CUSTOMER STORY
Greyhound uses feedback to boost its NPS and drive business value
Learn how a reimagined feedback strategy helped Greyhound improve bus station performance and profitability.
HEADQUARTERS
Dallas, Texas (USA)
COMPANY SIZE
2,000+ employees
INDUSTRY
Transportation
USE CASES
Customer satisfaction
Net Promoter Score
OVERVIEW
Greyhound is a US-based intercity bus operator that conveys almost 16 million passengers every year. To keep up with all those customers and provide better experiences, the 100-year-old company needed to move on from a manual, inefficient survey method and collect data that would drive insights and revenue.
94% survey completion rate
A nearly 15-point NPS increase
Average 3 min/week analysis time
THE CHALLENGE
Improve survey completion rates and obtain actionable data
When Greyhound first requested post-trip feedback from its customers, it hit some significant bumps in the road both in terms of the survey itself and the platform it was using. The 57-question survey took an hour to complete and had a completion rate of less than 18%. The resulting survey reports, which were supposed to provide insights to bus station managers, were lengthy and tricky to interpret, especially the open-ended responses. Eventually, the survey was sidelined because it just wasn’t delivering useful data. Greyhound’s Net Promoter Score (NPS®) dipped, bus station complaints remained nebulous and managers were left without clear next steps. Matt Schoolfield, senior manager of commercial analytics, knew the company needed to rethink its survey strategy.
“SurveyMonkey checked off two buy-in factors: SurveyMonkey understands GDPR. SurveyMonkey gets Salesforce. That’s huge for us.”
Matt Schoolfield
Senior Manager of Commercial Analytics and Voice of the Customer
THE ANSWER
A simplified survey approach that syncs with Salesforce
With SurveyMonkey, Schoolfield replaced Greyhound’s overly long survey with a new five-question survey that included the NPS and one open-ended question. Response rates jumped to 94% and the feedback highlighted the top customer issues that the company needed to address. Bus station managers found that the time they spent reading through customer comments went from a tedious three hours to an efficient three minutes per week.
Post-trip surveys were also improved thanks to the SurveyMonkey for Salesforce integration, which was a huge selling point for Greyhound. With the integration, survey emails are triggered inside of a Salesforce journey, so they’re personalised and automatically sent 24 hours after a trip is completed. Today, the link in the email brings in about 85% of Greyhound’s responses. Schoolfield even has plans to further streamline the experience by eliminating origin and destination questions and connecting that information by using the booking confirmation number in Salesforce.
“Within a few months, our NPS was up almost 15 points. SurveyMonkey changed the way that data was getting into people’s hands and it changed what they were able to do with it.”
Matt Schoolfield
Senior Manager of Commercial Analytics and Voice of the Customer
Greyhound
THE RESULTS
Less churn, more revenue and a big NPS boost
Greyhound’s NPS jumped nearly 15 points within a few months of switching to SurveyMonkey; after one year, up to 90% of bus station managers were logging in to get a daily view of specific bus stations in their town or city. Instead of wading through thousands of comments, it was easy to quickly detect themes and correlate open-ended responses with the NPS.
In one instance, Greyhound found a link between complaints about a bus station’s toilets and NPS decreases. Although checks were carried out to confirm that the toilets were clean, the negative feedback continued. The real issue was uncovered in open-ended feedback: the women’s toilets were being closed for cleaning during the busiest part of the day. Once this was identified and fixed, the NPS increased sharply.
Perhaps most significantly, a large churn survey not only unearthed the impact of on-time performance, ticket pricing and terminal conditions, but it also revealed how these issues were tied to Greyhound’s profits. “We were able to pinpoint that an on-time performance increase on our survey score generates a specific amount of additional revenue. And that was a game-changer,” said Schoolfield. “It showed us how valuable survey metrics are and how valuable perception is to our customers, and it pinpointed areas where we can make improvements to our bottom dollar in our profitability.”
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Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.