Customer Experience Case Study: Forest Holidays

Summary:

Customer: Forest Holidays - camping, caravan and cabin holidays.

CSN services: Monthly phone-based questionnaires including verbatim comments; analysis reports.

Goal: Improve the customer experience and internal processes through analysis and interpretation of customer feedback.

Introducing Forest Holidays

Forest Holidays (www.forestholidays.co.uk) is a partnership between the Forestry Commission and the Camping & Caravanning Club. It provides cabin holidays and caravan and camping holidays in 24 locations - five cabin sites and 21 caravan & camping sites - across England, Scotland and Wales.  

Its focus to offer the forest itself for entertainment, with miles of paths and cycles trails to explore and active adventures, such as pony trekking and sailing or joining a Forest Ranger to discover the location\'s flora and fauna. 

The cabin holidays are self-catering, with a range of cabins for couples, families and groups of friends. The cabins themselves are designed to be both \"green\" and luxurious - many have private hot tubs - within stunning natural surroundings. The camping and caravan facilities, too, are carefully reviewed and updated to deliver a modern yet environmentally friendly experience.  

Gathering customer feedback

Some customers have been coming to the campsites for decades, back to when the Forestry Commission provided them. The creation of Forest Holidays in May 2006 meant marketing a new name, new ideas and new terms & conditions. After successful work with the Camping & Caravanning Club, CSN was asked to provide survey and analysis services for the new venture. 

Mark Sheppard, Operations Support Assistant at Forest Holidays, is responsible for managing all the customer-facing processes at Forest Holidays. This includes all types of feedback and data gathering - ways of constantly improving the way the company interacts with its customers. 

With extensive experience of contact centres, as agent, supervisor and coach, then compliance in the financial services sector, Mark is working his second full season at Forest Holidays:  \"Our interaction with customers can be via phone calls, emails, letters. In addition, the surveys and analysis carried out on our behalf by CSN are a vitally important piece of the feedback jigsaw.\" 

Mark continued the arrangement with CSN begun by his predecessor and began searching for more ideas to manage and make best use of the information: \"I\'ve developed a good relationship with CSN. Darren [Darren Young, CSN\'s Business Development Director] has visited our sites and I always get good, friendly service when I call the CSN office.\" 

CSN - surveys and analysis

CSN has developed and refined three separate questionnaires - for the campsites, the cabin sites and the reservations process when booking over the phone.  Each month, CSN interviews 20 customers who have recently experienced the cabin sites, 10 campers and 25 customers who have made a reservation. 

To ensure objectivity, Forest Holidays provides the basic customer information to CSN but deliberately does not dictate or even know which specific customers CSN calls or who says what in the feedback. 

The Net Promoter question - whether a customer would recommend Forest Holidays - is included, along with whether they would re-visit and, finally, how the customer would rate the overall experience. 

\"The surveys and analysis are a highly productive tool for us. Through them, we discover what is affecting the customer experience, what factors influence recommendations and repeat business and give us pointers for managing our site managers. Moreover, working with CSN, we are reading between the lines, so to speak, to discover more about what our customers are actually telling us.\" 

By analysing the verbatim comments and cross-referencing answer to specific questions, CSN is able to discover which earlier questions influence the final \'\"overall experience\" question. So, for example, it became clear from the in-depth analysis that for customers, along with first impressions, consistency was a key indicator in rating the overall experience.

From reports to action

The vast majority of customers enjoy their forest holiday, but Mark likes to go deeper, comparing sites and spotting trends, building results month by month: \"The analysis worked extremely well throughout the 2008 season - notably for the cabin sites. The quarterly reports from CSN clearly show the effectiveness of particular managers and the impact of specific influences, such as weather and school holidays, on the level of customer satisfaction.\" 

Focusing on interpreting the survey data really paid off by the third quarter of 2008. In particular, recalls Mark, it showed the significance of customers\' first impressions: \"Our surveys always give the customer an opportunity to make verbatim comments, which can be tremendously revealing and even contradict the overall satisfaction expressed in the rest of the survey.\" 

The relationship is flexible, enabling Forest Holidays to target specific aspects of its work in response to changing circumstances. For example, the on-site shops are now managed by Forest Holidays and have become an important ancillary income. The company wanted to gauge what customers thought of the outlets: \"The easiest and quickest way was to include the shops in the survey, which CSN did smoothly and provided us with important information that helps us decide opening hours and product lines accurately to suit our customers.\" 

CSN compiles reports on all the verbatim comments it collects and these results, too, can have a direct effect on Forest Holiday\'s processes. Verbatim comments relating to check-in, for instance, prompted one site manager to change procedures so that, where possible, new arrivals are walked to their cabin instead of simply being handed the keys and a map. Other managers will follow suit if the trial proves successful. 

Survey results and comment analysis by CSN has also prompted positive changes in the cabin manuals and a trial of heating the cabin in advance of a customer\'s arrival. 

Mark adds: \"CSN helps us read between the lines of the survey and draw out practical steps we can take to improve the customer experience.\" 

Good is not enough!

Apart from the Net Promoter questions, everything is rated from poor to excellent. Increasing the number of customers reporting \"good\" to \'excellent\" makes a massive difference to overall repeat spending - a 30% chance of revisiting among \"good\" rating customers compared with a 70% chance among \"excellent\" ratings. 

Mark says: \"Investing in CSN\'s services, resulting in an improvement to that score, makes commercial sense.\" 

Forest Holiday\'s overall satisfaction rating is around 98% - a combination of \"good\" and \"excellent\" ratings, with only one in 60 customers scoring any less. But internally, Forest Holidays scores itself only on the \"excellent\" rating. 

\"Our overall satisfaction rating was painting a near-perfect picture of the business, but I knew it was not accurate enough to progress the business. The granularity of the detail is important. You get a far better idea of what\'s really happening by focusing on the \'excellent\' results, particularly as to how our individual site managers - and our outside contractors - are performing.\" 

\"Our contract with CSN gives us a clear sight of where we are and gives us ideas on how to ensure constant improvement. It\'s always been good advice and helped us to get where we are today.\"  

Looking ahead

With bookings up considerably and the re-branding and new investment having a positive effect, Forest Holidays is using the data and analysis from CSN to good effect: \"We are undergoing tremendous changes at the moment, so the data we get from CSN becomes more valuable over time,\" says Mark. 

Forest Holidays recently negotiated a further year\'s contract with CSN, with more analysis, quarterly reports and software upgrades enabling Forest Holidays to produce its own charts and presentations. 

Mark sums up: \"CSN presents us with an image of our customers and an impression of ourselves, from which we can develop and improve our service. Eventually - hopefully by the end of 2010 - we will be in a position to gain Excellence in Customer Experience Accreditation.\"  

Diagram caption:  Excellent and Good scores viewed together would produce a more or less flat line, telling Forest Holidays little about the true situation. Focusing on the Excellent rating shows the spikes and troughs caused by particular issues, such as busy periods or a regular site manager being away.  

Here, the Excellent scores (in yellow) fell in June/July after a manager left and a new manager was finding her feet. Scores then stabilised and began to rise consistently as her positive influence was felt. The Excellent scores in the site she left stabilised in advance of its new manager becoming established.