“Re:infer enables us to have a more data-driven approach, giving us the chance to digitise qualitative customer feedback, and even to embrace the so-far ignored silent majority of customers. The Customer Experience Index has grounded CX for executives. Now they can touch it and feel it. As a CX leader, I feel much more empowered when our analysis is linked to revenue.”
<small>Arthur Zhuravsky, Global Senior Head of Voice of the Customer, FARFETCH<small>
The challenges
FARFETCH has always competed to provide the best brand and customer experiences to its large and diverse customer base. Yet, adapting to the competition and making the improvements that mattered most to customers wasn’t always straightforward. Company leaders faced difficulties in proving the cause and effect of initiatives, measuring and reporting on ROI, and in connecting customer experience (CX) initiatives to the priorities of the C-Suite.
The global brand was collecting an immense amount of data from diverse, disconnected sources. This included data not only from a variety of external customer sources, but also a wealth of internal operational metrics - all of which had been siloed from each other. As a result, this well of insight was largely untapped.
Customer service improvement depended largely on manual analysis by agents - but their failure rate in logging the correct customer issues was approximately 20%. The FARFETCH Voice of the Customer (VoC) team wanted to capitalise on the company’s vast data reservoir to truly understand what was most impacting the customer experience and how this affected the company’s revenue. It would then use this operational insight for growth and to provide better products and services to FARFETCH’s customers.
The objective was to empower functional teams with the insight they needed to drive effective improvements in customer service and the customer experience. They also wanted to find a way of connecting CX initiatives to concrete financial outcomes that company leaders could have confidence in.
"Improving the customer experience always seems like an obvious goal, but it can be very difficult to prove cause and effect. Many CX leaders agree that a 1% improvement in CX will translate to a 1% uptick in profitability - but this isn’t convincing enough for functional leaders in a budget discussion."
<small>Arthur Zhuravsky, Global Senior Head of Voice of the Customer, FARFETCH<small>
The solution
FARFETCH knew it needed a more accurate, data-driven and provable metric with which to guide CX improvements and initiatives. Traditional methods, including CSAT and NPS, were constrained by the frequency of feedback and prone to prioritise the needs of a vocal minority of consumers. A metric was required that could capture the voices of the ‘silent majority’ of customers who provided no feedback but who generated the most value for the brand. This would ensure that the most impactful and beneficial CX improvements could be prioritised.
In its mission to develop a more intelligent and attributable CX, FARFETCH adopted the Re:infer enterprise NLP platform. Starting with the company’s customer service emails, FARFETCH used Re:Infer to digitise its customer contact, turning messages into clean structured data for analysis and action.
Re:infer provides an extra layer of customer intelligence, enabling FARFETCH to recognise the fine-grained root causes of customer service issues and opportunities. Re:infer also reveals how customers feel about their experience by extracting the sentiment data from customer conversations. This allowed FARFETCH to attribute a net emotional value (NEV) to every customer conversation, which can be collated to provide an overall picture of the brand’s quality of service.
Using Re:infer NLP to transform the customer voice into data, FARFETCH has developed a new metric to guide service improvement - the Customer Experience Index (CXI). CXI connects FARFETCH’s VoC data with that of its operations, sales and product team KPIs. FARFETCH extracts the data from what its vocal minority of customers is saying and applies this to operational events data, extrapolating what most customers (the silent majority) are experiencing. This has shown FARFETCH how its ops functions impact customer loyalty and recurrent spending.
The results
With Re:infer and its Customer Experience Index, FARFETCH has been able to achieve a scalable and data-driven approach to CX improvement.
FARFETCH can now see, and directly link, how operational events and failures impact the customer experience. This is helping FARFETCH to identify the most valuable improvements that will benefit the silent majority of customers and enhance their loyalty.
FARFETCH’s VoC team has become a centre of excellence for customer insight. Leaders of operational functions now use the team as a vital resource to understand how functional changes will impact the experience and satisfaction of customers.
With Re:infer, FARFETCH’s VoC team now understands:
- Every customer communication in real time and at scale
- The needs of all customers, including the silent majority
- The specific aspects of internal order execution that cause customer responses
- How order execution affects retention and customer lifetime value (CLTV)
- When to recover customers, even before they notice an issue
- The internal drivers of poor CX, linking them to specific Operations KPIs
This has enabled FARFETCH to:
- Increase recovery project ROI by 8x-20x
- Increase repurchase rate and the profitability of CX improvement projects
- Measure execution excellence for each order
- Highlight the most valuable CX improvement opportunities at the ops level
- Provide customer recovery leads for customer service agents to act on
“When I joined Farfetch I was totally cynical about text analytics. Re:infer has really changed my mind on that. The power of taking detailed qualitative feedback data and quantifying it is really special. Re:infer has definitely been good value for Farfetch.”
<small>Louise Barr, Senior Marketing Research Manager, FARFETCH<small>
Watch the FARFETCH Story
FARFETCH’s Arthur Zhuravsky joined Customer Contact Week Europe Exchange to explain how Re:infer is helping his team quantify the customer experience and drive real improvements to customer service.
Watch his full presentation:
