Victorian Plumbing customer excellence

Victorian Plumbing is one of the UK’s largest online retailers of branded and in-house designed bathrooms and accessories.

Based in Merseyside, UK, the company was founded in 1999 and with its focus on customer excellence, has gone on to enjoy tremendous success. Turnover is expected to hit £100m ($140m) this year.

Joe Pascoe is Victorian Plumbing’s Senior Marketing Manager. We spoke to him to find out more about how the Customer Service team use Customer Thermometer and how it is contributing to delivering customer excellence in the business.

Tell us a bit about your role and what you’re aiming to achieve

On paper, my role at Victorian Plumbing is Senior Marketing Manager, but I also lend a hand with a lot of third party software integrations across the business.

We were looking to give our Customer Service teams a way of accurately understanding the satisfaction of customers at each contact with us. Our General Manager asked me to help devise a system which gives our advisors and managers in that department an easy, department-wide KPI (Key Performance Indicator).

How does Customer Thermometer fit into this?

We use Customer Thermometer primarily as a Zendesk integration.

On the email footer of each response to an issue, we include a series of available ratings. Customers can quickly click those icons, allowing them to rate the response we sent them, in real-time.

We then take the advisor-level data, and pair it up with the post-telephone contact rating data and create a blended Temperature Score.

What system did you use before? Why the change?

Before using Customer Thermometer, we used the native Zendesk rating system, but what we were finding was that customers tended to rate us based on their overall satisfaction with the business, our service levels and product.

It was important for us that advisors were receiving ratings based on their performance and one-to-one interaction with the customer, so we brought Customer Thermometer on board.

What were you hoping Customer Thermometer would enable you to do? How has this been achieved?

We were hoping to create a department-wide agreed KPI which enabled advisors to have a greater understanding of where they sat within the business. After we agreed a KPI, we also agreed a bonus incentive, if advisors met a set Temperature Score level.

We’ve seen an increase of 106% of advisors meeting or exceeding the Temperature Score KPI since inception.

This directly means we’re providing a better level of customer care to our customers, and we’re also now rewarding our team members who are leading the way in great service.

What are the benefits of using Customer Thermometer?

I’ve found the reporting flexibility to be extremely useful. The system we use for our telephone satisfaction ratings is nowhere near as advanced, so Customer Thermometers raw reporting, league tables and exports have been a big help.

I’ve also found the level of customizing we can do of the Zendesk integration to be great. We are able to provide our own prompt, images and layout to ensure advisors are getting a fair rating about their performance.

Want to improve your customer feedback like Victorian Plumbing?

Give Customer Thermometer a go. It’s simple, quick, and you can pop it into emails you’re already sending customers from dozens of systems like Outlook, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Zendesk, Kaseya and ConnectWise.

Your free trial begins here, no credit card or other information needed…