Tapping into text analytics for stand-out customer experience

Tools used

Survey design and distribution
Tailored operational dashboards
Strategic reporting views
Action management and alerting
Advanced text analytics

Industrial and electronics distributor RS Components wanted to position itself as the first choice for its customers. To do so, RS Components needed to shift to a customer-centric culture across its 6.600 global employees. Our products were at the ready.

The challenge

Helping RS become world’s most customer-centric distributor

RS Components set high standards – and they aim to meet them. Their goal was to become the first-choice distributor for their over one million customers worldwide. And they turned to Forsta to build its Voice of the Customer (VoC) program to help them do that.

The company wanted to find out why customers would recommend them, where they could do better, and what changes would have the most impact. They knew our software would be able to capture all the survey metrics and specific customer feedback comments and interaction data they needed – and more.

The ability to combine the rich qualitative data in the verbatims with quantitative data is enabling us to track over time where and how we are moving the needle to make a more positive experience for the customer,” he highlighted. “This is particularly helpful for continuous improvement initiatives where the ability to measure progress is essential and where responsibility for change is not held in a small CX Team but with our cohort of 1000+ employees.
Greg Christopher
Performance Insight Manager, RS Components

Our solution

Revealing customer feedback to drive action

Our program brought results straight away: high response rates from customers and uplifts in NPS and NES scores drove a cultural shift within the company. But the work didn’t stop there: on a mission to keep improving customer experience, RS relaunched the program to dig deeper. The decision to link customer experience metrics with employee performance showed a real commitment to prioritizing both customers and employees at every level.

The team extended the VoC survey questions to explore seven key stages along the buying journey – from product availability and price to support and returns. With nearly 400,000 responses, RS Components used our Text Analytics solution to identify patterns and phrase clusters within customer comments. Hundreds of employees were trained on how to identify customer sentiment and pain points, giving them the power to make a difference for their customers.

The results

A 34% rise in three-month NPS over four years

Over the last four years, RS has seen an impressive 34% improvement in rolling three-month NPS. And the firm’s rolling 12-month NPS went up too, by 5.4% year on year. With our text analytics program, the company has reached 85% accuracy for sentiment and categorization on a sample of 81,000 comments and counting.

Thanks to the success of Text Analytics, they’ve decided to use it in live chat transcripts, too – making it easier for employees to work out any changes they need to make for customers. Feedback from the Live Chat related to support questions was delivered to the product team who for example heard that the information on a particular page was not helpful and therefore took immediate action to update and resolve the issue.