In a crowded industry, there’s a surefire way to stand out among your competitors, and it’s through the customer experience. But you want to be sure you’re standing out for the positive experiences, not the negative ones.
Striving for a positive customer experience is something Cinch Home Services, an AskNicely customer of more than three years, is familiar with. Cinch provides its customers with warranties on appliances, built-in systems, and the complete home. They’re in a highly saturated market so being the best to work with is one way to stand out.
We spoke with Michael Blake, customer experience manager at Cinch, about how they use AskNicely to understand their customers better and how they’ve used that information to improve the customer experience.
Michael joined Cinch two years ago to take over customer experience management for the business. That work involves identifying customer pain points, increasing customer satisfaction, creating divergent competitive advantages, and understanding the customer journey to increase customer satisfaction.
To get this complicated job done, Michael collaborated with AskNicely to shift the normal ways of thinking and point back to the core ideology around customer experience. According to Michael, “I took a step back from the ‘tried and true’ thought methods and created a process that prioritized customer relationships to turn Cinch from an existing home warranty company to a ‘top of mind’ brand that is an advocate for the customer.”
In a little over two years with Cinch, Michael has worked diligently and achieved ratings success as their ratings have skyrocketed from a -13.7 NPS to over a 40+, nearly a 400% increase. They achieved this remarkable transformation by using AskNicely to collect and solicit feedback, implement more robust alerts in the platform, and utilize specific and detailed playbooks when they receive negative feedback. According to Michael,
“When Cinch receives a low score or has an unhappy customer, there’s a chain reaction that takes us from a passive, information-only business to an actionable, forward-thinking industry leader.”
When unhappy customers are found, we take the necessary steps to reach out and seek to understand what happened to produce this negative experience. The appropriate team is assigned the case, tasked with contacting the customer and every effort is made to rectify it if possible. “With this strategy, we can resolve issues quickly and make sure negative feedback is always addressed,” Michael said. The frontline always knows what their next step is, and they can improve the customer’s negative experience and build a relationship with them for the future.
Implementing AskNicely's enhanced Case Management features has further revolutionized Cinch's customer service process. Michael elaborated, "We've seen a 31% increase in our successfully resolved detractor cases. Additionally, our time to close cases has decreased by an impressive 73%. The ability to set rules for detractor follow-up and ensure that requests reach the right team has streamlined our operations. The notifications and the new overdue cases tab have kept us on top of our SLA compliance, ensuring no case slips through the cracks."
Beyond improving their NPS, Cinch has put positive feedback to good use in attracting new customers. Using AskNicely's Review Request feature, they set up an automation to prompt customers to share their feedback as reviews online with just one click. “By enabling the review request feature we’ve increased our Google reviews by 63%,” Michael said.
To get the full picture of their customers’ pain points, Michael and the team at Cinch go beyond collecting feedback on their product. They expanded to collecting feedback on the third-party service providers they were sending to customers’ homes too.
“We started looking at it not only from the customer service aspect but how our service providers were projecting as brand advocates and how our product stands out against our competitors,” Michael said. They worked with AskNicely account managers to target their customers and give their home service providers substantial feedback.
“We were able to take it from ‘What do our customers think of our product?’ to more targeted aspects like our service providers, service offerings and warranty coverages,” Michael said. They started sharing feedback with their service provider networks to help create a better experience next time. Now they can improve the customer experience from all sides and improve the customer journey to retain more customers.
Working with AskNicely has enabled Cinch to grow their customer experience efforts, including more personalized and complex collection, reporting, and feedback for their teams. They value the partnership with AskNicely, appreciating the insights and perspectives offered on potential improvements to their approach.
Michael confidently states,
"With AskNicely, we've transformed detractors into promoters, increased organizational visibility, and significantly boosted customer satisfaction. Our customer relationships have never been stronger."
When asked about recommending AskNicely to others, Michael said, "This is a great company because they'll start you out, but then the great thing is they'll grow with you as you develop."
