Melodics' big Aha! moments through analyzing customer feedback

It’s always inspiring to hear how our Thematic clients are able to leverage insights derived from analyzing customer feedback. I’d like to share with you the story of how Melodics got some pretty big Aha! moments when they started digging deeper into their feedback data. 

Melodics Music is an app that teaches you to play MIDI keyboards, pad controllers, and drums. Melodics has found an innovative and easy way to teach music, providing lessons from contemporary, respected musicians.

The app makes learning music relevant, rewarding and most of all fun. This is a game-changer in the industry as music lessons are traditionally seen to be “boring, expensive and time-consuming” (as per the Melodics website).

We talked to Sam Gribben, CEO, and Sam Stokes, Head of Customer Experience, to see why they chose Thematic to help them get critical insights on their customers. Sam Stokes explains that they previously collected most of their customer feedback from their in-app system, as well as from their customer support team. They also have a private Slack group where they can get direct feedback from subscribers.

Align priorities based on customer wants and needs

Melodics’ aim was to understand what users actually wanted, so that they could provide them just that, by aligning their priorities and develop a roadmap of future features and development.

Melodics started sending Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, but, like many companies, found themselves struggling to leverage the responses effectively.  And with limited resources dedicated to customer insights, and a customer experience team that was still being built, it was difficult to get an objective answer to the critical question “what really matters to our customers?”

And let’s be honest, “looking at a big CSV file is a nightmare, and it can be difficult to get any insights out of it”, says Sam. 

Melodics’  goal was to get insights on their customers at critical moments in their journey – those “moments of truth”.

Why Thematic?

Stokes had looked at traditional offerings on the market and did not find a provider that was able to solve Melodics’ core challenge: provide deep insights on customer feedback with little manual intervention from anyone at Melodics.  

Except for Thematic.  Thematics AI-based technology provided the perfect solution for Melodics.

Explains Stokes: “Other survey platforms have reports or word clouds, but they don’t provide anything substantial or meaningful. We have run surveys in the past to collect feedback, but it usually meant manually going through the results, which takes a couple days”.

It was quick to set up and send out surveys

Melodics could easily and quickly set up and send out the survey through Surveygizmo (one of the tools that Thematic integrates with seamlessly).

“From the initial set up to sending out the survey, it only took us 3 days in total to receive responses. However, Surveygizmo wasn’t able to analyze the data the way we wanted to”, says Stokes.

The customer survey asked 3 questions:

1. Are you likely to recommend Melodics to family and friends? (1-10)
2. Why did you give that score? (Free text response)
3. What could we do to improve our service? (Free text response)

The collection of data using Surveygizmo was quick, and thereafter they sent the first CSV with responses to Thematic. Just a few days later Thematic team had set up the data and went through it with both Sams. “We got immediate access to the Thematic portal, which was super useful”, says Stokes. “Then, we sent the second set of data a day after demo, and a few days later the portal was updated with the new available data.”

Big Aha! moments

Melodics had a very interesting Aha! moment when finding out if customers were interested in a certain product or not.

One of those moments concerned whether to include music theory in their lessons. “This was a touchy subject in the Melodics office, since lots of people had a [different] opinion [on it]” .

Melodics had originally chosen to not include music theory in their lessons, but when they received seemingly mixed feedback, they were were unsure whether to include it as a module in the lessons they provided.

Music Theory is rarely mentioned as to why Melodics users gave the NPS score they did

Music Theory is the 4th most mentioned theme Melodics could improve but is mentioned almost half as often as the largest more lessons

“[We] wanted to get some unbiased and objective information [to know] if it’s actually an important topic for customers or not”, says Stokes.

By leaving the field open to their users and analyzing the results, they were able to learn that it wasn’t frequently mentioned by their users, and didn’t have a large impact on Melodics’ NPS either.

“Thanks to Thematic, they helped settle this internal debate. The fact that [Thematic] could provide an unbiased point of view was incredibly useful”, says a relieved Stokes.

What was the most valuable part of using Thematic?

Gribbens explains that, for him, “the value of Thematic is the way [it is able to] distill a qualitative dataset that is laborious to go through, [and] pull out the things that really matter.”

“The most valuable tools for me were the impact and comparison tools. It was clear, visual, and quick to see the impact” continues Gribbens. “I don’t need any more information or tools, it was just right”.

I addition, they found it valuable to see what people currently valued and also any features they wanted to be added to the product. For example, they learned that lag in the app does, in fact, make a big impact on the NPS score.

Tech Issues, in particular lag caused the biggest negative impact on customer NPS

“We could also see that lots of people wanted more lessons in the app, but, interestingly, lessons are not that important to the actual score.”

Identify specific product issues at the core

Importantly, Melodics used Thematic to identify specific product issues and find examples of user feedback mentioning it. They then broke down the feedback for each department of the business and walked through the feedback with each specific team, identifying their top issues, whilst showing them the critical insights Thematic was finding.

“We found that positive comments are good to share, especially with Marketing”, mentions Stokes.

“The rest of the company were also quite excited to see the themes and example comments from real customers, they had lots of follow up questions”.

Both Sam Gribben (CEO) and Sam Stokes used the tool themselves, and then Sam Stokes would run sessions and show the data to the Melodics staff. “For us, packaging up insights was really valuable, and exporting comments about topics was good for providing context”.

Sam Stokes was quickly able to download all Detractor comments related to tech issues to share with the team who could then get in contact with those individuals

How Thematic can help manage detractors

With the insights derived from the data, Melodics could identify and reach out to detractors and help with their specific problems. “Yes, there’s definitely value in closing the loop and identifying individuals who [raise] specific issues”, says Stokes.

So, what’s next for Melodics using Thematic?

With Thematic, “we can set up our product roadmap better in the future, with [deeper] information about our customers and what they want”, confirms Stokes. They’ve planned to create specific projects to address any issues derived from the insights.

Although Melodics know they can run surveys more frequently, they’ve chosen to run another survey the following quarter as they’re now comfortable running it. “We’re confident it’s worth the time, since we can pull deep insights from it using Thematic”, concludes Sam Stokes.  

The top image shows Melodics’ CEO Sam Gribbens.