Achieving even higher customer satisfaction at D.E through a fact-based approach

Customer Satisfaction

DOUWE EGBERTS MASTER BLENDERS 1753 offers a wide range of coffee and tea products, machines, and related items for both the professional and retail markets. High customer satisfaction is an absolute necessity for the company and brand to stay ahead of the competition. One key indicator of this is the number of customer complaints. Fortunately, D.E has consistently enjoyed a very strong track record in this area. However, recognizing that there is always room for improvement, D.E launched an initiative to further reduce the number of customer complaints. To this end, multidisciplinary teams were formed to address various issues, involving all relevant departments such as research, production, quality, and service. CQM was brought in to guide the teams on the overall approach and to conduct in-depth quantitative analyses of the complaints using available production data and experiments.

Number of customer complaints reduced by a quarter

Dominique van Loon, D.E’s R&D Category Manager, leads one of the teams and is enthusiastic about CQM’s approach: “In addition to their insight into the coffee industry, we learned a great deal from CQM’s structured, fact-based methodology. It always involved three distinct steps: formulating a hypothesis based on expertise and data, testing it through an experiment, and given a positive outcome validating it in a production setting.” Han Meertens, D.E’s Director of Quality, Environment, and Safety, is also positive: “After just one year of using this approach, the number of customer complaints already low to begin with has been reduced by another quarter. A fantastic result.”

_{Making texts/images public and/or reproducing them is permitted only with the express consent of CQM.
Photo credits: CQM and D.E.}