The importance of listening to customer feedback

Customer feedback is an integral pillar for organisations to help them understand what customers want and grow the brand to better serve those customers.  

Tina Morell, general manager customer strategy and experience design, NRMA about how they collaborated with their customers to create a better experience.

Before NRMA shifted to being a more digitally-led brand, they asked the community to see what digital experiences they should be providing their customers. 

Morell said, “We thought that was the right thing to do. But we validated that through research of saying, what do you expect in this type of environment that branch should be doing? That validated the shift to supporting the community more broadly.”

The NRMA pivoted to get its staff moving forward to respond to those community responses.

Morell said there was a shift in digital emerging.

“We had to certainly respond to lifting that even more so. We saw people using our app – mobile in particular – even more so than what they did, it significantly went up. We had to reinvest in making that even more seamless,” she said.       

For NRMA, they had to reinvest their focus on their customers from a digital perspective, Morrell explained.

“We were checking in on their expectations throughout. That’s something that we learned to do is how do we tap into the pulse of the customer and what they were expecting through our research, through our NPS, verbatim and reading them, getting underneath working together to respond to those needs,” she said.

Morrell said organisations need to understand the path the customer is taking and how brands can make that journey seamless.

“It may be one small point, it might be, tell me where you are. Just in that communication give them a phone call,” she said.

During Covid when the NRMA was short on staff attending to road incidents, staff began calling customers to reassure them that there was help on the way.

Morrell said that customers responded well to the simple act of a phone call.

“They understood what was going on, but they wanted to get the phone call or get the text message. Any business can do that, even at a smaller scale,” she ended.

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