Converting detractors into promoters thanks to customer feedback

colora is part of Boss Paints, a Belgian paint manufacturer. For more than 50 years, Colora has been a benchmark for professional paints and DIY accessories. They want to distinguish themselves by adopting an extremely customer-oriented approach. For that they need to have sufficient insights into the customers’ expectations.

Their challenges:

1. colora wanted to know how their service makes the difference for their customers by giving them professional guidance
   
   
2. colora was looking for a platform that allows them to quickly and accurately evaluate customer expectations and identify best practices
   
   
3. colora had difficulties engaging their employees to reach out to customers after a bad experience to close the loop and identify improvements.

1. Differentiate best and bad practices 

colora had already surveyed brand awareness but they never really asked what their customer thought of colora as such. They did have a gut feeling that their customers were satisfied with their products and services the coaches provide but they weren’t entirely sure. “We wanted to know which stores perform well, and which ones don’t. And what makes the difference between both. Hello Customer easily shows us how our stores perform and what drives satisfaction. That makes the platform really valuable.”

“Thanks to ISAAC, the artificial intelligence that drives the Hello Customer platform, we can evaluate differences between shops and employees and we can identify what goes wrong. We mainly use the platform to think about how we can convert detractors into promoters. This is an enormous opportunity to achieve more growth. It’s always important to have a competitive advantage, especially in the paint business. We wanted a platform that could provide insight into our best and bad practices. Moreover, thanks to Hello Customer’s feedback platform we can align our expectations to those of the customer.”

2. Service as a driver of customer delight

colora knew that their strengths lie in their products and services, but they didn’t know which one had the biggest impact on customer loyalty. While they knew service was good, they underestimated its impact on the customer’s decision to return. The results showed that about 75% of the comments were about staff, end they were mostly positive. That’s the most significant company policy they got out of it: people are really satisfied with the staff and their advice. “The insights we gathered from the tool certainly surprised us. Customers come for the products, but they stay for service and advice. The tool showed us that while the product is important, our employees are the decisive factor in customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

3. Improving employee engagement

“Via the conversation manager we can quickly contact every detractor as we get an alert for people with a negative satisfaction score. We contact every customer that gave a bad score, without open feedback. And customers that gave us a 0. A lot of the time we learn a lot from our customers just by reading their feedback, and we like to get back to them for additional information. Reaching out to customers happens mostly by phone, to apologize or to give them the chance to explain what went wrong.” It also has been a priority for colora to not only share negative comments. In fact, criticism tends to be linger longer than a compliment does. But a detractor is important for a company because it’s a dissatisfied customer who wants to give you a chance to do better. “And if you don’t make an effort to respond when a customer complete a survey, they will be annoyed because they gave you the chance to make up for it and you denied it.

Some employees were reluctant to contact customer again. But the employees coaches tried to convince them that customers are more conciliatory than they’d expect. Our customers are often surprised when our employees get back to them and sometimes even feel embarrassed after they filled out the survey. It’s up to our employees to show them that we care about their story.” They also use Hello Customer in their employee bonus system. 80% of their bonuses are given based on the financial results of the store. The other 20% represent the NPS scores. On a store level, every retail team must be within a 5% margin in our national NPS average. They also set another bonus goal that takes into account the number of email addresses their employees collect from customers.

1. colora actively improves the in-store customer experience. By dispatching By dispatching customer positive and negative feedback to their shop managers. customer positive and negative feedback to their shop managers.
2. colora achieve 75% positive comments about the staff. People are really satisfied with the staff and their advice. Until now this remained an assumption.
3. colora turns detractors into promoters. By actively closing the loop after a customer has given feedback.