How to find out the consumer's opinion?

To process the information left by their customers, companies are applying technologies such as AI or machine learning, which have made possible the development of tools such as process automation, support chatbots, or speech and text analytics software, which processes the natural language of texts or calls. These tools not only convert the amorphous information they receive into data that can be analyzed, but also make it possible to enrich customers' evaluation "and not limit ourselves to surveys to evaluate from 1 to 10, but also incorporate unstructured opinions or comments, but also more spontaneous ones, to obtain valuable conclusions about what they are telling us," says Barber.

Under the umbrella of these new technologies, 'Customer Voice' programs, a term that groups together initiatives to survey consumer sentiment, have become a methodology on the rise. "More and more companies are committing to increasing spending in their relationship with the customer to make their experience differential. There is value in that because customers are not only driven by what they need or by price. There are elements such as friendliness or the fact that they solve your queries and you don't have to call five times that are relevant at the time of their choice," explains Barber.

A diagnosis shared by the Director of the Association DEC, for whom "investment in Customer Experience undoubtedly translates into growth for companies." According to the study 'Connected Customer Journey in Iberia', carried out by the commercial software developer HubSpot, 61% of companies that have invested in Spain in data analytics to get to know their customers better and improve their experience have recovered this investment in the first year.

Since January 1, 2023, any user of a Repsol service station can rate their experience. If they use any of the company's payment methods (Waylet, Repsol más Travel, or Solred), they will find a link to a satisfaction survey in the email they receive with the details of their transaction, while whoever pays by another method can access it through a URL link included on their receipt. Moreover, there are QR codes at all stations in visible places that offer customers the possibility to rate their experience. Since its launch, more than 1.8 million ratings have been received, with a growing number of responses "until we stabilized at around 200,000 ratings per month, some 6,000-7,000 per day," summarizes Pablo González, head of customer experience in Repsol's Mobility area.

The analysis of customer ratings has allowed the identification and prioritization of four improvement areas at service stations for 2024: ensure the correct application of discounts and simple information about them, speed up the issuing of invoices, reduce prepayment to the minimum necessary, and guarantee the availability of gloves for self-service refueling. In general, the data for this first year reveals a positive evaluation of the service, with an average score of 4.77 out of 5, where the good opinions received by station personnel for the treatment received stand out.

The questionnaire is simple and takes just over two minutes to complete. It asks about overall satisfaction with the experience on a scale of 1 to 5, and then asks whether the customer has experienced anything they liked or had an incident. In the latter case, the customer is given the option of being contacted from the service station itself to deal with the incident. These are the so-called 'alerts', which represent around 2% of the total number of ratings, which the manager of that station receives instantly and must respond within a maximum of 48 hours.

It also asks "about the attributes that we know most influence overall satisfaction, such as cleanliness, friendliness, speed, or the ease of the experience," continues Gonzalez. In addition, there is a section for suggestions for improvement, with an open response so that customers can give their ratings or make suggestions, which the platform processes using text analytics software.

The system is based on a powerful program from the company Qualtrics, one of the global leaders in customer experience software, which facilitates each service station, in real time and on any device, all the information received from its customers. A project that, for González, shows the possibilities of digitalization: "We used to do surveys through a customer panel and received 100,000 ratings a year. Now we have 200,000 per month instantly and they are from real customers, objective information for our service stations. This is a very important step forward in our data-driven culture, a great qualitative and quantitative leap that would not be possible to manage without such a platform."

The generalization of these tools allows the improvement of the service the customer receives, but also entails a risk: that customers end up being swamped with surveys. "We all receive tonnes and there are increasingly more," recognizes Federico Sanz. "At Repsol we are preparing quarantines and we are always trying to be as non-invasive as possible to not burn out the customer." The digital transformation also offers alternatives to prevent that saturation and, at the same time, extract valuable information. "It will be increasingly more important to process unstructured information," continues Sanz, "extending, for example, the automated analysis with speech analytics of all conversations with call centers, so that the tool makes a transcription and analysis of the customer sentiment."

Companies' interest in knowing consumers' opinion and trying to offer them the best service will not decline and developments in Artificial Intelligence will play "a fundamental role in identifying conversations and anticipating, through predictive systems, problems that may affect customers," ensures Nanes Martínez-Arroyo, of the Association DEC. And who knows, "if in not so many years autonomous vehicles become more common, the car makes the decision of which service station it stops at to refuel by also taking into account the ratings it has," concludes Sanz.