JogPost - Leaflet Distribution

Ride Along Awards

JogPost "Ride-Along" – Restoring Customer Faith Across an Entire Industry

We discovered early on that confidence in the UK leaflet distribution industry is so low that customers are in serious need of reassurances. After consistent bad experiences, customers suffer from a permanent insecurity that their leaflets will never be delivered as promised.

In response, we quickly identified “Transparency” to be our most important core value communicated to every customer we engage with. “Ride-Along” was developed to “part the curtains”, and expose our working systems directly to the client.

This both cements the relationship between them and JogPost, but most importantly, permanently restores their faith in the leaflet distribution industry.

We took a lot of time and care when interacting with our clients to find out what it is they really needed in order to get their confidence back. Its this attention that allowed us to really come up with a way to finally solve a problem in this industry that has essentially existed for many decades.

We came up with the ground breaking “Ride Along” customer experience. The JogPost “Ride Along” can be described as a “personally-tailored customer service tour”. It is free of charge and made available to all customers at the point of sale. It is our key relationship building tool.

The customer is invited to “Ride Along” in the car with their dedicated supervising manager. They are collected and driven around the distribution area for approximately 1 hour and shown exactly how JogPost organises the teams and operations.

The client has the opportunity to meet, speak to and observe the joggers (distributors) working on their shift. They learn about and use our tracking systems to physically catch up with the joggers and can see how the supervisors interacts with the staff and checks the quality of the work.

They get to see the effort and training the supervisor has to make sure the team is happy and efficient. They are also free to ask the supervisor as many questions as they like about our leaflet distribution process and are essentially free to scrutinise all aspects of our service end-to-end.

The client is then invited to give feedback on the Ride Along experience, as well as offer any improvement suggestions they may think.

This innovation is an undeniable display of transparency and ethical conduct that earns the unshakable confidence of our customers.

We targeted the very root of the customer confidence issue in our industry and is focused solely on helping the customer overcome that. They can confidently work on their businesses instead of having to worry if their leaflets have actually been delivered and look for contingency.

We would be very proud to see the Ride Along awarded for its service to customers and to an entire industry.

Impact:

The impact of this innovation can been measured and demonstrated in a few different ways. We believe this innovation has had a huge impact on 4 core areas:

1. Increased Customers Confidence – we see in our “Ride Along Feedback” videos that exactly 100% of our Ride Along customers experienced a dramatic sense of renewed faith and confidence. The difference between how confident the customers feel before taking the Ride Along, compared to how they feel afterwards, is like night and day.

We have this irrefutably documented on our Ride Along feedback videos and written reviews. The video evidence is so powerful that the effectiveness of the Ride Along as a customer service tool is undeniable.

Here is an example of a video feedback: (there are more 20+ recently uploaded on our YouTube channel)

2. JogPost Leaflet Distribution Sales Growth – we have mapped on a graph the last 3 years sales growth of the company showing 450% cumulative sales growth over that period. We put this continuous sales growth down to the social proof our Ride Alongs create to generate new business and also that our current clients feel genuinely taken care of and listened to by JogPost staff. This builds unshakeable bonds between our clients and of course results in increased repeat business and word of mouth referrals.

3. Increased Customer Service Focus in the Whole Industry – JogPost have never tried to compete by offering a lower price, we have always been competing by focusing on the customer and their needs. This means that customers are now willing to pay the slight premium to get these needs fulfilled.

As a direct result of our activity we have seen a huge increase in companies now competing by being more customer focused rather than trying to be being cheaper. The whole industry standard is now being augmented and customers are receiving a better service across the board from all reputable suppliers.

4. Wider Economical Benefits – We provide a very important function in customer generation for thousands of businesses. Therefore this increase in customer focus translates directly into improved responses and ROI for customers using leaflet marketing.

This means by providing a better service industry wide we can seriously help to stimulate that extra growth in 3 party businesses and help drive the bigger economy.

This innovation has been a huge success.

Innovation:

We entered into the market in 2010. This industry had been around for hundreds of year but there were still so many unsolved issues and. This only really effected the customers, with nowhere to turn companies would still make profit. Customers were very nervous about using a leaflet company, very quick to accuse and generally would just put “leaflet distribution” and “leaflet dumping” in the same bracket. This is a result of a continuous failure to innovate a solution by leaflet distribution practitioners to a clear need.

Quite simply customers just want to be able to rely on their distribution partner without having the usual persistent worries. It seems simple enough, but hadn’t been solved and except for a few companies the industry was generally in disrepute.

We solved this head on by creating a (trademarked) customer service product called “Ride Along”, designed to work in mainly 2 ways.

The first is to deliver in one hour to the customer an intricate and trusting understanding of the company they are transacting with. So they can feel confident with the end to end process. The Ride Along is incredibly detailed and structured, designed in a way to leave the customer with no unanswered questions.

The second is to invite the customer out from behind their desk and bring them on a “journey” with us. This powerfully accelerates the relationship building process. One hour on our “Ride Along” can be compared to months of regular phone and email communication, possibly years. This reactivates a positive emotion to having their leaflets delivered and anchors an immediate and powerful paradigm shift.

We innovated a solution to a huge problem and many companies have benefited directly from this. We believe that an innovation in any other industry that solves a problem so large would be a worthy competitor for an award, we are sure that our industry has started to carry enough weight for the “JogPost Ride Along” to get the recognition it deserves.

Inspiration:

We were the first company in our industry to allow our customers “in” to see the operations. Since doing so, the impact has been so large that we now see most companies in our industry offering vastly improved customer service (some even use a “Ride Along Style” service) to engage customers in order to compete.

Practitioners historically compete with each other just on price, this reduces the budget everyone has to work with, leading to underpaid and valued workers and also trains the customers to pay less for the service. This has been the crippling factor. Companies in our industry now compete on quality not on price and customers are now learning that cheap distribution is not good and good distribution is not cheap. This perception change has made the industry almost unrecognisable.

We have inspired the development of the whole industry in terms of, customer engagement, providing quality service, accountability and re-educating the market about the industry to change customer perceptions. This has all a result of JogPost’s customer service innovations and the passion we have for delivering quality.

Consequentially for JogPost, our business’ ROI grows month on month, achieving 100% growth in the last 6 months alone. Our brand has is the most reviewed on Google and our reputation in the industry for quality precedes us.

There are 2 key reasons for this:

Firstly, we publish the video feedback on our YouTube channel to show other prospective customers what type of service they can expect working with us. Hearing about our service from other satisfied customers is extremely powerful, as word of mouth is much more effective than any other customer acquisition methods.

Secondly, we retain almost all of the customers that have taken the RideAlong. Once they have “seen the light” they become customers for life, and would not take their business elsewhere.

The key message is that Transparency in all aspects of customer communications is vital for creating a satisfying experience for customers. And even in the event that something were to go wrong in the service you offer, your customers would be extremely tolerant and patient and even work with you to correct any issues.

The leaflet distribution industry has never been taken so seriously as it is now. We believe this is a direct result of our innovation, customer focus and drive and has led to a massive change in the whole industry.

We identified our customer need and found that Transparency is the key to their confidence.

Identifying the customers’ needs and innovating engaging solutions, centered around good services/products is the key that unlocks the door to customer satisfaction in any industry.