Improve retention for the most dissatisfied customers after a poor order experience.
Customer retention, lifetime value, order frequency & transaction value, return on investment.
I was responsible for the research, design and set-up of the pilot. I collaborated closely with the Operations team who were responsible for the execution of the pilot. I also worked with the survey provider and data scientists to define technical requirements.
Qualitative & quantitative research, service blueprinting, pilot design, monitoring and analysing pilot performance.
I conducted quantitative research on customer order and interaction data to understand which customers are the least likely to reorder. I also conducted qualitative research including sentiment analysis, to understand how users were feeling and why they might not wish to reorder using Deliveroo.
I also conducted competitor research to understand how other organisations with a strong reputation for customer experience try to recover dissatisfied customers.
In my quantitative analysis, I uncovered a strong correlation between retention and customer satisfaction measured using Net Promoter Score (NPS). This meant that customers who were the most dissatisfied with their experience were also very unlikely to reorder using Deliveroo. This also presented an effective means to quickly identify customers who were likely to have low retention.
I also found that many NPS survey detractors were driven to submit the survey because they were very upset by their experience. Many in this group were expecting Deliveroo to take action to solve their complaint.
Through my competitor research, I found that a lot of companies that have strong reputations for good customer service provide an extra touchpoint to dissatisfied customers.
These insights challenged us to consider: how might we recover poor experiences by offering customers an additional touchpoint?
Customer service best practice in this type of scenario is to offer dissatisfied customers a call back. In order to test the viability of a call back in improving retention, we decided on a small pilot in one market. The Operations team members were responsible for the call script, and training a pool of agents in making these calls.
I designed the pilot, including the parameters for eligible customers based on their NPS feedback. I structured the pilot as an A/B test where half of eligible customers would receive a call and the other half would not. I worked with our survey provider and data science team to ensure that the necessary data flows were in place to support the agents and to capture the pilot performance.
This pilot ran for two months in order to accurately capture customer retention after receiving a call back. I was able to see a strong positive indication that the call-back improved customer retention, where the customers who received a call-back were significantly more likely to re-order, but also at a higher frequency and with larger basket sizes, contributing to a large difference in customer lifetime value.
Using the increased customer lifetime value and the additional operational cost for agents to make the call-backs, I was able to estimate that the return on investment for the pilot was positive.
The initiative was evaluated to be a resounding success, and was scaled across the all countries Deliveroo operates in as an enduring service offering.