Lots of sites gather customer feedback, but only a few really know what to do with it
By Mary Wagner
With the average engagement ring at its site priced at a hefty $5,600, and referrals a key source of new business, online jeweler Blue Nile Inc. wants to deliver a perfect customer experience every time. So it’s continuously digging for customer feedback, including, since March, a link that solicits comments from customers on how their search experience is going while they are in the middle of doing the search.
A click on the link at the top of Blue Nile’s diamond search page pops up a window in which shoppers can enter their comments. Those comments generate an e-mail that is automatically routed to customer service, technical staff, or whichever group in the organization is charged with responding to that specific query. The submitted comments also get a wider e-mail distribution in the organization. And they reside permanently in the common repository of Blue Nile’s order management system, into which departments such as merchandising and fulfillment also have visibility.
The right time
This method of capturing feedback from customers live, while they are using the recently overhauled diamond search, has proven so useful that Blue Nile has since rolled out the internally written application to capture feedback on other site functions. And it’s already made changes to its diamond search tool based on the feedback it’s gathered.
Seeking feedback from a customer while he’s intent on something else—completing the search and deciding on the ring—might seem counterintuitive. But it’s precisely because the customer is so invested in the effort at that point that Blue Nile finds it a perfect place to display the feedback link and it’s one of a number of ways that Blue Nile seeks to measure how it’s faring among shoppers. “Our customers are very involved in the process of buying a diamond engagement ring. They’re spending thousands, and they’re emotionally attached to the purchase. So they are very open to giving us both critical and positive feedback on what’s working for them, or isn’t,” says Darrell Cavens, Blue Nile’s senior vice president of marketing.
Blue Nile’s story shows what creativity, forethought and some handy web developers can do to make the most of customer feedback. The challenge attached to handling customer feedback effectively is steep. There’s first of all the problem of gathering it and resolving customer-specific incidents or complaints in a timely fashion, and then of pushing it out beyond customer service to drive longer-range site improvements. To do that, feedback from shoppers must be stored in such a way that history can be easily mined for patterns, and an internal process created that turns those patterns into action items for the relevant departments in the organization, ranging from IT to buyers and merchandisers.
A number of third-party providers offer online customer satisfaction surveys. While useful from a quantitative perspective, they may not zero in on a specific customer complaint quickly enough to foster an immediate resolution. E-mails from individual customers may be incident-specific, but aggregating and reviewing their content to spot ongoing problems or trends is manual and time consuming.
Enterprise CRM systems offer much of the functionality needed to drive responses to specific incidents and save that history for future reference. But at multi-thousands of dollars, such high-powered software is beyond the budget of some online retailers. So as another way to make the most of customer feedback, some retailers are looking beyond these options for solutions.
Knocking down the silo
“Companies have been deploying independent software and services to manage different aspects of customer feedback,” says Customer Feedback Solutions CEO Dustin Ruge, noting that customer feedback may come in through different areas of a web site, such as a Contact Us page, a service or support page or a customer e-mail. “The independent systems are running on independent databases, so they are siloed and limited in scope in terms of what they can do with all the customer feedback that comes in.”
A hosted system—read “lower entry cost”—from Customer Feedback Solutions helped solve that problem for sandwich shop chain Blimpie, while serving as an effective customer e-mail acquisition tool. With more than 1,500 franchise locations nationwide, Blimpie had been using a web-based form on its site that allowed customers to submit feedback or complaints. While earning high marks for making it easy for Blimpie’s customers to submit comments, the process flunked when it came to handling the comments on the back end. Unless the customer’s report included information on store location, Blimpie didn’t know which location the customer’s feedback was about. The form enabled Blimpie to reach out and placate the customer, but not to effect changes in the store at issue.
The previous system gathered customers’ comments and information and pushed it into an e-mail for distribution within the company, but it didn’t capture it in a way that lent itself to reports. “It was elementary and didn’t hit on all of what’s necessary in managing customer feedback, which is to understand where our problems are,” says Janet Rhodes, formerly manager of guest experience at Blimpie and now director of regional sales for Customer Feedback Solutions. Rhodes notes that with the average sales of a Blimpie shop about $250,000 a year, there wasn’t a big budget, by restaurant, to manage feedback. Outsourced solutions such as call centers and toll-free lines weren’t in the budget, nor were enterprise CRM systems.
Rewarding operators
Ruge says the company’s hosted system combines the most commonly used customer feedback capabilities online into a single system running off a central database. The centralized system, branded to look to consumers like the retailer’s site, replaces whatever the retailer has in place for contact pages, support pages and web forms. “It aggregates all the communication that takes place between the company and the customer,” Ruge says.
Beyond making it possible to identify, communicate with and send a coupon to the customer reporting an incident, the system also pushes the feedback out dynamically to the local operator who can fix the problem. On the back end, the stored feedback has been used to support rewards to franchise operators turning in a good performance and in some cases to terminate franchises with ongoing problems.
