Handwritten Feedback helps Dollond & Aitchison improve Customer Service

Dollond & Aitchison is one of the UK's leading opticians. Established 250 years ago, and now with 380 stores nationwide, D&A is the oldest retail chain on the High Street.

D&A takes customer service very seriously and conducts a continuous assessment programme to measure levels of customer satisfaction on a group, region, branch and individual colleague basis. A follow-up questionnaire is sent by post within a few days of the customer collecting their new eyewear and customers are asked to rate aspects of the service received by ticking one of four boxes. Space is provided to write further comments as appropriate.

Monthly statistics on overall trends and regional, branch and individual ratings are available to the D&A board and senior management team for review. Branches and individuals that are either worthy of particular credit or are underperforming can be identified and the appropriate action taken. Every six months, individual members of staff receive their own personal customer service report.

Rob Halliday-Stein, Digital Media Manager, was tasked with reviewing the data collection process. The scanning of the response forms had been handled by a local bureau but it was proving costly and somewhat inflexible and the bureau couldn’t process the customers’ handwritten comments.

Rob commented, "We looked at several alternative suppliers and ADEC Preview Services was selected because we had confidence in ADEC Preview's ability to deliver an outsourced solution to our exact requirements."

Completed questionnaires - approximately 300 responses every day - are returned by customers directly to ADEC Preview’s data centre. The pre-paid response envelopes are mechanically opened, the contents scanned and OCR’ed. Handwritten comments are scanned as TIFF images and the collated data files are subsequently uploaded to D&A’s data warehouse for analysis.

"The benefits of the ADEC Preview solution are lower cost and greater flexibility. The inclusion of customers’ scanned handwritten comments is very powerful and makes the whole exercise seem more real, more immediate. We felt that this would improve the impact of the reports by sharing with colleagues their performance as perceived by their customers."

The new method seems to be having the desired impact. In the few months since the switch, D&A are already seeing a significant measure of improvement in overall customer satisfaction.

http://www.danda.co.uk

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