Holvi offers financial and accounting services to small businesses to facilitate their daily bookkeeping. Read how they use learnings from customer feedback to inform action.
Every company wants to understand its customers in order to develop its business and drive growth. Since 2003, NPS or “net promoter score”, has been a key metric to measure growth and loyalty.
While gathering feedback from customers used to prove quite difficult, in this data-rich era the problem can often be too much data. When there’s tons of feedback and data to analyze, companies need to find new ways to organize research and use metrics, such as NPS, the right way.
Jarno Nousiainen, Holvi’s User Research Lead, shares how Holvi uses NPS and automated customer feedback analysis to get actionable results and reveals his best tips to help you do the same.
Since its introduction by Rehichheld in 2003, the net promoter score (NPS) has become one of the most important customer satisfaction metrics and has been adopted by many companies to improve their customer understanding and loyalty programs. Even though the interest towards the 11-point scale question of “How likely are you to recommend” is not wavering, there is also healthy criticism questioning its value.
On the positive side, as a single number its easy to follow, its simple to ask and answer, there are benchmarks across all industries, and executives love it. Then again, the score doesn’t guarantee loyalty and the number itself doesn’t tell you why you are getting these scores. It’s easy to forget customers who fall in the middle, and it’s not a metric that causes or guarantees growth.
To get real actionable value out of your NPS surveys, you need to ask your respondents why they gave you the scores they did. This way, you can analyse the sentiment and gain a more in-depth understanding of positive, neutral and negative answers. It takes some manual work, but this way you have more than just a random number in your hands.
At Holvi, the whole team wants to have a deep understanding of customers’ wishes and pains – and preferably in real time. Jarno Nousiainen has a long history of doing just that. Originally joining Holvi as a customer support specialist, he believes that it all starts with a solid understanding of people.
Previously Holvi’s customer feedback and NPS collection was largely based on manual work. Jarno used to go through, translate and categorize all the customer feedback that Holvi received.
Six months ago, Jarno identified a problem: the company and the number of Holvi customers were growing almost too quickly. Along with the rapid growth of Holvi’s customer base, the amount of feedback was also increasing dramatically.
At the same time Holvi was also exploring new markets, which meant that customers were being served in more languages and feedback was received in these additional languages. Customer research was no longer a one-person job!
Ultimately, the beloved NPS was not providing any real or actionable insights. It was just a number that left Holvi wondering- “why?”
The help came from Lumoa, an AI powered customer feedback solution.
Lumoa developed a customer feedback analytics service tailored for Holvi that allows the business to make customer feedback actionable. It does much, much more than just collecting feedback. The software uses AI, real time sentiment analysis and natural language processing (NLP) and allows Holvi to understand what drives NPS up and down.
A common concern for businesses is how much time it can take to implement a new solution into an already established system. However within just 6 days Lumoa was up and running, and Holvi’s team had access to a tool with company-tailored analytics that they could use immediately, to analyse and improve customer experience.
”We were concerned that uploading the data and fine-tuning the analytics for our particular case would take a long time. However, we had a working system in less than a week and we were able to refine the results so they would suit our needs with very little involvement”, says Jarno.
Today, automation is at the core of Holvi’s customer feedback collection and analysis. Product managers can see in real time which areas of the Holvi offering and service get positive or negative comments, and gain a better understanding of why this is the case. They can easily use these insights to implement improvement initiatives and also track the impact of these initiatives.
“Now everybody in the company understands what our customers wish and can make a link between customer feedback and what to do about it. We are able to proactively solve customer problems instead of spending days working to understand the data”, says Jarno.
In Holvi, things tend to move forward fast. The project has already switched owners and now Stephen Smith, Customer Success Manager, coordinates the feedback collection and analysis and makes data driven business decisions based on the insights presented by Lumoa.
And the work doesn’t stop there! Both the promoters (happy customers) and the detractors (not-so-happy customers) are responded to. Promoters receive an invitation to join Holvi’s ambassador program, whilst detractors are contacted via email to acknowledge and address their dissatisfaction.
“It’s important to reach out to the unhappy customers as well. That way we can ask for further feedback whilst reminding them that we are here for them”, explains Stephen.
As Holvi turns customer feedback into actions, they want to ensure that their customers know that their feedback matters, and that they are up to date on what’s coming up in terms of product development.
To help achieve this, Holvi has launched a Product Portal to promote total transparency and to make sure their customers know that their input is valuable and is being listened to as associated product improvements are made.
“We have started a process whereby our intersectional teams sift through the customers’ feedback and comments each month and come up with actionable feedback. The teams will then work on these actions and we will report back to customers to let them know their voices have been heard”, says Stephen.
Regardless of the size of your business, you need to understand your customers. But especially for small businesses, it can be time-consuming to first get feedback and then analyse it.
To sum up Jarno’s learnings, here are 4 tips from him to help businesses of all sizes collect and analyse customer feedback.
1. Remember to always ask “why?”
Without the “why?” there’s little depth to the feedback you receive. Dig in a bit deeper by asking, for example, “Care to tell us why?” or “Your feedback will help us to improve. / Good to know! Would you tell us why you feel that way?”
2. Learn what your methods can and cannot do.
Spend extra time in understanding what the method (NPS or other) you’re using actually can and cannot tell you. Any tool used in the wrong way can lead to less optimal results.
3. Build relationships.
Foster conversations and relationships instead of just sending out customer satisfaction surveys. Continue the discussion further and actively engage your customers.
4. Listen, listen, listen…..
…instead of leading or assuming. When asking about your offering, do it in an open-ended way and avoid naming or suggesting answers. Let the customers tell you how they see and experience your offering in their own words.