Case study: Euroloan Group’s customer satisfaction monitoring journey

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Petra Mengelt
Petra Mengelt
07/11/2017

The customer service director of FinTech company Euroloan discusses how customer satisfaction monitoring has helped them elevate their customer experience

In just a single week, I count far too many customer satisfaction surveys beeping on my phone asking ‘Please help us develop our services’ and ‘Please let us know what you think about us’. In the mean time, I am trying to understand how we can collect reliable data. Are customers just clicking answers away to get rid of these ever-interrupting questionnaires?

The common dilemma with the companies is the fact that there either is too much data and too little time for people to understand it, or vice versa. Besides, does data tell us everything we need to know? What is actually considered as “knowing your customer” in 2017? Do we still need to shake hands, have eye contact and make our perceived expectation in person? How do we transfer the real life into online so that it creates a touch and a feel based memory?

At Euroloan Group plc, an international financial technology company that offers services online, we recently began a new smart phone based campaign to collect customer satisfaction information. The aim was to discover whether we follow the actual customer service experience we claim we deliver. Do we walk the talk and are we able to connect the dots from the vision to customer service, training, motivation and resources? Are we measuring the fulfilment of our expectations?

SEE ALSO: How Euroloan Group is building customer experience excellence

Customer feedback gathering

In the Nordics it’s common practice to send a SMS to gauge customer satisfaction, rather than shoot of an email, for example. Previously, the SMS survey we would run would require texting back and forth between the customer and the automated service, meaning that the customer would sometimes even occur additional operator costs to provide their feedback. The response rate to this service could drop below 10 per cent.

The new version provides a slider for customers to give us a rating between 0 and 10 for NPS with a link to open the full survey in a web browser. It is easy to use and Euroloan branded so even if the name is not yet fully recognisable to newer customers, this repetition of the brand will help grow the awareness. Not only that, but once in the web browser there are opportunities for open feedback and we’ve found that people actually don’t mind providing this, they share a lot of detail and their time to do so.

We started this new way of measuring customer feedback recently, and the goal is to continuously measure satisfaction all along the customer journey, rather than occasionally. So, instead of hearing from one customer when something doesn’t go entirely to plan, we want to make it more common so people also let us know when things are going great. The SMS surveys are voluntary and don’t have any incentives in place, yet response rate has risen to 20-25%.

To further gain value from the feedback, our team also follows up with customers over phone to ask them more details about the issues and how we can improve this. It is important for customer to understand they are valued and their voice is being heard. Speech and text analytics are of course other options for further feedback gathering but we’re not quite there yet. We want to do one thing right first and prove it to the senior management team before we take this next step.

Employee satisfaction monitoring

While customer satisfaction monitoring is important, one thing to not forget about is your employees. Back in the day we used to ask all the personnel how they feel about the company – once a year. According to recent studies, this is old school and if you really want to understand the pulse of the personnel, you should have a quick 20 second “how do you feel today from 0 to 10” questionnaire once a month. It is not the questionnaire itself that is of value, but what you do with the data, and how you communicate the results every single month to the personnel.

I was looking for a partner who had technology that was safe, quick and easy to use to help with this and I came across SurveyPal, who can give us agent specific feedback. There can be over fifty different forms of feedback per agent month so the team leader is able to see the strengths and areas of improvement for each employee. We have also build customer service incentive bonus scheme on top of this survey.

What has been valuable in this partnership is that SurveyPal does not just sell a service and a monthly newsletter with highlights. We initially saw them once monthly and then on a quarterly basis as they’re a partner and they don’t just send an invoice. As a decision maker, it’s much easier to buy a tool that comes with guidance as I don’t have time to read up on this myself continuously.

We now measure employee net promoter score NPS (eNPS) with the help of this tool on a monthly rather than an annual basis. It has helped us understand our employees better. And where previously the annual eNPS could dip, we now believe we will see a tremendous positive curve in the near future.

Satisfaction from the very first customer

When the first Euroloan Group Company was founded in November 2007, the key idea was the belief that modern technology will dramatically benefit the customer compared to traditional operating models.

The first product was introduced and went live in February 2008 as we started on-boarding customers for our first lending service. However, something interesting happened on the way to handling our first customers: we had our first signup.

We wanted to handle this first customer in the best possible way, so we immediately called him. His first name was Erkki, and we explained the situation openly. He was positively surprised to see that we cared about serving him. We ended up having half a dozen discussions and fixing many of the early bugs with the help of Erkki and we would not have got this far without his positive attitude, patience and understanding.

As a thank you, almost ten years later, we would like to remember this special episode to teach us to involve a customer instead of only talking about a customer.

This is an extract from The Customer Experience Buyer’s Guide 2017. Download your complimentary copy of the full report by clicking on the banner below.

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