Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods has won Best Newcomer to CRQ

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Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods has won Best Newcomer to CRQ

Congratulations to Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods who have won Best Newcomer to CRQ!

Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods has been awarded Best Newcomer to CRQ in the Deep-Insight 2022 Excellence in CX awards and we are thrilled for them. This is a truly deserved award as it’s hard to believe that this organisation only ran its first Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment in 2022.

When we started working with Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods they were quite vocal about being relatively new to anything related to Customer Experience Feedback. They then impressed us by embracing the process like they had been at this for years. They got stuck in from the word ‘go’ (and even before) and kept their momentum up all through the live survey and throughout the reporting stages. They dived deep into their results to ensure they had specific actions for each area of the business that they could follow up on.

Rose Murphy, COO at Deep-Insight has said: “Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods are expert communicators. They are open to feedback, and they listen with care. They develop strategies that are in line with what their customers are telling them and have created a very sophisticated response to customers to keep them informed at every level. This is what it means to be customer centric”.

Gerben van Schaik, Commercial Director at Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods has said:

“In Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods, customers are at the forefront and are top of mind in everything we do. It is important to Vreugdenhil that we understand how our customers value the relationship they have with us. The research done together with Deep-Insight has given us a clear picture on how to develop even stronger relationships with our customers, with the hopes of an even better outcome in 2024.”

Congratulations to everyone in Vreugdenhill Dairy Foods, and a special shout-out to Leonie, Erik, Jeroen, Gerben and Harry!

About Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods

Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods is a leading provider of milk powder products as ingredients for nutrition across the food industry. Vreugdenhil Diary Foods has many years of experience in their field and works together with their chain partners to make a difference for their consumers across the globe. Their vision is: milk nutrition in everyone’s daily diet.

For more information, go to vreugdenhildairyfoods.com.

About Deep-Insight

Deep-Insight is a leading European B2B Customer Experience (CX) company founded in 2000 by a small team of ‘magicians’ with one goal: researching a way to read customers’ minds.

Today, Deep-Insight supports customers all over the world with the skills, tools and methodologies to help you operate world-class CX and EX programmes and transform your organisation.

For more information, go to deep-insight.com or email awards@deep-insight.com.

Should Customer Experience and NPS Surveys be Anonymous?

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CX and NPS feedback – should it be anonymous?

Should Customer Experience and NPS Surveys be Anonymous? The simple answer is NO – anonymity is not required for a B2B CX or NPS programme.

But the answer is not that simple. Let’s start by defining what Confidential and Anonymous mean in the context of surveys. This may sound obvious, but I have been amazed at the number of times I have needed to discuss this:

ANONYMOUS: No person or application can associate the answers you give with any identifiable information about you
CONFIDENTIAL: Any identifiable information about you will be held confidentially, and stored in an appropriately secure manner
OPTIONAL CONFIDENTIALITY: Any identifiable information about you will be held confidentially, and stored in an appropriately secure manner unless you specify that you would like to be identified (in other words, you decide to waive your right to confidentiality)

So for the rest of this blog, I am not longer going to dwell on anonymity. It’s simply not needed.

Confidentiality – now that’s a different matter

In any setting, when a third party asks for your opinion about someone, confidentiality is important to ensure a really open and honest response. In personal relationships this goes without saying but in the B2B world this is also true. It’s especially true if your staff are doing what you need them to be doing – building strong and personal relationships with clients.

Of course, many of your customers will indeed give you an honest response regardless of whether it is confidential or not. But many won’t. Cultural differences will mean this statement is truer in some parts of the world than others. However, regardless of where your customers live, there will always be those who will not respond, or who may not be as open as you would like them to be, unless their responses remain confidential.

Example 1

This example is an actual Deep-Insight client.

Company A ran a Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment (Survey 1) and told respondents that they had the option for their responses to remain confidential. Six months later Company A ran the survey again, but this time told respondents the option to remain confidential was removed.

