How Fairphone turns feedback into sustainable improvements
The leading example of sustainable smartphone development uses customer feedback to improve its products, promote repairability and make customer centricity company-wide.
Fairphone manufactures and sells fair electronics. Originating from an NGO awareness campaign about unfair practices in the electronics industry, it evolved into the leading example of sustainable smartphone development. Fairphone began creating smartphones in 2013; today it is an international company with 250,000 customers.
Repairability is central to the concept: DIY repair and affordable spare parts help customers use their phones for as long as possible. Max Seabrooke leads CX — and started out gathering and analysing every piece of feedback himself.
Feedback keeps us on our toes. It gives us an outside critical view on our processes, but it also guides us in how we can further develop our strategy in a sustainable way, and it shows us what we can promote better to increase our conversion.
What they needed to solve
Fairphone's feedback programme began as NPS surveys run by one person. It taught the team a lot, but it couldn't carry the company's ambitions: longer-lasting products, better-known repair services, and customer centricity across the whole organisation.
Gathering and analysing all feedback by hand worked in the first years, but as colleagues asked for more insights and more data, collection and analysis had to become sustainable too.
DIY repair and affordable spare parts prolong a phone's lifetime — a key part of the concept — but customers weren't always aware these possibilities existed.
To make products customers want to keep using, Fairphone needed feedback precise enough to prioritise product improvements — for retention and for new customers.
Customer centricity is core to Fairphone's mission, but it had to become tangible, with the entire company on board rather than one team carrying the vision.
How Fairphone uses Hello Customer
When the new CX vision kicked off, Max knew the one-man approach had to go: Fairphone wanted a platform to centralise all customer feedback and automate as much as possible, including the analysis. The two NPS surveys — onboarding and customer support — were migrated to Hello Customer, which cleared the road for gathering insights efficiently and makes the feedback visual and accessible to everyone in the company.
Feedback showed customers aren't always aware of the repair services linked to Fairphone's brand promise. DIY repair is empowering, easy and fast — but Fairphone just didn't clearly talk about it. The team is now testing the impact of being more explicit about the repair journey in its marketing, and each repairability topic creates new branded touchpoints to keep customers engaged.
The camera was a much-discussed topic, and some feedback pointed at very specific aspects of it. Those became concrete starting points for prioritising camera improvements on the newest model — and for a dedicated satisfaction survey just about the camera, working back and forth with customers on the product.
Workshops brought disciplines from across the company behind one CX vision — a genuinely collaborative effort. The customer service team is a big contributor, hearing directly from customers when something is wrong, and works on closing the loop both internally and externally, often resolving issues before feedback is even given.
The touchpoints Fairphone listens at
NPS survey once the phone is in the customer's hands
NPS after interactions with agents
New touchpoints being set up around DIY repair
Results
Centralising and analysing feedback now takes a fraction of the time, freeing the team to work on improvements with the people involved. Fairphone understands better what customers love and promotes exactly that, has created new branded touchpoints for aspects that previously went unnoticed, and turned negative camera feedback into a concrete improvement on its newest model — with A/B tests running on how to improve repairability further.
With CSAT and CES joining the primary NPS surveys, Fairphone has a better overview of CX performance at different touchpoints — different flavours of metrics for different things to measure — and a growing CX network inside the company to act on all of it.
The idea was to get on the platform, focus on one metric and look purely at the feedback. That's where you'll get the most insights from. And we did that.Max SeabrookeCX Lead, Fairphone
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