The latest in our ongoing webinar series looks to the work Chattermill have been doing with leading meal-kit delivery company HelloFresh.
This month, our very own VP Customer Success, Junior Hewitt, was joined by HelloFresh’s Associate Director and Voice of the Customer expert Steve Crolic to chat about customer feedback and how it helps drive retention and scale up the business internationally.
Read on for our key takeaways from the conversation, and be sure to check out the video below for the complete discussion and the Q&A.
How HelloFresh drives Customer Satisfaction and Retention with Chattermill - Chattermill
How HelloFresh use customer feedback to drive retention
With the CPG sector seeing a massive digital consumer shift in recent years, the value of customer retention has, as you might expect, really come to the fore.
The numbers speak for themselves. There’s a 60% to 70% likelihood of selling to an existing customer, compared to between 5% and 20% for a new prospect. Consequently, as Crolic points out, nearly every bit of data HelloFresh collects drives retention to some degree.
‘Everything winds up affecting retention,’ he says. ‘But it’s maybe not the easiest thing to measure. A lot of that is about understanding and trying to solve for customer needs.’
These impacts can be relatively subtle, such as improving recipes to make them taste even better or tweaking instructions to make them easier to follow. But customer feedback also drives more extensive changes, sometimes pushing the company to drop recipes altogether and bring old ones back.
The problems HelloFresh had before working with Chattermill
Crolic has been with HelloFresh for nearly five years, and Chattermill has worked alongside the company for at least that long. One of the critical issues he remembers from his early days concerns the overwhelming number of responses the company was getting.
‘The amount of feedback we were receiving very quickly started to outpace the number of people we had to review that feedback in detail and to understand and apply it to our actions in a very consistent way,’ he says. ‘So having a tool which allows us to add consistency and speed up reviewing qualitative feedback was critical.’
From recipe feedback to Net Promoter Scores (NPS), Chattermill helped HelloFresh manage the fast-growing responses the company was receiving and streamlined the process for actioning that feedback.
Chattermill also assists with competitor research, pulling in publicly available customer sentiment data for other brands about different aspects of meal-kit use – from ingredient themes to delivery and customer care. Something that ultimately enables them to stay one step ahead of their competition.
How HelloFresh uses Chattermill to drive customer satisfaction
When it comes to customer satisfaction, HelloFresh uses the Chattermill tool to monitor feedback trends and develop improvements for their customers.
‘It’s about understanding what the pain points are for our customers and what the plus points are,’ Crolic says, ‘and trying to influence stakeholders to come up with something that works a little bit better.’
This can range from understanding the main CX drivers to specific brand virtues such as sustainability, a growing feedback topic.
In this case, Crolic works with the relevant local teams to develop the right way to communicate the drive for sustainability within the company and explore how to achieve the same freshness with less plastic, fewer materials in general, or more environmentally-friendly suppliers.
How increasing customer satisfaction impacts loyalty and retention, and how Chattermill helps HelloFresh improve both
‘We have very established and quite clear links between certain metrics and lifetime value,’ Crolic says.
Some examples of these include NPS responses from customers and recipe ratings. Both impact retention and give the brand the confidence to shoot for higher scores and look for improvement areas.
‘There’s a natural bias to focus on negative feedback,’ Crolic adds. ‘We occasionally try to focus on positive feedback. Teams should be rewarded for all the positive sentiment they bring to the product.’
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How HelloFresh wins back customers
HelloFresh has a Reactivation Team that works to try and rekindle relationships with customers who have stopped using the service.
‘There are certain areas where we know customers have left us for certain reasons,’ Crolic says. ‘And we know over time that we develop a better product offering that might be more suitable for those customers, or that we’ve invested in new ingredients for the menu that could be interesting for people. Part of what we try to do is find ways to let former customers know about these types of developments.’
When it comes to reaching out to old customers, it can be as simple as contacting people individually. Broader segmented messaging is also helpful. Crolic points to a growing vegan customer base in Germany as a recent example where the brand has reconnected with a segment of previous users.
How Chattermill has helped HelloFresh improve efficiencies
Crolic points to their product offering as a critical way Chattermill has helped HelloFresh improve efficiencies.
As we have seen above, veganism has seen growing top-level demand. Still, there are also sub-segments within dietary choices – such as healthy eating or convenience – which are easier for the brand to discover and act upon thanks to the Chattermill platform.
Chattermill has also assisted with localisation. HelloFresh has now expanded to 17 countries. We have helped with handling additional languages and scaling up to new regions with varying culinary tastes and different sets of competitors.
How Chattermill enables HelloFresh to spot the biggest CX opportunities
‘We always know in any given market what the main priority areas are – what people complain about the most but also what are the biggest in terms of impact,’ Crolic says. ‘We try to tie that to the financials we have.’
HelloFresh, alongside Chattermill, can successfully quantify the actual value of a customer complaint or compliment.
This is crucial for identifying the opportunities available to the brand as they work to improve the overall experiences their customers have when using the service.
If HelloFresh knows that there is a monetary value lost every time they get a complaint, it is far easier to justify investment into that area in the future.
Watch the webinar in full
How HelloFresh drives Customer Satisfaction and Retention with Chattermill - Chattermill
