Humanising Hardware: How Mitre10 Made Voice of Customer Actionable with Thematic

The Challenge: Hearing Our Customers Through the Noise

When we rebuilt our Voice of Customer (VoC) program at Mitre 10 five years ago, we thought we had it all figured out. We'd implemented comprehensive retail and trade feedback systems, built-in closed-loop feedback processes, and aligned everything with our new brand promise: "With You All the Way."

But something was still missing.

Despite collecting mountains of data and 20,000 verbatim comments per month across our 84 stores, we found ourselves in a paradoxical situation: we had all this customer feedback, yet we still couldn't clearly articulate what our customers were actually saying. As a cooperative business with stores across New Zealand, this disconnect was particularly problematic.

The truth is, a standard text analytics approach wasn't helping us get a deep understanding of customers . Our Insights team couldn't read through thousands of comments each month to dive into topics, and while our store teams had a pulse on their local feedback, no coherent story was emerging at the strategic level.

This lack of clarity had real consequences:

• Limited empathy for customer needs at the executive level
• Difficulty prioritising when "everything seemed important"
• Inability to explain month-to-month NPS fluctuations
• Struggles to link insights to meaningful action

My CMO summed it up perfectly when she said,

"I still don't feel like I know what's going on with our customers".

That candid admission was actually liberating—it gave us the license to try something different.

Finding the Signal in the Noise with Thematic

Two and a half years ago, we partnered with Thematic to help us unlock the power of those thousands of customer comments. For our small three-person insights team, we needed a solution that could:

1. Cut through the clutter of feedback
2. Accommodate our team's learning curve (we didn't know what we didn't know)
3. Be customised to our business needs
4. Deliver value quickly to justify the investment

What made Thematic stand out was how quickly we could implement their text analysis capabilities and code frameworks. The Thematic team took the weight off us through the setup process by leveraging retail-specific code frames and mapping them to our internal business structure.  With some basic training on the theme editor, we were then able to take control and do final customisations for our business.  , This meant we could begin translating customer feedback into actionable insights within days.

From Data to Decisions: Real-World Applications

The impact was dramatic—suddenly, we could see exactly which topics had the biggest impact on our NPS scores, allowing us to make truly data-driven decisions and spend our time working with the data, not on it. Here are a few examples of how we've put these insights into practice:

Stock Availability: Quantifying the Obvious

Stock availability is fundamental for any retail business, but we'd struggled to quantify its importance. Through Thematic's analysis, we discovered that stock availability issues were taking half a NPS point off our overall scores.

This insight came at the perfect time as we were building a new trade strategy. Being able to definitively state that improving stock availability would deliver measurable NPS improvements helped us reinforce this as a strategic priority.

Trade Website Redevelopment: Focus Where It Matters

When redeveloping our trade website as part of a SAP transformation, our development team needed direction on where to focus their efforts and rally the agile build team. Thematic's analysis revealed that while simplicity and ease were key strengths to maintain, search functionality needed substantial improvement.

For our agile development team, this clarity was empowering. Rather than trying to tackle everything at once or getting distracted by less impactful features, they could concentrate on the elements that would most significantly improve the customer experience.

Customer Segmentation: Tailoring Solutions to Real Needs

By cross-analysing our feedback with customer segment data, we discovered that our website was particularly problematic for our most valuable customer segment—builders constructing homes from scratch, who represent some of our highest-value customers.

This insight helped us prioritise not just what to fix, but who we were fixing it for, allowing us to align our range and service offerings with the specific needs of different customer segments.

Connecting Insights to Strategy

Linking our VoC insights to business strategy has enhanced our VoC programmes value. At Mitre 10, we use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) with customer experience as one of our top-level objectives. Thematic helps us connect high-level NPS targets to specific, actionable initiatives.

The real power comes in bringing this customer perspective to the teams doing the day-to-day work. For example, our agile development team now regularly incorporates customer feedback into their planning sessions, drilling down to read individual verbatim comments to understand pain points at a human level.

One surprising discovery was that even promoters—customers giving us high NPS scores—were providing valuable improvement suggestions. Without Thematic's ability to analyze themes within positive feedback, we might have missed these opportunities by focusing only on detractors.

