How We’re Improving our Business with Customer Panels

Customer feedback is crucial to refining our walking and cycling holidays. We’re dedicated to gathering insights, making improvements based on those insights, and upholding best practices in customer privacy. 
 

Amy Fletcher, our Digital Product Manager takes us through why it’s important to us to connect with our customers, and how being in the same room as them is a great starting point. 

Why have we started customer panels?

We want happy adventurers, and that means creating a great customer experience across every stage of their journey. From the booking process and using our navigation app, to the trips themselves.  
We put our ‘customer hats’ on as much as we can, but nothing beats hearing it directly from the horse's mouth – so to speak! So, in order to gather direct feedback from our customers, we run monthly customer panels that allow us to test new features and concepts. The goal? To improve the overall customer experience across Macs and Abenteuer Wege – our Germany branch. 

What are our customer panels for? 

We want to collect first impressions and honest feedback for a variety of different areas. It might be that we’ve identified something that we feel needs improving, so we’re looking for opinions and initial thoughts, or it could be that we want to test new features before they go live. We also use these sessions as feedback opportunities where we ask our customers to highlight aspects they find confusing or a bump in their customer journey. This could be a process, a missed step/explanation in the customer journey, down to UX design.  

How do we choose our customer panel? 

The customer panel was recruited from a cross-section of Macs customers, including first-timers and repeat customers, across a variety of ages, genders, locations and who favour different trip types in order to get as many voices heard within the panel. 

What do we do with our customer panel findings? 

These sessions follow our Digital Product principles of being driven by data over internal opinion, testing with real users wherever possible, and iterating on those findings. Customer panel findings are collated, and key takeaways are shared with the business where the impact is beyond a digital change. 

We're passionate about making our self-guided walking and cycling holidays the best they can be. To find out more about what our customers think, check out our reviews.