How Zip Water Improved Their NPS by 58 Points in a Short 4 Years

Welcome to the Account Experience Podcast. My name is Adam Durrell and as ever, I'm your host to guide you through the difficult but challenging world of business to business account Experience. That's right. It's the marriage of account management and customer experience that makes Account Experience all worthwhile. We generally talk about how you can improve this by improving your. Net promoter or perhaps acting faster, client information or closing the loop and so on. And today's no exception. We're talking with Amanda Graham. She's head of Customer Experience Zip Water uk, and they provide sustainable drinking solutions for offices and homes. They're well known for the hydro tap solution, multifunction tap, which delivers filtered, boiled and chilled sparkling water. And their Customer Experience team supports customers on their journey through purchased install to other purchase services such as repair and services, and they measure their promoter on that journey. Be hearing all about that today. That's coming up in one bit. Don't forget to like and subscribe. If you're enjoying the content on the alexperience podcast, do recommend it to a friend. We are all about the NPS experience. Amanda, it's great to talk to you today. How are you doing?

Hi there, Adam. I'm really well, thank you. Really good. Really good to be here.

Oh, thanks for joining us. Now, I did a little introduction earlier. You are head of Customer Experience, zipwater in the uk. I am in Norwich.

In Norwich, yes, in the uk.

I'm speaking to you from Amsterdam today. So let's make sure the technology works. But tell me about Zip Water. What's the history of the company?

So Zit Water was founded in 1947 by guys called Michael Crouch here, as you said, just in the heart of Norfolk, not far from Norwich. Since then, Zip Water has become the UK arm of the Zip Water team in Australia. The headquarters are based there in Sydney. And also the company is now part of Culligan International, which is a world leader in delivering sustainable premium water services and solutions for consumers that really improve the health and wellness of consumers. That's at the heart of what we do.

Hey, I'm just going to drill down on that. Improving the health and wellness now. Sustainable water solutions, that's like no more plastic bottles, right?

Absolutely it is, for sure. So a lot of the services that we provide to officers in particular and to homes are all about providing water instantly boiling, chilled and sparkling. And it's sustainable because of course, we'll use our glasses to refill and our chili's bottles to refill as opposed to plastic. So, yes, it's really a Big focus for us on sustainability and that's.

You see that. Is there a trend for people to hydrate more in offices? Everyone I see these days has a. Has a bottle of walk around them these days.

Absolutely, absolutely. And it's good for a number of reasons from an office point of view, from productivity. There's also energy savings in the way that our hydrotap actually works and performs. So there's a number of sustainability angles, I guess, in terms of the delivery of what we provide. And then we're now moving as well into electric vehicles for our teams around the country who go out to visit customers and go out to install our product. So we really have a number of key focus areas on sustainability.

And I noticed I was having a look at the website, your taps are no touch to turn on. So I guess post Covid, that's a really important thing to.

Absolutely. It was huge. We brought that out right at the beginning of COVID and in the office environment, as you can imagine, no touch and the hands free has been hugely popular and also a safe way of. Are continuing to provide that, you know, that boiling chilled and sparkling water instantly.

Thanks for giving the history of Cullingham. What's your personal history? How did you get into the role of looking after customer experience?

So I've been here about five years. I have a background in customer experience and I came along to help initially actually as a consultant to help look at overall customer experience. It was really important to our md, Tracey Bamber, to find a way to measure experience, to report on consistent outcomes for customers with a well, kind of recognized tool. And I'm really excited and passionate about Net Promoter Score and have been throughout all of my roles in terms of understanding how the feedback from both customers and colleagues helped shape the experience for the customer in the best way possible really.

So let's lift the lid on your program a bit. So how do the mechanics of IT work? How are you measuring customer experience as it water?

So we're using our CRM tool and our customer gauge is heavily integrated with that. The account experience allows us to see our regular touch points with customers. We tend to measure via survey customer experience team and then the customer experience when they've had one of our engineers or one of our technicians visit them on site. So there's kind of two touch points in that one journey and what we've been able to do. So we started the program back in 2018 and we started with the score of plus two. It was plus, which is positive and a nice start, but actually what we've been able to do over this four year period is grow it to a plus 60 and we're super. And we can.

