Lowell Stays Customer-Focused With Dedicated Customer Panel

In regards to debt management, Lowell’s primary goal is to make sure customers are placed on a sustainable and affordable repayment plan. As Lowell is a relatively unknown brand outside the debt sector, it’s important to understand and gain the trust of customers, whilst also growing brand recognition and reputation to ensure more consumers know about Lowell and their values.

Lowell’s relationship with their customers is unique. As one of the few debt management companies to put their customers firmly at the heart of their business, the team place great emphasis on customer insights. To gain a more detailed understanding of the customers, Lowell required a panel that could deliver a variety of research projects and inform decisions across the entire organisation in a timely manner. And because of the negative emotions typically associated with debt, getting members to contribute to research in a meaningful way that would also help to build trusted relationships was vital.

Lowell needed a reliable, welcoming panel that they could control and conduct research through on a self-serve basis. In early 2021, Lowell chose to build this on the FlexMR InsightHub platform. Since then, the panel has grown to include 2,000+ customers ready to inform key decisions.

Since the panel’s inception, Lowell have conducted 48 different studies using a range of tools. The team have used the platform to facilitate surveys, focus groups, creative qual testing and more to create a better partnership with their customers.

‘‘With our customer panel, we are able to amplify the voice of our customers across the organisation to make sure all teams are staying customer-focused.” - Lisa Hulme-Vickerstaff, Head of Insight

In one recent study, Lowell used Open Polls to ask the question: “What would paying off debt mean to you?” In less than 2 hours, Lowell received over one hundred detailed responses, describing the intense freedom customers would feel once all their debt was paid and bringing customer emotion to life. While they had a number of hypotheses of what customers might feel, ‘freedom’ was unexpected.

Another key benefit Lowell have been able to take advantage of is Video Booth questions, collected, catalogued and reviewed through the native platform tools. Through their initial trial of the VideoMR tool, Lowell used vox pops to capture and share qualitative customer insights.

Now, the panel is not just used by the insight team - but other key stakeholders that impact the customer experience. For instance, the firm’s marketers use the InsightHub to build educational campaigns on tough topics such as hidden debt and debt after divorce.

“The panel we’ve built with InsightHub is informing a huge range of projects, from ongoing competitor benchmarking to in-depth service development.” - Lisa Hulme-Vickerstaff, Head of Insight

“We work hard to use everything customers tell us, to make sure we are delivering exactly what they need.” - Lisa Hulme-Vickerstaff, Head of Insight

As a valuable research asset, the Lowell InsightHub is helping the business to stay customer-focused, whilst building new communication channels, increasing their research volume and growing insight engagement across the business.

Feedback from the panel has been overwhelmingly positive. In competitor benchmarking studies, Lowell discovered that 85% of customers reported positive experiences with the company, compared to only 42% who reported positive experiences with competitors. This insight was supported by powerful qual data.

Every project Lowell run through the platform is contributing to their company mission. InsightHub has quickly become a critical tool for delivering on that mission, whilst also improving the efficiency reach and influence of insight.

Response rates for projects run through the InsightHub are continuing to climb, and the research team at Lowell are aiming to recruit up to 10,000 customers into the panel by the end of 2023.