For the last 50 years we have worked hard at running our business based on integrity and trust. We have been successful as a business and mostly successful in providing a trusted service. We don't always get it right, but we have always been committed to making our offering and service better.

About two years ago we recognised the need to improve the experience our customers have when they deal with Pickles. Our vision for the future is to take what we do, do it better and do it anywhere. To be true to this vision we needed to take action.

What was required was a mechanism to measure, benchmark and drive customer experience across the business. So we implemented the Pickles Cx (Customer Experience) Program, based on the Net Promoter Score. We call it our Cx Index.

Two years on we are progressing well, but with room to do what we do better. Our Cx mantra to our staff is simple: our NPS scores (explained below) are an indicator of our progress, but our focus is on the detailed feedback from our customers. We want to drive healthy behaviours internally in relation to creating great customer experiences.

Why is Pickles Cx important to us?

Simply put, by providing our customers with a total experience that is both wonderful and memorable, we earn their loyalty, which motivates them to stay with us, buy more, and refer us to others.

How do we know how well we do what we do?

We measure that experience using Net Promoter Score® (NPS®). NPS® is all about determining the advocacy of our customers (their likelihood to recommend us to others) based on their experience with our service.

NPS® is not new -  since its development by Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company and Satmetrix, it has become the most widely accepted measure of customer loyalty and retention worldwide.  It is also a customer experience metric that provides insight into a company's potential growth and financial health. 

At Pickles we are focused on improving customer loyalty, and NPS® is the key indicator of the perception our customers have of our brand and service.

NPS asks the question "How likely is it that you would recommend Pickles to a friend or colleague?" and measures responses on a 0-10 point scale. The scale is broken up into three types of response: (0-6) are Detractors, (7&8) are Passives and (9&10) are Promoters.

Think about how few companies you would rate a "9" or a "10" and you can see how high the bar is set by this scoring. The final score for a company is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, leaving you the Net Promoter Score.

The gold is in the feedback.

The response to the NPS question gives us a score and tells us how well our business delivers on customer experience, but it doesn't tell us why. Understanding why, is as important as knowing the score.

In order to determine the Why?, we ask for feedback, and that's as simple as asking the follow-up question "So why did you give us that score"?  More often than not people are happy to share their thoughts, and this feedback becomes a goldmine of useful insight that helps us to define areas of focus for improving the customer experience.

We take these comments and analyse them for common threads and themes, and if we see an issue appearing regularly we know it's a focus area of improvement for the business. These comments also tell us what we do right, and we use this information to reinforce our positive actions, and ensure they are delivered uniformly across the business.

Sharing is caring!

Pickles Cx (Customer Experience) is not a department, it's an attitude! It's a philosophy that we encourage everyone at Pickles to be part of, and one that everyone owns.

In order for this to be true we need to share! Share the results, the insights, the plans, the good news and the bad. Without sharing we don't engage, if we don't engage we don't encourage and if we don't encourage we don't deliver. And if we don't deliver, we don't improve, which ultimately means we don't grow.

So we encourage everyone in the business to be part of our Cx program, from  the receptionist, to the head of division, to the forklift drivers - everyone has a role to play. This enables us to recognise the great work our people at all levels of our organisation do every day, and reward those who consistently deliver above and beyond the expectations of our customers.

In a nutshell.

Pickles Cx is a program of improvement and engagement. In line with our vision to take what we do, do it better and do it anywhere - creating an experience that is truly beyond our customers' expectations is our goal.

Click here to see our video about why and how NPS is used at Pickles.