On the front end, the system also helps drive a customer loyalty program that’s boosted online sign-ups for Blimpie’s loyalty program by 25% in the first six months of implementation. Customers can submit a complaint or feedback without registering for the program—but those who do register for it get something besides coupons: visibility into a part of the system that allows them to track the status of their complaint as it moves through the company for resolution. More than 70% of the customers who went online to report an incident wound up signing up for the loyalty program.
The process for capturing and making use of customer feedback at Cooking.com has evolved since the early days and that evolution continues. Currently, its multiple feedback collection points include links or text boxes that let customers submit comments from the shopping cart, product detail page or search process. A Contact Us page generates a web form to send an e-mail to customer service. Recipe review allows registered customers to submit comments on posted recipes they’ve tried.
Forms of active feedback solicitation include e-mails to shoppers a few weeks after purchase that let them rate or review the product purchased. The reviews are posted at the bottom of the relevant product page. A post-order survey, implemented in June, is added to the same post-purchase e-mail and allows customers to submit feedback in survey form. The survey captures data on several fronts including whether delivery and product expectations were met, and whether the shopper would shop again at Cooking.com or recommend it to friends. The site also posts BizRate survey banners, giving customers the opportunity to click and submit feedback on their experience immediately post-purchase, while they are still on the site. The company receives e-mailed reports on the data from BizRate daily and actively reviews those comments.
4,000 comments a month
Altogether, apart from BizRate and Amazon reviews generated by its participation in the Home section at Amazon.com, and apart from general e-mail queries or phone calls that come into the company, Cooking.com receives about 4,000 pieces of feedback about the site, the products, and its customers’ experience every month, says Kirk Oshiro, director of customer service. But while it’s striven to cast a wide net over as many collection points as possible, it works just as hard to make the most use of that information once it arrives.
Customer service is generally the first point of contact for feedback received on Cooking.com, with the sole exception being feedback coming in through the site search text box—representing about one-third of the monthly feedback received. That goes directly to the buyers’ team to provide a window on what customers are looking for on the site.
Oshiro estimates that about 25% of the feedback that comes into the site is from e-mail, which goes into an e-mail management system—a web server coupled with a database—and is processed and circulated according to established guidelines. Most of the rest is feedback that’s been entered on web forms, which goes into the regular production database.
Oshiro says feedback is stored in both databases. “It’s easier to review what’s stored in the web form database. We can also look at stored e-mails, but it’s not as convenient,” he says.
How about reconciling comments that come in via e-mail with similar comments that may be entered on the web forms? That’s something Cooking.com is still figuring out. From a standard process perspective, Oshiro says there’s no way to reconcile the two databases. The company does, however, use leads from one database as a reason to search for similar information in the other, a process Oshiro compares to putting together a jigsaw puzzle. For example, a customer might send an e-mail saying she had difficulty checking out, but offering no specific information. Oshiro’s team could handle that by reviewing cart feedback generated by the web form to see if there are any patterns.
No. 1 priority: Checkout
Across all of its multiple feedback collection points, the three web-based forms together are the biggest driver of site improvements currently. Among those, cart feedback issues go to the head of the line. “Anyone having problems or issues while they are in the cart checking out obviously has an effect on conversions, so it’s critical,” says Oshiro. However, the web-based forms may eventually be replaced as the key driver of site changes by the post-order survey instituted in June, given the volume of information the survey’s already generating, Oshiro says. Like most of the rest of Cooking.com’s systems for accepting and processing customer feedback, it’s an internally-written application.
The web and e-mail are easy ways for customers to submit feedback or complaints—but what happens to submitted feedback as it’s received on the back end varies widely from retailer to retailer. And yet, “the most important part of the process is turning feedback into actionable items,” says Oshiro. While retailers attempt to address the issue with the individual customer, if the feedback received isn’t aggregated and centralized on the back end, the retailer has lost an opportunity to spot trends, see areas in need of improvement, or identify ongoing problems with a policy or product.
But with the right processes, smart retailers don’t see feedback, even the negative kind, as failure. Rather, it’s an opportunity to do better, both for the individual customer involved and for how the entire site operates. As the result of customer feedback, for instance, Blue Nile already has made changes to the diamond search function it launched this spring. For example, it’s added parameters to the search and it reinstituted an earlier diamond comparison feature it had removed from the new diamond search design after customer feedback indicated shoppers wanted that feature returned.
But Cavens says Blue Nile isn’t evaluating the new feedback application in terms of direct ROI. The real payoff is in the business intelligence it provides about the customer experience on the site. “We are not so much measuring the success of the tool as seeing the value in using it more and using the data we get out of it more,” he says.
mary@verticalwebmedia.com