Building Customer Empathy Throughout the Business

Beyond the hard metrics, Thematic has helped us humanise customer feedback in ways that resonate across the organization at a scale that was previously unfeasible, such as:

• Seasonal Insights: We can now quickly identify how customer needs change from summer to winter, helping stores prepare for seasonal shifts in demand and service requirements.
• Event Planning: By analysing feedback from previous years' events like Mother's Day, we create simple guidance for stores to improve the customer experience next time around.
• Trade Value Proposition Development: When developing our trade business value proposition, we used Thematic to identify our genuine strengths: convenience, local presence, and range. This bottom-up approach ensured our messaging was authentic to how customers actually see us, not just what we aspire to be.
  
• Reliable Ad Hoc analysis: We’re regularly asked for specific deep dive analysis, either on specific locations, opportunities or hypothesis testing.  Using thematic we can quickly ascertain if our VoC data collects the relevant feedback, perform comparisons and highlight with confidence the key issues or opportunities.  Turning analysis around often within minutes..

Key Takeaways from Our Journey

As a passionate advocate for verbatim analytics, I've seen firsthand how Thematic has transformed our approach to customer feedback and reporting:

1. Simplified Surveys: We're now confident enough in our text analysis to remove some structured questions, creating shorter surveys while gaining deeper insights.
2. Strategic Alignment: We can better support strategic initiatives with clear, customer-driven work-ons that help teams focus on what matters most.
3. Clear Communication: We've learned to keep it simple, focusing on key data points presented in visually compelling ways that tell a clear story.
4. Authentic Customer Voice: By maintaining the customer's tone of voice in our reporting, we build genuine empathy across all levels of the organisation.

Our journey with Thematic has helped us truly humanise hardware—not just by wrapping "soft stuff around really hard stuff," but by ensuring the voice of our customers informs every aspect of our business, from strategic planning to day-to-day operations.

When you can confidently explain what your customers are telling you and translate that into actionable priorities, you transform Voice of Customer from a measurement program into a powerful driver of business success.

Audience Q&A: Putting Theory into Practice

After sharing our Mitre10 journey, I received some thoughtful questions from the audience that highlighted key considerations for any business looking to enhance their VoC program:

B2B vs. B2C Approaches

One participant asked how our approach differed between consumer and trade (B2B) customers. While the fundamentals remain similar, our B2B analysis benefits from richer data connections—we can link feedback to customer lifetime value and even share of wallet metrics to understand how much of their total building spend we're capturing.

What surprised me most was the communication style. I initially expected our trade business feedback to require a more serious business approach. Instead, we found that using authentic, conversational language that mirrors how our trade customers actually speak creates much better engagement across the business. Our team member who handles this area cuts through business speak and puts insights into the customer's voice, which resonates strongly with our trade teams.

The strategic application differs slightly too—B2B insights tend to drive more account-specific initiatives, while retail feedback requires more granular, day-to-day operational responses. That said, we've been able to apply the same fundamental principles across both business areas with success.

Confirming Intuition vs. Discovering New Insights

Another interesting question was whether the text analysis primarily confirmed what we already suspected or revealed entirely new insights. The answer is a bit of both. The analysis validated some retail fundamentals around service, price, and range that we intuitively understood, but the real value came in two areas:

1. Prioritisation clarity: The analysis provided clear evidence of which factors truly drive customer satisfaction, helping us focus our limited resources where they'll have the greatest impact.
2. Actionable depth: While "service is important" might be obvious, understanding precisely which aspects of service matter most allows us to develop specific operational standards and employee programs that make a tangible difference.

The consistency between our Thematic insights and our Qualtrics analysis gave us confidence in the approach, while the additional depth and specificity from Thematic enabled more targeted action than ever before.

These questions reinforced a key learning: voice of customer analysis isn't just about discovering what your customers think—it's about translating those thoughts into concrete priorities that everyone in your organisation can understand and act upon. When you can do that consistently, you create a truly customer-centric business that delivers measurable improvements in both experience and results.