CUSTOMER STORY
Greyhound uses feedback to boost NPS and drive business value
Learn how a reimagined feedback strategy helped Greyhound improve station performance and profitability.
HEADQUARTERS
Dallas, TX
COMPANY SIZE
2,000+
INDUSTRY
Transportation
USE CASES
Customer satisfaction
Net Promoter Score
OVERVIEW
Greyhound provides intercity bus transportation to nearly 16 million passengers each 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 get actionable data
When Greyhound first reached out to its customers for post-trip feedback, it hit some significant bumps in the road with both its survey and the platform it was using. The 57-question survey took an hour to finish and had a completion rate of less than 18%. The resulting survey reports, which were supposed to provide insights to station managers, were lengthy and a pain 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, station complaints remained murky, 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 NPS and one open-ended question. Response rates jumped to 94% and the feedback highlighted top customer issues that the company needed to address. Station managers found that the time they spent reading through customer comments went from a miserable three hours per week to three efficient minutes.
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 personalized 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 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, as much as 90% of station managers were logging in to get a daily view of specific stations in their city. Instead of wading through thousands of comments, it was easy to quickly detect themes and correlate open-ended responses with NPS.
In one instance, Greyhound found a link between a station’s restroom complaints and drops in NPS. Checks were done to confirm the bathrooms were clean, but the negative feedback continued. The real issue was uncovered in open-ended feedback: the women’s bathroom was being closed for cleaning during the busiest part of the day. Once this was identified and fixed, NPS shot up.
Perhaps most significantly, a large churn survey not only unearthed the impact of on-time performance, ticket pricing, and terminal conditions, 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.