Uncovering Customer Concerns About COVID: How Kohler Used CX Insights from CallFinder to Get Ahead of the Pandemic

As the CDC continues to update their COVID guidelines for the workplace, employees are heading back to the office and companies are taking stock of COVID’s impact on business over the last year. The pandemic has undoubtedly changed how companies approach their customer experience strategies. But how well businesses adapt to changing customer concerns about COVID will determine their success moving forward.

With that in mind, we recently co-hosted a webinar with Ingage and Kohler Senior Sales Executive, Neil Jochman, to discuss how Kohler uses data to optimize business strategies and monitor customer interactions. This post will focus on how Kohler used customer analytics data from CallFinder to uncover and respond to customer concerns about COVID.

If you missed the webinar, here’s the recording:

Understanding Customer Concerns about COVID

There’s no doubt the pandemic had a big impact on business in 2020, but we wanted to know how much it impacted Kohler – a company that has been working with 800response since 2016. So our team went to work, taking a deep dive into Kohler’s customer interactions over the past twelve months.

800response had been working closely with Jochman to provide his team with a way to efficiently monitor calls in their call centers. With 10 years of experience running enterprise call centers, Jochman already understood the value of an automated call monitoring solution. Jochman’s team had been using speech analytics for script compliance and quality assurance, but that all changed with COVID.

Here’s what Jochman had to say about their strategy at the beginning of the pandemic: “At the very beginning of the pandemic, we knew that it was important for us to maintain an understanding of our customers’ sentiments and feelings about the pandemic through monitoring calls.”

Using that knowledge and sentiment insights, Kohler adjusted their customer experience strategies based on the COVID trends they uncovered. And once Jochman’s team began seeing more trends, they were able to ease customer concerns and increase conversions.

COVID’s Impact on In-Home Sales

Tasked with launching Kohler’s internal call center operations for the company’s walk-in bath division, Jochman recognized some initial challenges. How to safely enter homes for demos and in-home sales was one of those challenges. “When the pandemic started, almost none of our dealers had experience with virtual selling,” says Jochman. This became immediately apparent when they started seeing the number of requests for virtual selling.

But Jochman’s team also saw more and more comments relating to concerns about COVID, which they were able to capture easily using CallFinder. As the number of those comments began to quickly increase, Jochman says, “It definitely incentivized us, and helped us understand the importance of investing in a massive shift to virtual selling as quickly as possible.” CallFinder’s custom reports made it easy for Jochman’s team to identify trends in COVID concerns and make the leap to virtual sales.

Customers Want a Different Path

Ultimately, the ability to monitor 100% of customer conversations provided the data Jochman needed to make informed decisions. He points out that feedback from agents alone has its limitations. “It’s one thing to get feedback from call center agents about what they think is happening, but you don’t know if those customer comments are coming from one or two customers, or a hundred customers,” Jochman told 800response Sales Director, Mariann Carlson, in his closing remarks.

The customer insights provided by CallFinder showed Jochman that “it’s hundreds of people making the comment that they want a different path.” By knowing exactly how many customers were expressing concerns, Jochman’s team turned those insights into action. In addition, they could prove ROI after exceeding sales goals. “We knew we were making a sound investment in moving to virtual sales during that period,” says Jochman.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway here is that uncovering these trends helped Kohler understand that as customer concerns about the pandemic have waned, his team knows exactly where they need to adjust their call center scripts. And having the ability to do that efficiently is an added bonus, as reflected in Jochman’s final statement: “It’s been a great way for us to directly hear all of our customers without actually listening to every single call.”

Ready to Find Out Exactly What Your Customers Want?

To learn more about how 800response and CallFinder can help you optimize your CX strategies, schedule a custom demo today! Not quite ready for a demo? No worries. Fill out our Contact form with any questions you may have, or call 1-800-NEW-SALE to speak with an Account Manager.