How Polypipe learnt to benefit from customer feedback.

Company: Polypipe Building Products

Location: Doncaster, UK

Whether it’s for new build or refurbishment projects, Polypipe’s Building Products business recognises the demands of modern construction environments and works across all disciplines to help industry professionals to get the job done.

We asked Dean Asher, Head of Technical and Customer Services, to tell us about his experience of implementing a customer feedback system.

Tell us about Polypipe.

We manufacture plastic pipes and we supply a wide range of water management and heating solutions that help our construction customers build better.

The passion, personality and ingenuity of our people has helped us create a strong brand and we’ve grown to become a FTSE250 business. There’s a real family feel to the company, which makes it a great place to work.

Why were you looking for customer feedback software?

In the past we relied on comments passed back from our sales team but this data was patchy, anecdotal and sometimes old and out of date. We’d never really asked our customers what they think about us, certainly not in a systematic way.

We were trying to improve our customers’ experience with us so we realised we needed more reliable data about their priorities and how they wanted us to improve.

When we started looking for a solution it was important to us that it was simple for customers to give feedback, easy for us to manage and that the data would be up to date.

What was your experience of working with CustomerSure?

Why did we choose you? Simple — great service and a great product.

Before we started, the only feedback we received was by word of mouth. The CustomerSure system was ready to use ‘out of the box’. You supported us in setting everything up which made things very easy.

The harder part for us was automating feedback because we had some old systems which made integration difficult at first. We also faced challenges when trying to decide the best time to ask whether our customers were happy because we sell a variety of products which are used in different ways, and we sell through a range of different channels. But over time we’ve been able to integrate more areas of the business so that we’re measuring satisfaction at the important points in the customer journey.

The product’s really taking hold now. We get useful reports and customer experience is established as one of our key monthly performance metrics. We’ve also been able to use the data to set up customer experience improvement groups.

I like the ease of use and adaptability of the software but what I really love is the super-fast service we get. When we ask for improvements they’re done within days, sometimes even within hours.

If I had to sum up our experience of CustomerSure in three words it would be Supportive, Innovative… and Awesome!

What results have you achieved for your business?

The impact has been very positive — not just for our internal stakeholders but also for our customers.

Some of the improvements have taken time as we’ve worked through changes within the business, but the data has helped us to tackle some longstanding issues.

The end result has been happier customers. By dealing with the issues raised in feedback we’ve seen measurable improvements in customer satisfaction from quotations onwards - as we’ve continued to roll out the system across other touch points the results have been very positive.

Has anything surprised you?

There’s been lots of positive feedback, which is always great to receive. One person was so happy they offered us ice cream, so we’re pretty sure we’re on the right track!

What advice would you give to someone getting started with customer feedback?

My advice is simple - just get on and do it!

Don’t be afraid of what customers are going to say. If you don’t listen they will go elsewhere, especially in these tough times. It might take some time to implement it fully, but you can easily start on a small scale and the results are 100% worth it.