Suunto manufactures and markets sport watches, dive computers, and compasses. Read how they increased their CSAT and changed the focus of their consumer insights department to be more strategic.
Suunto has used NPS as a key consumer experience metric for several years. Before the cooperation with Lumoa started, the free text feedback analysis required a massive amount of manual work. Because of the laborious process of first translating the feedback from various languages and manually categorizing the feedback, the utilization of feedback remained limited. The driver analysis focused only on negative drivers and on most recently launched products. This was valuable as such but gave the company only a partial understanding. It didn’t provide any visibility to how the various drivers differed between products nor did it reveal what the most valuable positive consumer experience drivers were. Because the manual process was heavy and resource-intensive, it didn’t allow the team to make any ad hoc exploration.
The Consumer Insight team at Suunto, led by Maria Pekkarinen, started investigating whether they could automate the analytics of consumer feedback. They considered several alternatives. One of the market leaders seemed to have a comprehensive package that would enable both feedback gathering and analytics. In the end the team decided, that the value for money was not there: the price was high, and text analytics capability appeared to not be optimal for Suunto’s purposes. Maria and the team concluded that getting the text analytics to work with “the market leader’s” solution would have required too much work in building the topics, tagging feedback and actively managing the quality by themselves.
The Suunto team also tried some other solutions but were generally unhappy with the results. Sometimes the analytics required too much effort from the Suunto team, and even from their consumers, for instance, some solutions required that the consumers themselves categorized their own feedback into predefined topics. While the trials were disappointing, they also helped the Suunto team to understand what they really needed: a service that was easy to use, text analytics support for several languages and smart analytics results without a huge onboarding effort.
Lumoa and Suunto started their cooperation in the Fall of 2018. Maria admits that Lumoa’s reasonable price compared to other text analytics solutions made it easy to start the cooperation. The team soon realized that Lumoa had some unique benefits that they couldn’t find elsewhere:
“I guess we also fell in love with the dashboard immediately after we saw it”, says Maria.
Tiina Taskinen from Maria’s team adds:
“In a corporate environment you seldom see user interfaces that truly delight you. Lumoa is an exception. It really is a delighter.”
Lumoa provided Suunto with automated translations from any language they needed and analytics of their NPS data: both the score and the answer to the “why?” question. Suunto could also get categories tailored to their very specific industry and products.
“This combination was something we couldn’t find elsewhere”, concludes Maria.
The Suunto team wanted to have a topical categorization matching their product features. As they manufacture very specialized gear, such as diving computers, the expertise of the Suunto team was needed when building the best possible logic for categorizing the feedback. While it took some iteration rounds and meetings to discuss the optimal setup, the team is clearly very happy with the end-result.
Tiina says: ”While we needed to explain the special terminology related to our products, we also felt that we were in good hands during the onboarding. Lumoa clearly has very deep expertise on customer experience and you quickly understood our business as well. We like the fact that you are opinionated and openly express what you think. That creates trust – we know that you would warn us, were we heading in the wrong direction.”
Lumoa is used within Suunto widely. The team doesn’t want to restrict the access to Lumoa in any way because they believe in the benefits of democratizing the consumer feedback. One of the key benefits of Lumoa is the intuitive and easy to use dashboard.
“It feels good to share it since it’s so easy to use.”
One of the benefits Maria highlights is the ability to see both the big picture – what really matters – and dive deep into the original consumer comments. The fact that Lumoa’s dashboard makes these two – the holistic view and the real consumer comments – visible at the same time, helps in putting things in their right context while still also understanding the nuances of real individual experiences.
Tiina tells how the application development team has benefited significantly from using Lumoa. Their product management and designers use Lumoa on a continuous basis to test their hypotheses and follow the feature improvements. The team has managed to improve their NPS score significantly during the one-year period they have been using Lumoa.
Tiina, who works closely with the app team, says: ”Lumoa helps our development team to prioritize the feature changes that really matter. The utilization of consumer feedback and NPS is on a totally different level than it was year ago. With Lumoa we make smarter decisions and are more consumer centric in how we do things.”
Suunto uses Lumoa to analyze consumer feedback across multiple consumer touchpoints.
One important indicator of the success of the cooperation has been the interest it has generated across the company. After the product feedback analysis was started, the Lumoa usage was expanded first to apps, then to analyze the brand experience. After that Suunto’s consumer care team got interested and the Lumoa analytics was expanded to cover the feedback received by the consumer support and repair teams. Finally, the marketing team also wanted to have their website feedback analyzed with Lumoa.
Maria says: “I do think we still have room to expand Lumoa utilization. We started with NPS feedback but now that you can also analyze other metric types and free text as well, I believe there are still more teams who could benefit from the service.”
“You seldom make an investment in a system or tool, that you never ever question afterwards”, says Maria, “Lumoa has been one of the very few cases with such a significantly positive ROI that we can be just proud and happy that we chose it. There is no questioning of it.”
When asked about the return on investment, the Suunto team breaks it into three elements:
Maria explains the cost savings: while the reduction of manual work is immediate and clear, it is still just a salary of one or two professional individuals. The bigger savings come from the more effective decision making. The leadership at Suunto is particularly passionate about their products and making the right choices for their consumers. Earlier, some of the debates could take hours or days and suck a significant amount of executive time. Now, there is much less need to debate the consumer priorities: Lumoa shows what matters to consumers and what doesn’t. The leaders can focus on making the decisions and following them through instead of debating the options.
While the cost impact of how the executive management spends their time might be bigger than the impact of how much CI team does manual work, the latter is significant as well.
Tiina says: “It’s such a relief that I no longer need to be the bottleneck. When people ask specific questions, I can lead them to Lumoa. I don’t need to answer all of their questions myself.”
Maria talks about the transformation of her team as a result: “When we no longer need to spend our time on answering basic questions from stakeholders, we can focus on what really matters for Suunto as a whole. Unlike many other CI teams in other companies, we don’t measure our team’s impact on how many requests we fulfill or the questions we answer. Instead, we focus on driving the right business decisions. In many companies, the Consumer Insight people are so overwhelmed with the reactive work that they cannot stop and think how to be more impactful. Lumoa gave us the opportunity to transform our way of working.”