Let me just put plus six zero. Is that right? 58 point improvement.

Yeah, we had an ambition. Thank you. We had an ambition when we joined to get to 50 and I'm super pleased that we've, you know, we've been able to exceed that. So yes, this is the one journey which is our, you know, our most important journey. You purchased our purchase our product, you've spoken to our customer experience team. We're coming to install your product or we're coming to service your product. And, and that is the journey that we, that we have particularly focused on.

Okay, I'd like to unpack that further because for a company to improve 58 points in four years, you must have had some significant aha. Moments along the way and things that you changed. Can you talk us through some of the things that you discovered?

Yes, certainly. So I think one of the things, Adam, that people are really, and this is customer experience, you know, you can apply this across a number of journeys is first contact resolutions. The customers very much, especially with a premium solution, very much want to talk to you once and then really and truly expect everything to be done. So whilst we don't measure, and I'm very particular about the fact that we don't specifically measure the score of NPS in terms of we don't incentivise on it, we don't bonus it, but we're very keen on the drivers which is part of what the account experience allows us to do. So we've empty to see quite quickly what drivers impact, how customers are feeling about the service that we've offered. And so I guess a key one of those certainly is first contact resolution. Definitely that was a real moment for us. And also the way that we put together our after sale package, I think there was some confusion from customers around what was included in warranty and what was an after sales package. So that made some quite considerable. We actually redesigned our whole product off of the back of having that feedback, that really rich unfiltered feedback from customers about how they were finding, you know, communicating to us about, about that part of their service.

Unfiltered feedback. I love that, is that I'm always up for the dad jokes and stuff like this. So yeah, okay, let me just get. So first contact resolution, that's the time to solve an issue. Right.

Is that it's the number of touch points actually rather than the time. Yeah. So when we first started, when we. When we were in the lower with the net promoter score, lower scores, I guess we had a first contact resolution of somewhere in, you know, the 50, 60%. So 50% of interactions with customers, we, you know, we resolved one and done, if you like, and then the rest were taken a longer in terms of, you know, in terms of conversation and interaction between the customer and the customer experience team. And so along the way, we did, you know, there were a number of system, process, et cetera, fixes that we did to kind of move that and kind of get that, which we have now into the 80s. So in actual fact, 80% of our customers have a first contact resolution experience with us. And they told us it was important. So we fixed it using a feedback.

Brilliant. And so that. So you really use the customer feedback to actually fix the process. And a process fixing is really hard. I know that's hard.

It is.

You mentioned the other thing, which is about the after sales package. To me, that sounded like more of a communications improvement. Is that correct?

Yeah, some of it's around communication, Some of it is around the. Certainly the literature we use to talk about our product, but I think actually some of it's around just being really clear internally with our teams around, you know, the differences in those processes between what's involved in a warranty and what then is part of the service. I think one of the things that you might be interested in, Adam, is I sort of tried to find some ways to bring this to life within our leadership teams across the business. It's really important that it's in the culture, not just the experience team who are responsible for experience, but the whole. The whole organization. And I put together this kind of little exercise called Moments of Truth. And what I did was I took calls that customers had given us and that promoter score. And I played those calls to the teams and said, okay, so here's a customer. This is the interaction they had with the customer experience team member and let them listen. And then. Okay, so now tell me what you think. How do you think that customer scored us on a score of 0 to 10 based on the experience they had? And it was really powerful, actually, in bringing, as you said, like those sort of processes that perhaps far away sometimes from leadership teams within the business, and really bringing it to life in a moment of truth.

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I love that. I mean it's really, it's a really good example of how the power of the voice of a customer, sometimes a single customer really can cut to the heart of the problem. You know, to go off on a tangent, know the way that in Hollywood movies, if they're trying to tell a big story through like a history thing, they always like tell it through the eyes of One person. Because as humans that's the only way we can digest that. And I think that's how you bring something to the team. So I love my story.

It's a rich. Interestingly we all tended internally to score ourselves lower than the customer did. Which I actually learning as well.

Isn't it doom mongering?

