Riverford Organic
CLIENT - RIVERFORD ORGANIC. Guy Watson began farming at Riverford in 1985 on three acres of land on the Watson family farm in South Devon. With the land fully converted to organic status in 1987, Guy began delivering his vegetables to local shops, including his brothers farm shops. With a locally successful box scheme, home delivery was the next logical step, with local distributors setting up to operate the home delivery box scheme in individual locations, with all the vegetables being packed at the Riverford Farms network. Riverford were finalist in the Natural and Organic awards 2008 Best home delivery service.
OBJECTIVE. When this project was initiated Riverford were delivering 8 different types of Veg and Fruit & Veg boxes to customers regularly (weekly, fortnightly etc.) from 4 different brands, sourced primarily from their own regional farms and other local grower groups. Each box type had a fixed number of items (up to 12) each week but some or all of these items changed each week to reflect the seasonality of the produce. Riverford wanted to get customer feedback on every individual box and to be able to trace that feedback to the farms. As each item in the box had a brand impact it was important to know the performance of each item, in relation to the rest of the box, other boxes of the same sort in previous weeks and other boxes generally. They wanted to react quickly to customer feedback so that if an item was marked as poor, the relevant farm and customer would be responded to quickly. The study was to take place over a 12 week period.
STRATEGY. 3 days after each box was delivered, an email with a survey link was sent to the customer. The survey is specific to the exact box, customer and contents they ordered. Prior to selecting the Sensorpro solution this strategy would have required 32 surveys (8 boxes x 4 brands) and the same again for the email content. Because the Sensorpro solution supports dynamic content, one email and one survey design was used, with data from the customer details determining farm branding and the correct survey page to show, relevant to the box ordered. Because box content changed each week, the potential list of items could reach to more than 50 over the season. So we used the Sensorpro question editor Hide/Show feature to match the questions looking for item feedback to the exact box shipped that week. This saved a lot of time as it meant that just 8 box definitions needed to be changed instead of 32. For dynamic item feedback we defined certain questions as score cards. if a customer marked an item as poor this would be added to the overall score. At the end of the survey if a certain score was reached an email was sent to the relevant brand manager along with a helpful message to the customer.
RESULTS. The first survey was deployed on Saturday morning using the autoscheduler. It was specific to boxes delivered from the prior Tuesday. Overall the email open rate was 31% which is well above average in the B2C sector. Responses came in fast and it became clear that the customers were very loyal and passionate about the Riverford brand. The free text questions also yielded some interesting feedback from customers such as "should the vegetables still have earth on them" and how quickly the items were used up. This particular piece of information was very valuable in understanding which items to include in subsequent boxes and greatly helped logistics in terms of wastage.
Riverford had online access to results and could see immediate overall feedback. The rich analytics provided by the Flex2 charts in Sensorpro showed overall performance by Farm and individual box item performance. Individual feedback was also acted upon when customers reacted to certain questions selected by Riverford. Over the 12 week period Riverford received feedback on thousands of deliveries and was able to use the insights generated across all aspects of the business from logistics, marketing, finance, planning and growing.
CLIENT COMMENTS. "This was the first project of this nature that we had undertaken. We needed to be able to compare comments from our customers about all of the boxes delivered in a certain week, but also across all of those of a similar type, from a similar farm etc. and also to compare one week to any other to spot trends in box performance over time. With such a complicated requirement and with so many variables, we needed a system that could be flexible enough to cope, but also easy enough to maintain that it was not too much of a burden to us. Ease of reporting and feedback we could act on very quickly, were also key, as was a supplier that could guide us through the project. Working with the team at SensorPro, they rose to the challenge to tailor their solution to match our requirements. It proved ultimately to be adaptable and flexible and offered the reporting we needed. The need for our intervention on a regular basis was minimized and the alerts from respondents scoring our boxes in a particular way meant we could act very quickly indeed on feedback. SensorPro were professional enough to be able to turn our requirements into reality but also flexible enough to be prepared to work with us to develop their solution, and also accessible enough to always be prepared to talk through any issue that we had before, during and after the project."
Adrian Carey, Direct Marketing Manager, Riverford Organic
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