How MINDBODY Collects Customer Feedback to Improve 40 Million Experiences

A bit about MINDBODY and their customer experience philosophy

MINDBODY is a software as a service (SaaS) company that created a wellness marketplace to connect small businesses with customers so that the small business owners could do what they do best — concentrate on their customers' wellness.“We started using Net Promoter Score® (NPS) in the B2B arena in 2009,” said Annie Woo, SVP of Consumer Services. “

We concentrated on NPS because it was a fairly new, but simple, metric. It was important to ask, ‘how do you feel about us?’” MINDBODY’s commitment to wellness informs its core values and drives everything they do.Besides wellness, MINDBODY values being empathetic, humble, and helpful to their customers — both B2B and B2C. They want to consciously evolve and know they have to use customer feedback to do that.

“In the beginning, MINDBODY asked the question, but we weren’t using our NPS the best way,” Annie said. “I liken it to breaking into jail. We gathered the metric and shared it with marketing leaders and then left it at that. We weren’t closing the loop. In the beginning, NPS was a number, not an action.”Annie and MINDBODY soon understood that simply calculating their NPS number was not going to make it grow or accomplish any sort of customer or business impact.“

We realized that what we really wanted was a way to work the NPS surveys to improve our product and services for our customers. We wanted to use it to set the stage for great customer experiences.”

Why AskNicely?

“After learning that we weren't using NPS the best way, we looked for a resource that could help us implement actioning NPS,” Annie said. “We wanted a solution that had ease of integration and automation so that it wasn’t so overwhelming to close the feedback loop.”

Annie took her experience with NPS from the B2B side to the B2C side of MINDBODY.

“Each year more than 40 million customers book 600 million class and appointment sessions through the MINDBODY platform, and more than 130 million of those wellness sessions were booked by customers via MINDBODY’s mobile apps."

How did you implement your customer feedback?

“We initially started by surveying only our Intercom users, but soon realized that we were only seeing a sliver of our customer’s experience,” Annie said.

For NPS best practices you should already have a map of your customer journey. Then be sure to send daily surveys to customers who reach specific touch points, such as onboarding, renewing, or help call. The point is to be sure you send surveys out daily and reach every customer's important milestone.

Thinking about this best practice helped MINDBODY understand that starting with the Intercom integration was good, but not good enough. “The Intercom data was only giving us information on highly active users or users who were active in the last thirty days. That meant we were missing information from our less active and dormant users.

”MINDBODY reviewed the customer journey and found more trigger points. Then they implemented the use of their own database to reach out to all three segments daily: highly active, active, and dormant users. This gave them a clearer picture of their entire customer base.

“We survey about 30,000 clients per month and it was important to segment our results so that we can give the survey an all-important personal touch,” Annie said. “The AskNicely integration with Slack allows me to ensure I get the right comment to the right person for a highly personal touch. Personalizing the relationships improves our products, allows us to get more information, and deliver better services."

Getting the entire team involved

“We gather our NPS surveys and share that data with our marketing leaders, but we also send the feedback to our services and our product teams,” Annie said. MINDBODY keeps the NPS score and customer feedback front and center by talking about it in weekly team meetings and reporting on improvements, successes, and using it in did-well, do-better sessions.

“We keep an eye out for what comments are trending monthly,” Annie said, “and work on them with every team.”

An example: Product

People often think that customer feedback is only for customer service/success teams. But MINDBODY also uses it for their product team. “We were getting consistent comments on improvements customers wanted with our calendar scheduling functions and our search function. This feedback was used to inform our product roadmap and we were able to make the necessary changes in our product that customers needed. We might have been blind to this if we had not implemented this program.”

By giving their product team access to customer feedback, MINDBODY is better able to help their product consciously evolve. Conscious evolving is one of MINDBODY’s core tenets. “Guessing at what our customers need is not the answer. It’s better to evolve into what they actually want as their needs evolve.”

An example: Marketing Leaders

By informing product of the changes needed and having the product evolve, MINDBODY gives its marketing leaders new information to speak to customer problems and talk about the MINDBODY solution.

What is your biggest surprise, i.e. what did you learn since implementing this program?

“Our data scientists were able to look at the survey information and they discovered interesting information about our promoters in the app,” Annie said. “We learned that our promoters are booking 1.5x more often and purchasing in the app 1.5x more often than detractors.”

This insight gave MINDBODY information to set the goal to turn passives into promoters. Every passive they turn into a promoter will cause their bookings and in-app purchases to increase. It is a real business goal.

Another interesting insight that MINDBODY noticed is that detractors are more active than people who don’t respond to the survey at all. “We have to remember that a detractor is still a customer,” Annie said. “Detractors still do business with you and want you to deliver on your brand promise.” Besides pushing passives to promoters and addressing detractors, MINDBODY is interested in the customers who don’t answer the survey at all. “We want to find a way to reach non-responders and understand what their needs are.”

