We are evolving

Rhubarb is celebrating our tenth year by redefining our brand and setting our strategy to enable us to continue to evolve. In this short reflection on the past decade, we look back at where we have come from to show where we are taking our brand.

When we started Rhubarb in 2008, we had recognised that there is a direct correlation between effective engagement with the customer and the quality of the insight derived from customer surveys. Quite simply; without engaged customers and rich ‘voice of customer’ evidence then it would be difficult to identify trends, track improvements or derive actionable insights that would drive improvements in a customer’s journey.

That’s how our brand was born and for the past 10 years, we have challenged ourselves to put the customer, rather than the simple collection of data, at the heart of everything that we do. “Connecting with your customer” is a way of life at Rhubarb. And that is the way that we have evolved.

When Samsung first agreed to trial our way of working the typical engagement methodology was the deployment of mail and Agent calls to their customers. With our background in developing corporate contact centres and the delivery of Customer Service, we knew that customers wouldn’t respond unless they believed that their responses would be listened to and would make a difference. We knew that the value to the customer of sharing their experiences was in whether their voice would be heard. Whilst we understand that key metrics are important to our corporate clients, our belief is that collecting rich VoC is key to deriving actionable insights that are customer focussed and impact on improvements in customer experience.

Our Customer focussed approach has stood in good stead. Not only do we now support Samsung with customer experience surveys in territories across 7 European languages our reach has extended to a range of exciting projects, which include the supporting of customer engagement services for customers in the USA, developed a customer qualification service for national insurance brokers and have played a key consultative role in the development of a contact centre solution for a UK based utility company.

When we convinced our clients to connect with their customers through omnichannel engagement, we were delighted to be able to offer customer choice in the way that goes to the heart of our vision.

However, when we were looking for the tools to deliver omnichannel customer experience engagement and insight technology, we could not find anything in the market at that time to support our vision for the way that we wanted to deliver services and derive meaningful and actionable insights. So we decided to develop our own.

We developed our platform from our customer centred ethos. It was more than intuitive to us to know that Agent user experience would have a positive impact on customer experience. These were the essentials behind our development of our RHUBAS platform which enables the integration of digital telephony streams with CRM or work flow systems behind our own user interface that is designed to be clean and simple to use. The added benefit is to give control to our clients so that they can drive Agent and customer experience as there are no constraints to what can be developed into the system so that where there is a process change, new communication channel or a requirement for service specific screens then these are incorporated and tailored to our client’s requirements.

We remain dedicated to allowing our clients to understand all the elements of their customer’s journey and to provide the opportunity to engage with customers at every touchpoint to gain valuable voice of customer feedback. A vital part of our offering is the use of Artificial Intelligence, big data analytics and sophisticated data visualisation to derive actionable insights.

We have long held the view that when it comes to customer retention, eradication of pain points and shortening customer journeys, the key customer experience metric is the Customer Effort Score (CES).  Although NPS and CSAT have long been board level indicators of the strength of the business, when considering the path to customer delight, we have often seen that those brands that listen to and respond to the impact of customer effort have the edge in their markets and improving customer retention. Our focus on this metric has contributed to our success as we have been able offer insights based in actionable process and product improvement that have almost immediate impacts on the customer journey.

A significant part of our journey ahead is the continued development of scalable, integrated and intelligent customer contact solutions based around our RHUBAS platform. We will be working to continually find ways to reduce friction in customer interactions and to offer insight and recommendations to our clients with similar customer focussed end goals.

Our branding has been developed to reinforce our message around ‘Connecting with your customer’, which is an important part of our past and future. The symbol has been developed to reflect Rhubarb as an ever evolving and energetic business engaged in the digital economy and that movement and change is a part of our DNA.

The seamless revolution of the symbol’s shape reflects our commitment to the continual cycle of Connection è Insight è Action that drives outcomes for our clients and their customers.

Similarly, the changing colour and rounded corners of the symbol is designed to signify fluidity in the customer’s smooth transitions between digital channels as well as the frictionless and consistency of interaction that we provide in connecting to your customer.

Please stay tuned and feel free to follow our blog as we will be we will be connecting more and sharing our thoughts on key themes and issues that impact our clients and their customers.