You spoke, we listened: Improving customer experience at Very

Very delivered its best ever net promoter score (NPS) in FY23. That’s how we measure customer experience, and right now it’s tracking even higher.

Our score is improving because we’re getting better at listening to our customers. When we know how they feel about their experience, we know where we need to make improvements.

How we listen

We listen in lots of ways.

We have a monthly voice of the customer listening forum. Here, we bring together our customer data, including our monthly mindset research – where we ask our customers how they're feeling – as well as feedback our customers leave in experience surveys, and data that shows the reasons customers contact us. We use this information to discuss how we can improve the experience.

We also keep a central log of the most common customer pain points. We share this with our product teams, who use it to prioritise the changes they make to our website, app, and customer proposition.

Finally, we have an established customer committee, which regularly brings together leaders from across our business to understand what customers are facing and where we need to focus our efforts.

Finding new ways to understand

We are always looking for ways to improve what we do, including when it comes to listening.

Customers responding to our experience surveys are usually looking for support. But because we didn’t have instant access to their feedback, we were unable to give them the help they needed – meaning unhappy customers stayed unhappy. That’s why we have introduced another way to give customers a voice.

Partnering with Ipsos and using the Medallia platform, we now have real-time access to customer feedback. From February, we started using this capability to quickly call unsatisfied customers, understand their feedback, and help to resolve their issues. It also means we can give our customer forum better insight into the root cause of problems customers are facing.

Turning insight into action

It takes more than just listening to drive customer satisfaction. We use the insights from customers and turn that into meaningful action, so we can continue to improve the experience.

Through our new tech platform Skyscape, we will be able to address a number of pain points customers have flagged, including removing challenges in accessing accounts or transforming the effectiveness of the search function.

We have also invested in the pricing of key products that we know are important to our customers, which directly improves sentiment in satisfaction surveys. And when customers do find the right product at the right price, we have now introduced an enhanced next day delivery service to get it to them sooner.

We know our customers value these changes because they tell us. And we will continue to listen and learn from customers so we can further improve how we deliver on our purpose of helping families get more out of life.

Kirsty Tarbuck is customer experience strategy manager at The Very Group