You mentioned that your data scientists have great stats on promoters being 1.5x more sticky than detractors. What kind of business impact has your NPS program had?

“The number of appointments and classes booked in the MINDBODY app is an indication of engagement,” Annie said, “much like how in social media you would track the number of likes, clicks, shares, etc. Ultimately, booking a service in MINDBODY drives better business results to the customers that list their inventory in our app, which is where we see revenue generated. If our customers are successful and see more customers visiting their business more frequently, then MINDBODY wins as well.

“Year over year, we continue to see growth in the number of users as well as cost savings for support issues. This year, even though we added more users to our product, our support costs did not increase. I attribute this in part to our NPS program because we tracked feedback and delivered it to product managers who in turn made improvements in the app to both lift NPS and reduce support requests.”

Do you follow any CX influencers? Where did you learn about actioning NPS?

"For CX, I am a part of some communities found through LinkedIn — CX Accelerator group is one of my favorites. I also like to follow Customer Success as this movement in SaaS is inclusive of great customer experiences, and understands how making customers successful is the key to revenue retention and long term growth,” Annie said.

“For Customer Success, I follow a lot of what Gainsight publishes.“I learned about actioning NPS by reading The Ultimate Question 2.0 by Bain & Co. but the best lesson has been learning from failure. When we initially implemented NPS, people were excited, but we did not design the closed-loop process to follow up and act on feedback consistently. Because that process was not well designed, we became more obsessed with the score and trends of the score rather than the feedback. While we still track the score, and response rates, we are more disciplined about understanding the trends in feedback and passing that information to the teams that can make improvements to shift feedback and ultimately lift response rates and the score.”

What is the difference between good customer experience and great customer experience?

“Personalization,” Annie said. “If you can reach out when necessary and join in a personal conversation with your survey responders, you are better able to understand the customer experience from their point of view.”

Many companies with siloed departments segment the customer experience into the responsibilities of each department, but the customer doesn’t see it that way. They see the broader picture. By sending out daily surveys you are joining in a conversation that looks for gaps between what you think is your customer experience and what your customers actually experience. Closing these gaps helps your company go from good customer experience — seen in a larger number of passives — to great customer experience — seen in a larger number of promoters.

What’s one piece of advice you would give other companies who want to improve their customer experience?

MINDBODY works with small businesses every day to help support them in their marketing, booking, and financial transactions. Integrating AskNicely and MINDBODY together can help their B2B customers learn how to help their customers voice their opinions in a safe way to instructors and wellness experts. It can help their customers feel heard.

“Being small business owners, our customers don’t have a lot of time in their schedule. They might be filling in at the front desk, teaching classes, or doing private sessions. AskNicely can help them automate their customer feedback program and help them choose a high-touch approach to feedback and follow up in a timely manner.”

Another way to use your customer feedback is to discover who you can ask for referrals. Who might be open to a referral coupon or which customers might even be open to being a brand ambassador? You can give your promoters things to do. People like to help out, especially if they believe in what you are doing.

“Our customer feedback process creates more promoters step by step,” Annie said. “Our customers find it shrinks their turnover, adds or improves services their customers need most, and creates stickiness in their business just like we did.”

What are three critical elements supporting you and your team actioning customer feedback?

The top three for MINDBODY are:

1) Integrating with Slack and their CRM.

2) Segmenting information so they can get responses to the right person.

3) The ability to see and share feedback on various screens throughout the company.

What are the three top ways customer feedback has changed your business?

According to Annie, “NPS has changed our business in the following ways:

1. It created a framework for marketing, product, and services to talk about customer needs. There's a lot of data to support insights. This has brought us closer together in the service of our users.
2. We track improvements in the product and how that relates to a rise in NPS. This is motivational and gives a sense of accomplishment for employees. For services, we feel product is listening and responding to our users' needs. For product, they know in what areas they are hitting the mark and which areas still need improvement. Clarity always boosts morale in my opinion.
3. It provides us a benchmark to compare ourselves against other brands, which we can share with the public, but at the end of the day, we ultimately measure ourselves against ourselves. We always want to improve the quality of the feedback, the response rates, and the number of promoters.”

Conclusion

MINDBODY learned that they weren’t using NPS as efficiently as they could. They rebooted their program to action their customer feedback. The result: real business impact from promoters and the ability pinpoint ways to move passives to promoter status.

Moving passives to promoters increases NPS score and companies with higher NPS grow faster.

Are you using your NPS to grow your business? Want to find out more about how AskNicely can help? Click here to book a call with one of our customer feedback experts. We'll walk you through a program that is right for you.

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AskNicely helps companies create and maintain the superior customer experiences that grow their business. Rated #1 by G2Crowd for Enterprise Feedback Management, AskNicely is the premier solution for enabling front-line staff to give delightful, consistent customer experiences. Founded in 2014, AskNicely has offices in Portland, Oregon and Auckland, New Zealand.