Yeah. Really top worth belt.

Hey, I'm just. That's a brilliant learning as well. I mean most companies should go through that. I agree. The voice of customers often they score better than people. People think themselves and that's a really good exercise in teaching people not to be afraid of feedb. That's a. I'm going to. I've written that down. I'm going to use that again. So okay, so that was how you moved along the journey. Now you've got, you mentioned to me that before that you've got a product that you work in. I think it's the hydrocare system. Did I get that right? And that's, that's one of the projects that you've got a lot of net promoter focus on.

Yes. So that's the hydrocare. That's our product. Yes. Which is an aftercare service. Right. So essentially we come and we service the Hydrotap, make sure it's in good working order so that you know, it works throughout its lifetime, you know, and provides that filtered boiling, chilled and sparkling water. So it's an additional product to help maintain and kind of keep in good repair the tap that's been initially purchased. I guess the other outcomes almost of the program and some of the changes we've made have been in the customer experience team as you might expect and we've used some of the customer insights to kind of almost shape our quality of conversation tool. So in most customer experience teams there'll be a quality evaluation of some sorts or a call monitor or you know, that kind of tool. And really we've used the feedback to help shape what the framework looks like for within our team. So again it's about using the customer feedback to shape what we do as part of our process to then almost play back into the experience that our customers have. I think that's quite an important one that we changed as an outcome.

Yeah.

And then we've also put in place some multi skilling ability within our customer experience team. So very much when I joined the team people had kind of core skill roles. So customer experience advisors would perhaps be focused on purchasing, helping customers to purchase or helping customers with a warranty question or helping customers with an after Sales question and actually that led for quite a disjointed customer journey, very much in the theme of this first contact resolution that we were talking about. And so what I look to do is shape career paths and provide a, a stepping stone really for those advisors and by multi skilling them, providing that career path, actually what you have is an advisor who can answer more than one question when they're, when they're on with customers and help kind of deliver that overall experience, which again was so important to our customers because that's what they were telling us and that must.

Make for a more interesting work. It does style as well.

It does certainly. It certainly helps with retention. Although we are in interesting times for resource and recruitment at the moment, as I'm sure many, many, many companies are and many customer experience teams are too.

Are you measuring your employee experience at all as part of the journey that you have with customers?

I do, yeah, I do. So I actually measure ENPs here in my team because I think it's really important and we use the 0 to 10 score within my team as a regular touch point to say, you know, would you Recommend Working in Zip to your friends, family and colleagues and scorers on 0 to 10? And whilst the score's not really that important, certainly the feedback is to me because my team and I use that feedback to help shape what, what improvements it is the team would like in terms of their working environment or, you know, the processes that they deliver to their customers. So ENPS is actually just as valuable as NPS to me as my team here.

Do you see a linkage between the EMPs and the external facing customer MPs?

Absolutely, of course, of course. You know, I think we've long known that the experience customers receive is absolutely reflective of the, of the, you know, of the colleague that they're, that they're currently speaking to. For sure.

We had an interesting learning in customer gauge. I don't know if I can share this with you, but we had a dip in employee mps right about the time, you know, Covid hit.

Yeah.

The next quarter we had a dip in our customer nps. You know, we worked out that there was the debt, there was a definite lag, but it was about a quarter. So we were able to predict it. And you know, as we came back on track with our employee mps, sure enough, on our product team.

Interesting. We actually had one of our highest scores during COVID from customers. Yeah, for sure it was. We actually peaked during that time and I guess that was reflective of the fact that we continued to Serve customers and you know, did our best to keep them safe. But yeah, it's, it's an interesting time.

It is an interesting time.

Post pandemic. Yeah.

As you've gone through the four year journey, what have been some of the biggest challenges that you've had in implementing the. Either the system or the feedback from customers? What's been. That was a tough one to get through.

