Same Cars, Better Care
For years, Feeddex has been facilitating ongoing feedback and customer satisfaction surveys for Business Lease, both nationally and internationally. We discuss the collaboration with Robbert van Muyden, Director of International Sales, Marketing, and Operations; Leon Smulders, Team Manager of Purchasing and Technical Management; and Joost van Gestel, Fleet Analyst.
What prompted Business Lease to start working with customer feedback?
"We want to be the Best Care leasing company. You can only achieve this by continuously working on your services, asking for customer feedback, and acting on it. Customer feedback is a good way to put our slogan 'Same Cars, Better Care' into practice," says Leon.
Robbert: "We wanted to get a clear picture of how many aspects of our service are actually experienced. Where are the pain points and what can we do about them? There's only one person you can ask, and that's the customer." "We started asking for customer feedback in the Netherlands. Both fleet managers and drivers are systematically asked for feedback after important contact or relationship moments. After a successful pilot in the Netherlands, we rolled out customer feedback to our other countries: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania."
How do you use feedback in your work? And what are the benefits of this?
Leon: "Our goal is to improve. To get more attention and focus on improving customer satisfaction, we've added KPIs at all levels of our organization and set targets for customer satisfaction scores.
Employees have insight into the results and are involved in improvement actions. When you see what the customer is saying and really do something with the feedback, an improvement process gets underway." "We sometimes think we know and can determine what customers want too quickly, whereas if you really listen to the customer, their wishes are often different."
“A good example of this is our delivery time monitoring. When the purchasing department was busy, we would first clear away piles of work, which sometimes compromised delivery time monitoring. This was because we thought our customers would benefit most from clearing the work inventory. Until feedback from our customers showed that what our customers actually need is delivery time monitoring.
Robbert adds: "We use the feedback one-on-one with our business relations. The sales account manager enters into dialogue with the fleet manager." "We also discuss the positive points. This also yields a lot of useful information." "Now that we have also started working with feedback internationally, we can compare countries and look at trends. You can almost superimpose the graphs on top of each other; there is only a difference in bandwidth."
Employees have insight into the results and are involved in improvement actions. When you see what the customer is saying and really do something with the feedback, an improvement process gets underway." "We sometimes think we know and can determine what customers want too quickly, whereas if you really listen to the customer, their wishes are often different."
“A good example of this is our delivery time monitoring. When the purchasing department was busy, we would first clear away piles of work, which sometimes compromised delivery time monitoring. This was because we thought our customers would benefit most from clearing the work inventory. Until feedback from our customers showed that what our customers actually need is delivery time monitoring.
Robbert adds: "We use the feedback one-on-one with our business relations. The sales account manager enters into dialogue with the fleet manager." "We also discuss the positive points. This also yields a lot of useful information." "Now that we have also started working with feedback internationally, we can compare countries and look at trends. You can almost superimpose the graphs on top of each other; there is only a difference in bandwidth."
Draw up an annual plan based on customer satisfaction scores
Joost van Gestel, responsible for analyzing the results: "We draw up our annual plan based on customer satisfaction scores and feedback. We use Feeddex's Priority Matrix to determine our improvement actions for each process and department. This helps us focus on issues that have a greater impact on increasing the Net Promoter Score (recommendation intention) and overall customer satisfaction. Because we have been working with Feeddex for a number of years, we can compare the years side by side and see that our efforts and priorities are having an effect. We are seeing a nice growth in the scores."
How do you use the feedback in relation to your suppliers?
Robbert: "We also use customer feedback to improve the quality of our suppliers. We make agreements about this in collaboration with our suppliers. We give them a specific score as a KPI. They are compared with each other and improvement steps are determined."
Leon continues: "We set conditions for large suppliers that work with different branches. The Feeddex application shows us the figures and comments from the OpenBox (editor's note: customers can respond openly and request a response) for each branch, and we discuss these with the supplier or branch. They are happy with this input because it helps them to improve their performance.
Leon continues: "We set conditions for large suppliers that work with different branches. The Feeddex application shows us the figures and comments from the OpenBox (editor's note: customers can respond openly and request a response) for each branch, and we discuss these with the supplier or branch. They are happy with this input because it helps them to improve their performance.
Transparency with Feeddex results
Part of Business Lease's Better Care strategy is the personal online environment: Care Online. This allows a fleet manager to view the satisfaction scores of its drivers online in real time.
Robbert: "Internally, people were initially nervous about this visibility of results, but it forces us to take immediate action and respond quickly."
Robbert: "Internally, people were initially nervous about this visibility of results, but it forces us to take immediate action and respond quickly."
How do you experience Feeddex as a company?
Leon: "Customer satisfaction means always looking ahead to the next step. Feeddex always thinks along with us about that next step. Anyone can arrange feedback, but the question is: how do you deal with it?"
Robbert: "You really do it together. We get good advice and expertise from Feeddex. A big advantage of Feeddex is that we can offer the feedback management system uniformly in multiple countries." Joost is also happy with the collaboration: "We are very enthusiastic! The dashboard is very easy to work with. You can really do anything with it! For example, I use the Feeddex reports to communicate the results internally."
Robbert: "You really do it together. We get good advice and expertise from Feeddex. A big advantage of Feeddex is that we can offer the feedback management system uniformly in multiple countries." Joost is also happy with the collaboration: "We are very enthusiastic! The dashboard is very easy to work with. You can really do anything with it! For example, I use the Feeddex reports to communicate the results internally."
Finally, how do you ensure that it really works?
Leon: "Be proactive! Pick up on issues, continuously improve, and minimize areas for improvement. Make it clear to employees that they actually have an impact on customer satisfaction. As an employee, you can make all the difference to the customer experience. I read almost all OpenBox responses myself and discuss them with the employee concerned." Joost: "Creating engagement is very important. Communicating and involving employees in follow-up as well. Then they can see for themselves what the customer is saying and learn from the follow-up process."
Second nature
Robbert: "We have fully integrated customer feedback into our business processes. It is a regular feature of team meetings.
The management team from the various countries visits the Netherlands twice a year to evaluate where they stand." "Everyone must share the same conviction to work with customer feedback. Management must communicate the vision. Managers involve their employees and focus on customer satisfaction. This way, it becomes second nature and you continue to improve. You have to repeat it constantly. If Coca Cola stopped advertising, no one would drink Coca Cola anymore."
The management team from the various countries visits the Netherlands twice a year to evaluate where they stand." "Everyone must share the same conviction to work with customer feedback. Management must communicate the vision. Managers involve their employees and focus on customer satisfaction. This way, it becomes second nature and you continue to improve. You have to repeat it constantly. If Coca Cola stopped advertising, no one would drink Coca Cola anymore."