How Chattermill helps HelloFresh use Customer Feedback to Drive Innovation & Retention

“Chattermill allows our CX team to easily uncover the key drivers behind customer feedback and provides guidance around the right opportunities and initiatives for our business. With Customer Experience Intelligence, every department can easily understand what drives sentiment up or down, monitor how it changes over time, and identify key areas for improvement.”

Steve Crolic
Associate Director at HelloFresh

30%
Average order value increased by
5x
Amount revenue multiplied by over the last 5 years
4%
Average number of orders per customer grew by

Challenge

With years of revenue growth and product expansion, HelloFresh has a strong focus on retaining existing customers and applying a customer-centric mindset across new markets. To enhance this customer-centric culture, the company needed to first understand the experience across the entire customer journey, find areas for improvement and innovation, and take action on the voice of the customer.

HelloFresh chose Chattermill's Unified Customer Intelligence Platform to measure the sentiment behind customer feedback, understand the impact of customer experience on revenue and retention, and empower internal teams with strategic guidance for innovation.

Understanding Customer Sentiment in Any Business Area

For example, Culinary Teams fine-tune their cooking instructions to reduce complexity and enhance enjoyment through understanding the sentiment about their recipes.

Operational Teams optimize their supply chain and simplify the delivery process by tracking insights about the quality of ingredients and their suppliers.

Product Teams make it easier for users to create an account or apply a discount code by easily understanding the user’s pain points in the mobile app and on the website.

Making changes that work wouldn’t be possible without data that supports the right decisions. With Chattermill, every department at HelloFresh can find answers to almost any business question:

Culinary Team: How do customers find and rate recipes? Which recipes should be reviewed, improved, or replaced? Do customers find the recipes easy to cook? Why are some recipes more popular than others? Should we introduce new types of cuisine?
Operations Team: Which suppliers deliver the best quality ingredients? How much retention is associated with customers complaining about packaging?
Product Team: What are the biggest pain points that negatively impact conversion? Does the customer understand how to create an account or apply a discount code?
CX Team: What are the top opportunities to improve customer experience? What are the main reasons customers cancel their subscription? What are the key drivers behind the NPS score? What's the impact on revenue?

Turning Customer Feedback Into Innovation

Throughout their years using Chattermill, HelloFresh has gleaned valuable insights about customer preferences and needs to drive innovation. Product quality, delivery, and packaging feedback were immediately incorporated into the company's strategy and turned into innovative ideas. One such innovation is HelloFresh's recyclable insulation pouch, used to ship ice and proteins to destinations and to keep ingredients fresh.

"We noticed that in some markets like Germany, customer feedback and sentiment were strongly related to the sustainability of our packaging. Our team in Germany created a project team to look at the issue, set up goals, and discussed the impact of recyclable versus non-recyclable packaging on food, it's safety and quality.

As a result, they developed a fully recyclable insulation pouch that protects ingredient quality and substantially reduces the amount of plastic materials required for each shipment. Customers who received the new insulation pouch had 33% fewer cancellations related to our packaging."

Another innovation was introduced in the Benelux region: HelloFresh started electrifying the last-mile delivery fleet to support another important goal in the company’s sustainability strategy. All of this was based on customer feedback – saving CO2 emissions by reducing petrol and diesel-powered miles.

This innovation allowed HelloFresh to calculate and implement the most efficient routes for delivery, reducing the average driving distance per box. In the Benelux region, optimizing this process reduced the number of kilometres driven each week by 15%.

Using Chattermill to Drive Retention

Apart from providing strategic guidance for innovation, Chattermill plays a substantial role in how HelloFresh analyzes, understands, and improves customer retention.

Using a data-driven approach, HelloFresh discovered a clear link between NPS score, sentiment, and retention and determined that each NPS point is worth a specific amount in revenue.

‘The way we combine Chattermill insights with our sales data allows us to easily link NPS responses to our customer base and tie feedback to retention metrics,’ says Steve Crolic. ‘When we look at aggregated response data, it’s evident that higher scores and higher retention go hand-in-hand, so understanding these CX score drivers is imperative,’ he adds.

HelloFresh also analyzes retention values within different themes and categories in Chattermill and uses that data to analyze the financial impact of CX improvement opportunities.

"Chattermill's platform has transformed our focus on customers' needs” says Steve. “We can measure the impact of customers complaining about packaging, quality of ingredients, or recipe instructions, on retention and revenue. Our estimates prove that if customers think our recipe instructions could have been simpler, that costs us a specific amount of lost revenue and impacts our customer lifecycle value."

As a result, the team can estimate the cost of alleviating a CX pain point, evaluate the financial impact of improving the sentiment around a particular theme, and provide strategic guidance to reduce churn and improve retention.

Building a Customer-Centric Culture at HelloFresh

What characterizes the VoC program at HelloFresh?

High engagement levels across CX, Operations, and Product teams. The company is relentlessly focused on providing customers with a better experience and better products, driving innovation and retention.

Over the last year, HelloFresh has grown significantly in both Customer Lifetime Value and across broader business metrics in the US:

Average Order Value (AOV) increased by 30%
Average number of orders per customer grew by 4%

HelloFresh’s relentless focus on customer experience and operational excellence has been instrumental in their revenue growth. Globally, their revenue has multiplied by 5 times, and in the US, it has multiplied by 6 times over the last five years.

These accomplishments have played a crucial role in helping HelloFresh reach profitability in 2020. Notably, HelloFresh’s stock value has doubled since its IPO in 2017.