CONFIRMIT DRIVES CUSTOMER SATISFACTION INITIATIVE AT EGG

There are two ways in which a business can use research: to sense check business critical decisions or to provide the insight which will enable them to drive it forward. A pioneer in the online financial services and banking marketplace, Egg, has always valued regular customer research to ensure it delivers high levels of customer satisfaction. This has helped the organisation increase market share and continue to pioneer new products and services.

In order to enable Egg to respond faster to the demands of its customers, Egg has recently switched from a traditional bureau-based research service to the internet-based research software, Confirmit, to give it greater control of its research programme. The solution will give Egg greater flexibility and speed to market when undertaking both ad-hoc and strategic research projects. Kjell Øksendal of Confirmit’s provider Future Information Research Management (FIRM) explains how it is helping Egg take control of its research programmes and maximise data to drive customer satisfaction, product development and increase its competitive edge.

As the pioneers of the online banking and financial services market, Egg has always placed great importance on extensive market and customer research. This focus on research has enabled the company to establish itself as the world’s leading internet-only bank, by delivering new products and services based on real-time insight.

Having used a traditional research bureau service to conduct an extensive programme of research, Egg decided to look for a research delivery methodology which would enable it to dramatically reduce the cost of research while increasing the flexibility and speed of the entire research process. It was also essential that any new solution would enable Egg to conduct research via the internet – the company’s most valuable form of communication with its customers. The new solution would also need to provide both front end and back end functionality to enable the company to control the entire research programme, including survey generation, dispatch to sample groups and include data reporting and analysis. Confirmit met all of these criteria.

Research Manager at Egg, Andy Platts says ‘Being an internet-only business, we realised that the most effective way to communicate with both existing customers and potential new ones, was via the Internet. Confirmit enables us to maximise customer research via the web, which our existing Bureau service couldn’t.”

‘For example, by using Confirmit we have been able to improve the speed to market for an ad-hoc project from around 7 days to just 1. Confirmit has been able to provide us with an interactive feedback solution that matches the dynamic culture of Egg.”

Confirmit, conceived and developed by global software house Future Information Research Management (FIRM), is a 100% web-based software solution which enables users to design and deploy surveys, collect responses in real-time and deliver the results in a variety of formats across organisations. For Egg it enabled monthly customer satisfaction surveys with 10,000 customers to be undertaken, while delivering the flexibility to conduct more frequent research with smaller sample groups of around 4,000. Confirmit also provides Egg with the facility to monitor responses and send periodic email reminders to members of the sample group, where necessary, to maximise response rates.

Confirmit’s flexibility provides Egg with an incredibly powerful tool according to Andy Platts, ‘The speed of deployment and real-time data gathering that the Confirmit software offers enables us to take regular market and customer temperature checks. It also ensures that we are continually evaluating the success of both products and services, providing us with invaluable customer insight that we can act upon.”

‘Equally, if the product development team wants to test drive a new product concept, or the customer service teams needs to know how easy new customers have found the registration process they can approach us on a Friday afternoon, and we get the survey to our sample immediately. We are then able to view responses in real-time and have a report answering the query ready for Monday morning. This near-time facility to conduct entire ad-hoc research projects enables us to continue to pioneer advances in our product portfolio, while ensuring that the customer experience is up to our exacting standards.’

Real-time access to customer opinions and preferences has had a huge impact on decision-making at egg™. Using Confirmit has enabled us to condense the entire research process from a number of weeks to a matter of hours. The real-time that the software provides enables us to be proactive in continually improving the level of customer service we provide by alerting the customer service department to potential issues. This enables a representative to contact client to via the telephone in a matter of hours to find out how it can improve the user experience.

Traditionally, many businesses won’t know that a problem exists until customers defects, but by using Confirmit egg™ has been able to reducing churn and develop proactive customer retention strategies.

Andy Platts explains that feedback is now distributed across the business using Confirmit’s extensive reporting capability. ‘The feedback that Confirmit delivers is sent to our executive team to enable them to better understand our customers’ experiences and learn from good practice. Research is providing daily vision for egg over its business and customers, a company already acknowledged for its pioneering approach to service delivery and customer service.

‘The flexibility that we offer customers in providing feedback via Confirmit enables customers to respond when it is convenient for them to do so, rather than on our terms.’

Egg has already found that Confirmit has increased both the volume and quality of responses compared to postal or telephone research response rates to more than 80 percent.

FIRM’s VP of Marketing, Kjell Øksendal explains why. ‘The flexibility that our software delivers enables respondents to consider their answers, and provide more detailed and valuable feedback. Removing the pressure of a researcher armed with a clipboard or being telephoned in their spare time means that Egg’s customers are more willing to provide open and honest views and opinions. This helps Egg to identify and resolve issues before they become insurmountable. “

The benefit that Confirmit delivers at Egg is not limited to external research. Following the level of success it has achieved in driving the customer research process and the impact it has made to the CRM and service improvement activities at the company, Egg recently decided to use the software to complete its internal staff surveys. Having used a paper-based approach for this purpose previously, the company has had limited success and response rates have been low.

On using Confirmit to email staff Andy Platts says, ‘More than 80 percent of our staff responded within 2 hours. Aside from the speed, the quality of responses was significantly higher – staff replicated the experience of customers, feeling much more able to provide detailed feedback using this method.

‘At Egg™ we recognise that customer feedback is one of the most valuable resources in our market and that we must use that insight to maximise business benefit. The financial investment the company has made in Confirmit has been significantly less than conducting the same programme using a bureau research service – in excess of an 80 percent reduction. The real benefit, however, is apparent when you look at the immediate impact it has made to the entire business. In this way, Confirmit will more than re-pay our investment.’

ENDS