Case Study - The Nottingham

The Nottingham are undergoing major change and wanted to understand how their customers rated them to ensure these changes (a major IT core systems project amongst them) were impacting favourably on customer perception.

Customer Service Network designed process-specific telephone surveys to be used with The Nottingham’s mortgage, savings and estate agency customers. Overall, nine surveys are carried out on a monthly basis.

The key objectives of the programme are to allow The Nottingham to:

• Understand customer perception across their different business areas
• Validate the customer feedback against their own understanding and ideas of what needs to happen
• Prioritise areas for improvement
• Track trends
• Benchmark against local and national competitors, and best in class service providers
• Improve service and quality
• Track their Net Promoter score on a quarterly basis and use it as part of a balanced scorecard
• Set targets and measure performance based on their scores
• Understand what dissatisfies their customers and how they can put it right

CSN carry out 200 telephone surveys each month for The Nottingham. The data from the surveys is available for their people to view live at any time. Each quarter, CSN provide a detailed report and on-site presentation to The Nottingham’s Executive Team.

Because the Nottingham has live access to their data, this presentation is about adding value and getting to the heart of the matter. We believe this is helping customers understand the key priorities for customers, and recommending actions that will improve business performance and ultimately, the customer’s bottom line.

The Nottingham also benefit from:

• Coding of all customer comments so that they have lists of top 10 issues that customers are talking negatively about, and the things they like
• Free on-line or telephone support
• Expert analysis and best practice advice

The independent survey enables The Nottingham to use its customer feedback to develop improvement projects and engage staff in their objectives.

Real time customer feedback, especially comments, are a great way of bringing customer issues firmly into view and helping staff to see them clearly. The Nottingham has already made some significant changes that benefit their customers and are working on many more.

They are also looking to develop the relationship with CSN for even more detailed data in the future. Some of the additional features they will benefit from are:

• Increased on-line visibility
• Understanding feedback at department level not just business area
• Alert management when their scores go below or above certain thresholds
• Notifying branch managers when a survey is complete so they can instantly view it

A key benefit is that The Nottingham uses the customer feedback at a very local level and team and department managers are acting on real time customer knowledge to create action plans and monitor performance.

The feedback from customers is very positive and shows that The Nottingham’s commitment to customer service is paying off.

A key part of the survey has been to understand how The Nottingham can move customers who are happy into the 'top category' and become highly satisfied (delighted) advocates.

They now want to increase perception so that customers are much more than just satisfied. To do this they know that customer understanding is critical and will use the information from the CSN surveys to ensure they reach their targets.

July 2007