Making doing business better
The Challenge
Heineken wanted its on-trade customers to enjoy doing business with the company. However, price increases, service issues and a lack of human contact at a time when customers were facing rising costs, recruitment challenges and more of their own customers staying at home led to a slump in Heineken’s NPS score - dropping from 50 points to just 16 in 2023.
Heineken needed help to make doing business better.
The Impact
5
5 consecutive quarters of NPS growth
26
+26 NPS in 18 months
The Outside-in Perspective
We travelled around the country, visiting pubs, bars and social clubs, speaking to landlords and managers to hear first-hand what was keeping them up at night and discovering how Heineken could truly be distinctive vs their competitors and alternatives.
Bringing this insight together, we reconnected the team with their customers and provided clarity on how the customer experience could make the biggest difference in earning more customer decisions to choose and stay with Heineken.
The Insight
Heineken’s on-trade customers don’t work traditional 9-5 desk jobs. They need support when and where it suits them. They wanted greater recognition regarding the specific challenges they faced and needed Heineken to be more flexible, to work around their timetables and needs, and to provide proactive support to help them achieve their business goals.
The Solution
We worked with the Heineken team to develop a framework of customer promises - design principles for the customer experience that the whole business could align behind. These promises provided the foundations for a consistent and meaningfully distinctive experience for Heineken's on-trade customers.
The promises also helped the team understand where to prioritise efforts to improve the experience and helped to shape the specific initiatives that would capture why on-trade customers should do business with Heineken.
“As a newly formed customer experience function we were looking for ways to clearly define our CX strategy.
I loved the outside in approach taken by The Foundation and it made complete sense that in order to build a brilliant CX strategy it needed to have the customer at its heart. I also thought the approach of creating promises that are memorable and easy for people to relay was critical in creating a simple but effective strategy. Claudia, Dani and John were fantastic and absolute pros at guiding us through the development process.
Since implementing the promises we have continued to work towards how we can drive true customer centric change. This has been a huge effort with lots of cross functional working groups but over the last 18months we have been able to grow our NPS score by +26!.”