The impact on their average Net Promoter Scores (remember NPS is a measure of advocacy on a 0 to 10 scale) was as follows:

Individuals’ responses in Survey 1 Completion Rate (Survey 2) Average NPS (Survey 1) Average NPS (Survey 2)
Chose confidentiality (did not share details) 55% 6.3 7.5
Waived confidentiality (shared details) 70% 7.1 7.2

 

For respondents who had shared their names with their responses in Survey 1, there was no significant impact. When asked to complete Survey 2, 70% did complete and only a small uptick in scores was noted (7.1 to 7.2).

However, where respondents chose to keep their feedback confidential in Survey 1, there was a much bigger impact. For starters, only 55% of these individuals chose to complete Survey 2. For those who completed Survey 2, there was also a significant increase in scores (from 6.3 to 7.5). In fact, ‘Confidential’ respondents went from scoring more poorly than average to scoring more positively than average when forced to share their details with the response.

Example 2

Here’s another client of ours. Having received very high scores for several consecutive surveys, Company B decided to introduce the option of confidentiality to ensure the integrity of what it was measuring. The findings were interesting, especially for newly-included respondents:

  • 26% of respondents opted to remain confidential overall but for newly-included respondents the figure was 38%
  • ‘Confidential’ respondents scored more poorly than those who agreed to share their responses – but not significantly so
  • Newly-included respondents who opted for confidentiality scored significantly more poorly than other respondents

 

“…but my teams are frustrated by these unactionable ‘Confidential’ responses”

In both examples above, the organisations had good business reasons when they chose not to include confidentiality in their CX process:

  • Improved usefulness as an account management tool as ALL feedback is provided to account management teams
  • All raw data can be fully integrated with internal systems, allowing ongoing re-segmentation of responses (this is limited when responses are confidential)

But the argument that your CX or NPS programme should include ‘Optional Confidentiality’ is far stronger. If you don’t include optional confidentiality, your most unhappy customers will either not respond or will not give you a completely honest response.

This puts your entire CX or NPS programme at risk. You will end up making decisions based on inaccurate or incomplete data.

So should NPS Surveys be Anonymous? No. Should they include ‘Optional Confidentiality’? Absolutely!

“Is there any way to convince ‘Confidential’ respondents to share their details but still give an honest response?”

Maybe, but this will take time; people are people after all.

If a customer is at a point in their journey with you that they do not want to share their details, but they are willing to give feedback, that’s OK. Of course, you can explain the benefits of what you can do if they agree to share their details with you (you can address their issues more easily) but don’t push too hard. There is a trust issue here. Pushing won’t help.

You have a much better chance of convincing this customer by including them in your ‘Close the Loop’ process even though you don’t have a response from them. Over time you will gain their trust, both in the CX or NPS programme as well as in your organisation. You’ll eventually win that shared response.

Does your Net Promoter Score (NPS) matter?

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DOES YOUR NET PROMOTER SCORE (NPS) REALLY MATTER?

To answer this it is important to really understand what we asking our customers when we use NPS.

Recently, after a perfectly OK meal in a restaurant, someone asked me this question: Would I recommend the restaurant to friends or family? Without hesitation, I said ‘NO’. Queue shock and gasps. The meal was ok, the service was fine, the atmosphere was nice. How could I be so mean? I didn’t think I was being mean. It was all fine but a recommendation from me is a reflection on me, it is saying something about me and my standards – for food of all things. I certainly wouldn’t recommend a food experience that was a bit, well, “meh”.

In the professional B2B world the stakes are a lot higher. Social media – yes that includes LinkedIn – has created a whole business out of self-promotion. Recommending or promoting someone else’s business is an easy way to do this with little effort. It is the ultimate win/win. A recommendation from a customer is the most effective sales tool you can have and in turn, the recommender gets to add value to their brand. But this delicate equilibrium can only exist if your customers trust that recommending your business, and your company’s hard work, will reflect well on them.

