E – Business Operations Assignment 03 Pratik Soma (054)

4. Listen to your customers

In every way possible and use that to determine what you do. That means looking at their
actions (your stats) to see what does and doesn’t work. Regularly reading customer service
correspondence and reviews and acting on what you learn to make the systems and products
better. If you can get the customer experience right you will grow.
The icing on the cake with this is to survey your email database (without an incentive) and
include an open-ended question like “Why do you like {insert product category here e.g.
‘chocolate’, ‘holidays in France’}”. Hopefully, your customers will give you long answers,
then take all that text and put into a word cloud tool where the more a word is used, the bigger
it is. This will give you a visual representation of what’s important to your customers. Then
use this in your copywriting AND to pick the subjects for your marketing – for blogs, emails
etc.

Apple uses NPS surveys to generate over $25 million in additional revenue

Apple spends close to $1 billion per year on its retail stores even though they have an online
presence. Ron Johnson, an executive behind the Apple store design, said: “[The stores] would
be designed to encourage an ongoing relationship with customers, not merely a one-off
purchase transaction. The delighted customers would tell their friends and colleagues about
their wonderful experience at the store.”

Apple uses NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys to find detractors and improve their retail store
experience. Whether a customer made a purchase or scheduled an appointment to try on an
Apple Watch, they e-mail a survey to rate the in-store experience.

Steve Jobs once said: “And one of

the things I’ve always found is
that — you’ve got to start with the
customer experience and work
backwards to the technology. You
can’t start with the technology
and try to figure out where you’re
going to try to sell it. And I’ve
made this mistake probably more
than anybody else in this room.
And I’ve got the scar tissue to
prove it. And I know that it’s the
case.”

Apple carefully analyses NPS survey comments on a daily basis and follows up with customers
who score 6 or lower on the survey. In many of their retail stores, customer comments from
NPS surveys appear on a large TV in the break room. And store managers and employees meet

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E – Business Operations Assignment 03 Pratik Soma (054)

daily to review this NPS feedback and discuss how to adjust their work accordingly. They
address detractor comments as a team and work together to resolve these issues.

Within 24 hours, store managers call detractors to find out what problems they encountered
and what could have been done to improve it. Managers share feedback from these calls to
teach their employees how to improve customer interaction.

Their determined efforts to follow up paid off. Apple found that some detractors they contacted
were becoming bigger purchasers than promoters. This simple follow up generated over $25
million in additional revenue in a year. Apple has consistently achieved the highest sales per
square foot of any US retailer because of their relentless focus on the store experience.

American Coffeehouse chain

Starbucks launched My
Starbucks Idea back in 2008 —
when the company decided they
needed to really start listening to
customers. In that year alone,
they got over 70,000 responses
from customers and over
190,000 by 2015 (according to
Waterloo).
“Consumer feedback
continuous to be our most
important business driver”
-Howard Schultz
Chairman and CEO

The company’s ability to

successfully use technology to
engage with customers has
added value to the company. It
has created a robust and loyal
consumer following, giving
customers a place to voice ideas
and the company a place to
directly respond.

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