Conrad, originally a German company, specialises in electronics and technology for both the private and business markets. In the 1980s, Conrad also settled in other European countries, including the Netherlands. The extensive Dutch webshop contains almost one million products. Conrad operates from three regions: East, Dach and West. The Netherlands is part of the West region, together with Belgium, France, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland.
Where previously Conrad mainly attracted consumers, they are now increasingly focusing on the business market. We spoke with Matthijs Gaikema, Head of Analysis & Control at Conrad Electronic Benelux B.V. about Conrad’s ambitious goals and what role customer feedback plays in achieving these goals.
We strive to be the best B2B sourcing platform with electronic and technical products.
Matthijs Gaikema, Head of Analysis & Control at Conrad Electronic Benelux B.V.
Everything online for Conrad
Conrad’s online channels play the leading role for this company. There are no physical stores in the Netherlands and most other countries, so all purchases are made online. It is therefore very important that the online customer journey is optimal and that customers can easily achieve their goals. Conrad has been working with Mopinion for years and has since become very experienced in collecting customer feedback and knows how to successfully combine different ways of collecting feedback.
Despite its large number of consumers, the focus within Conrad now falls heavily on business customers. This appears to be a good step as Conrad continues to expand and is still growing despite the COVID-19 crisis. The Dutch website is linked to the other platforms by means of middleware. In this way there is a uniform system and changes can be easily implemented.
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How Conrad leverages customer feedback in practice
Conrad uses Mopinion software in different ways. From a reminder for visitors leaving the ordering process early to sending an email with the aim of enticing the customer into a second purchase. There can be up to 30-40 touchpoints in the online customer journey, so there are plenty of opportunities to approach customers.
With a permanent, yet subtle button on the side of the website, Conrad asks visitors to give their feedback about the website so that they can continuously optimise the website.
“Because the website / webshop consists of so many different articles, pages with products and information and because we are dealing with different countries and their own payment methods, it is impossible to test everything well for all websites before a new release.
And that’s why customer feedback plays a big role for us. Users can also send screenshots and pieces of code with the feedback via the button on the website. This allows our developers to easily detect where the error is located,” explains Matthijs.
“We also measure the Customer Effort Score on the thank-you page,” says Matthijs. “We want to know how easy the ordering process is. During the launch of the new website a few years ago, we experienced technical problems. So much input came in that we couldn’t possibly handle it all. Thankfully Mopinion showed us the most common problems and that immediately became our priority.”
Removing obstacles and optimising the online customer journey
Thanks to customer feedback, various obstacles came to light for Conrad.
A few examples:
- The payment module did not function optimally in various countries.
- The connection to the middleware did not always work well.
- Failure to add a promotional code was an issue.
- Older accounts were unable to complete the ordering process.
- Incorrect delivery times were shown for products
They were able to solve and prioritise these types of common problems thanks to the details in the customer feedback.
“One of the main reasons we collect customer feedback is because we want to measure customer satisfaction. After any form of contact with customer service, regardless of which channel, we measure the NPS. We discovered that private individuals are very satisfied with how friendly our customer service is, however that afterwards it is not entirely clear whether a solution will be found or what happens next with a complaint. This was a good learning moment for us. Our corporate clients generally give us higher scores than retail clients, but also have different customer service expectations. For example, the technical knowledge of customer service sometimes proved to be insufficient and because the business market has our focus, it is important that we do something with this insight.”
How Conrad follows up on the feedback
Conrad has developed its own “workflow” for efficiently following up on customer feedback. All feedback is collected and bundled via Mopinion’s all-in-one customer feedback software. There is so much feedback that it does not automatically go to customer service, but it is first filtered by one central person. All relevant feedback items are exported to Google sheets, so that the different teams working with this data have easy access to the data and from there the tasks are managed and the follow-up takes place.
Communication is very important when it comes to solving problems. Customer service and the development team discuss important customer feedback every week, so that everyone is aware of the status and follow-up. This prevents, among other things, that communication with customers falls between shore and ship or does not correspond to the actual status.
Pleasantly surprised by feedback
“When we did a customer survey on our website, internally we thought that our customers would be dissatisfied because the ordering process was not yet optimal at that time. Customer service received phone calls about this and we were concerned.
Pictured: Matthijs Gaikema, Head of Analysis & Control at Conrad Electronic Benelux B.V.
After the customer survey, it appeared that 80-90% of the customers were satisfied with our website, while we thought that there was a much bigger problem…
This was a pleasant surprise for Conrad.
“Thanks to the feedback, we were able to identify what needed to be improved, which weren’t all that bad. The search function also did not work well, which is something that we already knew, but we were not satisfied with the speed of improvement. By collecting feedback on this, we were able to make this a priority for the development team, so that the improvement of the search engine was given a higher priority.”
Conrad uses Mopinion in a special way
Everyone knows in which ways you can collect customer feedback, but as it turns out, Conrad has been using Mopinion software for other, unique purposes as well.
Matthijs explains,
“Over the years, we have used Mopinion in a variety of different ways. For example, we use Mopinion for our telemarketing campaigns. The operator asks the survey’s questions from the feedback form, and based on the answers provided, new questions appear on the screen, thanks to the logic we added to the feedback forms. In this way, the operators ask the right questions and we can then easily export the answers to Excel or Google sheets.”
Mopinion exposed Conrad’s pain points, thanks to the passive feedback button, problems arise that you don’t think of yourself. The website continues to amaze you…
Looking towards the future
Collecting feedback is certainly not new to Conrad. They have been customers of Mopinion for quite a while now, with continued (and regular) contact about new features and support with other ways of implementing feedback.
“Years ago we started collecting feedback with a competitive tool,” says Matthijs.
“Then we discovered Mopinion and technically-speaking, there were more possibilities in the backend of the software. That was one of the main reasons for us to switch. That and the price-quality ratio. We are now a few years further down the road and there is still so much more that we can do with Mopinion software. Certainly the other countries can take an example from us. In terms of collecting feedback, we are really ahead of other countries in the Netherlands. So I definitely see opportunities there.”
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