How Audio Network finds the VoC and ties it back to its products

There’s a good chance the music Audio Network records at Abbey Road studios sounds familiar. The London-based company produces original music for the likes of the BBC’s Great British Bake Off, Carnival Film’s Downton Abbey, and the trailer that Disney/Marvel created for Endgame, the last Avengers movie.

With a catalog of over 180,000 tracks, a team of skilled music researchers, and a simple global licensing process, Audio Network was trying to get a better understanding of its customers’ needs. They had a large collection of quantitative data from customer transactions and website clicks, but wanted to go deeper into the “why” behind their customer interactions.

“We had a huge amount of data on what our customers were clicking on and we understood that there was a lot of stuff happening across all our digital and offline touchpoints, but we didn't always have a great sense of why they were doing it.”

Matthew Hawn, Chief Product Officer, Audio Network 

They were also looking for a way to tie feedback to the conversations happening between music researchers and customers. “If we create a playlist of music recommendations for a client, we wanted to know how happy they were with those tracks and if we’d hit the mark for their brief,” said Ben Partridge, who manages Customer Service for Audio Network.

Audio Network had been using another survey platform from a competitor, but found it complicated for what they were trying to accomplish. The company moved to SurveyMonkey Enterprise for its ease of use, powerful feature set, and scalability—all at a lower cost than their previous platform. 

Another driver in the switch was the SurveyMonkey Salesforce integration feature. Having survey data directly tied to customers in Salesforce helps sales reps use that feedback as part of a sales conversation. For example, if a customer isn’t happy with a brief, sales could reach out to them on a personal level. “Customer Satisfaction Data from SurveyMonkey has become an important part of our account manager conversations with clients and having it all in Salesforce is very convenient,” said Andy Williams, Global Commercial Director.

Audio Network was able to apply the cost savings from the move to Enterprise to invest in SurveyMonkey Engage. “We wanted to combine a VoC survey solution with our new voice of the employee (VoE) program because we saw them both as deeply connected,” said Andrea Zemmel, Communications Manager.  “What I love about the Engage product is we get a holistic, ongoing view for how our functional teams feel about how we operate and how happy and engaged they are with the business, “ Zemmel said.

With the move to SurveyMonkey, Audio Network was able to reduce costs by 30-50%. Asking customers questions like, “did we nail the brief?” and “did we find you the music that you really wanted?” has helped Audio Network better understand their customers’ needs. Survey data added context to the patterns in their transactional data, highlighting the "why" behind customer clicks and purchases.

“Getting verbatims from our surveys changed the language we use internally as a company and how we describe and market our products,” Hawn said. “For example, we had a TV programming editor use the phase “Music Bins” to describe how he was managing the music he needed for his work. That phrase is now shaping a future iteration of our “projects” collaboration function and we will probably start calling them “bins.”

“Qualitative and quantitative data—married together—is very powerful. As we integrate this data into the customer insights that we share across our teams, I'm convinced we are becoming a more customer-centric company than we were a year ago.”