I think actually now is the toughest time, if I'm honest of all. We peaked and I said in Covid with the score, with the customer appreciation and then actually what we're finding now post pandemic is we are having some recruitment challenges, resource challenges and so some of the work on closing the loop and that constant analysis and root causing that I champion and I'm passionate about doing. Not where I'd like it to be right now, to continue our journey almost whilst we, whilst we fix some of the training, new starters, new colleagues and some of our response times that are not where we want them to be. And of course that's really important to customers. And I know that the account experience and customer gauge tells me that through the unabilted feedback. And so I'm concentrating really hard on fixing that so that we can kind of get back into the groove of doing that full close the loop and analysis of feedback.

Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. And you're not alone. I mean, I think this is a challenge that many companies have got at the moment. But. And I, I think what's interesting is that customers also experience that. Sorry, they'd say they appreciate that because they go through the same thing. But I think what they appreciate when a customer, when a company is transparent with them, says, look, you know, we are. This is something we really monitor the whole time and we know we're down on this, but we'll get back to normal. That's what I think makes a really good. That's what closed loop is all about.

Yes.

Whether it's, you know, you tell customers individually or you communicate to them. This is what we learned from our survey. But. And that I think is important.

Yeah, brilliant. The other thing, I guess that's the big. We chose early on not to incentivise for NPS at individual level, at team level, we chose to measure it as a whole and maybe measure some, as I said, like the drivers, some KPIs almost of the drivers of MPS. But I think we learned and we were kind of very passionate about being quite true to not gaining that score in any way because it ultimately doesn't Help you. And I think we were. I think we continue to be really proud of the fact that our score is completely anonymous. You know, we ourselves don't know through the system, we ourselves don't know which customers are going to be touched up, you know, at which point in their journey. And that for me is probably one of the things I'm most proud of. And I guess it's almost that aha moment of you don't need to incentivize. We have over a third of our customers leave us comments, and that's great, isn't it? And they don't, you know, and they don't have to, you know, they do it of their own, you know, of their own free will to tell us about that experience.

Do you have plans to use these now? You've got such a high net promoter score. Do you have plans to use your promoters to help spread the word about. Is it water?

Absolutely we do. And we, our. My colleague in marketing certainly uses those, can use the promoters to provide us with some beautiful testimonies. And we do have those. Sometimes we video them, sometimes we, you know, we use them as part of our website and certainly as part of our advertising. So we absolutely do use those positive comments.

I believe in my marketing career, I've also found that it is surprising how much people love to talk about the products they love. From the other side of it from being a marketer, you think, oh, no one's ever going to promote our program without some sort of financial incentive, and that's wrong. People that love a product really love to tell people about it, and they just need to be sometimes asked or prompted and they feel really good about it. So that's something you're working on now?

Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Okay, so where next with the program? How do you. Where do you go from here?

I think we might look at measuring other journeys. So this was the journey we were most interested in building because it's the key. It's the key one for our flagship products. So we might look at other journeys and we might also look at other tools I think that gauge can provide us with to help us better, I guess, identify those promoters. To your point, that could help find other promoters. And we want to do a little bit more research on some of those tools that I know account experience can provide us with.

Okay, that's great. And what about other people in your position, other customer experience officers around the world, other people listening to the podcast? What tips and tricks would you pass on?

I think keep it simple. Don't over complicate and choose one journey as we did and keep true to that. I personally look at the feedback, all of it myself. I am really passionate about it, but it really makes a difference. Don't delegate. It would be my top tip. Definitely, definitely look at it because it's really powerful and it helps you influence the leadership team around you. Yeah. And find innovative ways to bring it to life. I mean, I shared one of mine, but I think that helps bring it to life across the culture. Don't let it just be a customer experience job in terms of it's part of the customer experience job. It's everywhere. It's the whole company. Whole company, you know, should be looking out for the customer experience.

I totally agree. The whole company looks out for it. I think Zip Water customers should be really proud to have such a caring customer experience team. I think it's really a great journey you've been on and listening to customer comments to shape the company around that I think is a great testament to what you've been doing. Amanda, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today and giving us some insights into the program and if people want to reach out to you. Are you available on LinkedIn for.

Absolutely. Yeah. It would be my pleasure.

That's super. And I wish you the very best of luck with the Zip Water journey. And I tell you, I'm going to make sure that we get one installed in our office.

Fabulous. Thank you, Adam. I really enjoyed it. Take care.