Where it all started
Where my VOC and text analysis journey all began!
Back in 1993, ASDA supermarkets started running a customer feedback programme - ASDA Talkback. At that time, the company wanted to give store managers greater autonomy over making changes to their individual store to better meet customer needs.
Simple feedback cards were distributed throughout target stores. Customers were asked to give their comments about the store, and to post the written-up cards in collection bins in the store.
This was all pre-internet time. Everything was paper based, with 250,000 feedback cards returned each year from the stores to ASDA House in Leeds.
Sunday opening was still a novelty. Supermarkets starting to sell fuel - imagine! Smoking still prevalent in stores. And a land-grab by the big store groups for new superstore sites.
The agency I was working for took control of the programme, my role being the processing, analysis and reporting. Masses of manual data entry, manual reading and coding of the comments into more than 100 ASDA specific topics, split between products, store operations and staffing.
From the regular reporting, store managers made local changes to meet their customers' needs. This resulted in more products ranged, changes to opening times, no smoking in the cafés(!), better parking, improved till queues - and on and on.
Store managers filled in and displayed A1-sized posters to let customers know what had changed - based on listening to their feedback - which helped to promote yet more feedback.
A real win, win, win, win - easy for customers to give feedback; easy for ASDA to extract insight; easy for the stores to act on the insight and make changes; and customers could see that they had been listened to and acknowledged!
Next step - how to automate the hugely time-consuming exercise of the manual reading and coding of the cards to turn this amazing insight programme into a scalable operation? That work started in 1998 with the pioneering text analysis technology that became Feedback Ferret.
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