So, how do you find out if your customers trust you enough to recommend you? Enter Net Promoter Score or NPS. A clever, albeit obvious, idea –ask them!

And we have been asking, NPS is everywhere and we are obsessed. It can influence the whole mood of an organisation. But can you confidently say that that all of your promoters really are recommending your company? Not until you answer at least the following questions:

Are your Senior Leaders driving a culture of valuing the feedback, not the score?

We are often asked: ‘Do you measure NPS? Head Office needs us to provide an NPS number’.

One does not need a doctorate in psychology to know that if there is motivation, implied gain or actual gain, to reach a target number, then that will drive certain behaviors to reach that number. A commitment to consistently gathering the data with integrity needs to come from the leadership team, visibly and regularly. Helping our clients get this engagement from their leadership team is the first thing we do in any CX project, see how we do it here.

Is your organisation measuring it with integrity, or are you chasing a number?

Teams are often trained to find clever ways of making sure that NPS moves in the right direction. A new and improved NPS score is then announced and celebrated. NPS is very useful but only if the culture and approach for gathering it ensure that it is done with the intention of really understand the customer. It’s crucial that organisations do not distract by chasing and competing for a number. This is about the customer after all.

Is Transactional NPS concealing the truth?

Yes, in the last 5 minutes I had a great experience with your customer service team member. But will I recommend your business just based on this? No, of course not. But I will answer 10 because I am a nice person and I don’t want the individual who just really helped me to suffer. This use of NPS is manipulative and gives you absolutely no insight into your customers’ intentions for recommending you.

So, does your NPS score matter?

Does it reflect if your customers are actually recommending you in the marketplace, or has your organisation become better at understanding how and when to gather the responses in order to ensure a score is achieved?

Only when you can answer that should anyone care what the score is.

Does NPS Work for B2B Companies
* Net Promoter® and NPS® are registered trademarks and Net Promoter SystemSM and Net Promoter ScoreSM are trademarks of Bain & Company, Satmetrix Systems and Fred Reichheld

Product Management: First Month, First Insights

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Rose Murphy
Product Manager, Deep-Insight

I’m delighted to start my new role as Product Manager. It’s an exciting challenge for me and for Deep-Insight. But where do I start? What do I do first?

Having spent ten years working my way up to Operations Director in Deep-Insight, I know our products and services like the back of my hand. I’d like to think I have a good grasp of the enhancements required to improve the reports and results we provide to our customers. But how can I be sure?

Here’s the single biggest thing I learned in the last few weeks since starting this role.

What I knew within operations, I really knew. What I know now, I only think I know.

I need to gather a lot of information and knowledge in the next few months. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by this.

Here’s the plan; I am going to deal with the ‘known unknowns’ one day at a time.

There are a lot of unknowns at the start of this process, but I have decided that there are only two that really matter.

1. What do our customers really want need?
2. What is the correct product roadmap for the next couple of years based on this?

I thought I knew the answer to number 1 above. I did with the word ‘want’. I have been listening for years to client feedback on our products.

But do I really know what happens within our client’s organisations once we deliver the results? Do I know what they really need?

We spend a lot of time with the management teams responsible, as a result of our findings, for creating action plans and driving change throughout their organisation.

But what about the team on the ground responsible for working with the reports on a daily basis?
– Do we really know everything that happens with our reports and results once our clients receive them?
– Have we ever truly observed how the account management teams use our reports and findings to help them manage their accounts?
– Have we ever assessed if our clients are making full use of every piece of information in every document we send to them?

To answer the question at the beginning of this blog, that is what I am doing first.

I will visit every client that will have me and meet as many people as possible within their organisation. I am going to ask many questions but I am also going to stop asking questions and simply watch.

I believe that it is this process of watching how our products are being used that will bring me much closer to understanding what our customers really need us to do. I will consider this information to be the single most important factor when deciding on our product roadmap at the start of next year.

That’s better. Now I have a plan. I’ll keep you updated.