Nestlé Canada improves products with Questions & Answers

Nestlé Canada leverages user-generated content to gather insights, improve products, and interact with loyal customers.

As a subsidiary of the world’s largest food and beverage company, Nestlé Canada is on a mission to amplify consumer voices to improve product offerings and drive growth. Nestle’s products span a variety of items consumers use every day — from coffee and candy to pet care, nutrition, beverages, and more. With more than 2,000 well-known brands, including KitKat, Nescafé, Häagen-Dazs, Lean Cuisine, Delissio, and Purina, Nestlé has a presence in households around the world.

The company delivers on their mission by using Bazaarvoice solutions to drive consumer-first thinking across their marketing department, to harness data and insights to inform business decisions, and to deliver an exceptional shopping experience for consumers throughout the customer journey.

Though Nestlé Canada had been a Bazaarvoice client since 2016, in 2018, the Nestlé team decided to invest in maximizing the value from their user-generated content (UGC) program. Their consumer experience (CX) team took over ownership of the program and developed new objectives to ensure success.

“Before that, we weren’t leveraging the partnership to its full potential. We implemented the platform and were collecting reviews, but we weren’t maximizing the opportunities available. That was a key learning for us,” said Lee Beech, the Director of Consumer Experience at Nestlé Canada.

UGC supports consumer-first thinking

For Nestlé, becoming a consumer-centric organization is essential to growth. The company believes this requires paying close attention to feedback, both positive and negative. Listening to what consumers are saying and building engagement with shoppers is a core part of Nestle’s business.

By collecting and leveraging UGC, Nestlé Canada allows customers to directly inform brand strategy. Customer reviews and questions provide the Nestlé team with an in-depth look into the minds of their customers, and displaying this authentic content from real shoppers on product pages helps other consumers make informed purchase decisions. UGC puts consumers front and center, which builds trust in Nestlé brands.

While the Customer Experience (CX) team leads the UGC program, it shares the learnings and data from the program across the broader marketing organization, helping their entire business to better understand how customers perceive their products.

“Consumers do the talking for us. They speak, and we listen and take action. We’re fortunate that our leadership really understands the values of a platform for consumers to share their opinions and voices,” said Beech.

Harnessing data and insights for transformational action

To maximize the value of reviews throughout the organization, Nestlé increasingly relies on insights from reviews to inform product development. In addition to using focus groups, Nestlé leverages Bazaarvoice’s Insights and Reports solutions to make sense of data from the thousands of reviews it continuously receives. This allows the company to make faster decisions based on feedback directly from customers.

A few years ago, Nestlé made some changes to one of their customers’ favorite iced tea products. It tweaked the ingredients of the formula, and within a month of it hitting shelves, Nestlé saw a slew of negative customer complaints and reviews — then sales dropped.

Nestlé’s CX team shared these reviews and sales numbers with the brand team, and within several months, Nestlé reverted to the original iced tea formula. The average customer rating increased from 1.7 to 4 stars.

“There was so much quality information provided by the consumer that it added a lot of power to the decision making around reversing the formula,” said Beech.

Bazaarvoice’s expanded insights and reporting features also help Nestlé operationalize the reviews data it captures and share with other teams. By providing this data alongside reports from the customer service team, the CX team can present Nestlé Canada executives with a more complete picture of what customers are thinking.

“The review data mirrors some of the things that we’re seeing in the consumer service data, but it also allows us to see other themes that we may not detect through some of the phone conversations with consumers,” said Kristina Rapljenovic, Website Manager at Nestlé Canada.

Staying customer-centric also requires engagement

Listening to customers is only one piece of the puzzle — user-generated content is also meant to facilitate two-way conversation.

Nestlé spends time each day responding to customer reviews and answering questions. In fact, the team noticed that many of the neutral reviews (which many brands often don’t prioritize in their response strategy) included questions about the products. Nestlé did not initially respond to these reviews, as they were not fed into the team’s process flow. After enabling Bazaarvoice Questions & Answers, Nestlé received more than 700 questions from consumers within three months.

“When you think about the impact, that’s 700 fewer calls or emails coming through to our customer service team. It’s time and money saved, so the impact is significant,” said Rapljenovic.

One of the ways Nestlé succeeds with engagement is through the Bazaarvoice Salesforce Connector, which allows the customer engagement team to respond to consumer questions, reviews, and other inquiries within one tool.

“It saves, on average, eight minutes to code a case. We previously didn’t have the capacity and had to let go of engaging with as many of the reviews as we wanted. It would have taken eight minutes to open a case and transfer all of that content. Now, it’s all automated,” said Rapljenovic.

The customer is the top priority

Throughout its four-year partnership with Bazaarvoice, Nestlé Canada has invested in building a best-in-class UGC program. Through these efforts, the company has a close relationship with its customers, who, in turn, play a central role in how Nestlé creates and markets its products.

“We’re really excited to continue deepening the relationship and to get more and more value from the program. Despite all we’re doing and the success we’re recognizing, we think we’re still just scratching the surface,” said Beech.