History

“If you make your guests extremely comfortable, they’ll come back.” This is a lesson Dave and Mary learned at a young age in the international hotel industry. And that lesson still applies today. To all organizations. Everywhere in the world.

A lack of transparency and tampering with feedback from a previous employer is the reason for Focus Feedback founders Dave and Mary Wurms to dive into the world of customer happiness. Focus Feedback was created with the conviction that things can be done better and from a passion to make organizations better.

Where it all started

Dave and Mary had it in them early on: they want to give customers a unforgettable experience. They met while working in the hospitality industry. A great similarity between them: wanting to serve guests excellently is in their blood. Not directly with a commercial purpose, but because it truly makes them enthusiastic. Ultimately, the following always applies: “whoever does good, meets well”.

After several positions around the world, Dave and Mary finally ended up in the Luxembourg hotel industry in their mid-twenties. In addition to his hospitality responsibilities, Dave was given an additional task: to keep track of customer reviews.

Guests filled in review cards that they received in their room or in the restaurant. Dave’s job was to collect all the tickets and send them to the headquarters in Boston. But every month, just before he mailed the tickets, his manager came to him with some extra tickets. “Coincidentally” all cards in the same handwriting, with extremely high ratings. Then all tickets went out the door. Unfortunately, the reviews were insufficiently shared with the team in Luxembourg. Only the things the manager read which he was not satisfied with, was the team told.

A new mission had arisen: to make organizations better with input from their own guests.

The first step

Upon his return to the Netherlands, Dave went to work on complaints management. Dave and Mary soon saw potential and in 2003 they started their own business under the name Welcome Customer Care Solutions, a complaint management system focused on customer friendliness, honesty and transparency. Jos was part of the team from the start and the three of them entered the world of customer satisfaction.

From complaints to feedback; the introduction to NPS

In 2009, Welcome CCS was asked to organize a complaint management seminar for the industry. They invited a guest speaker who enthusiastically spoke about a new method of working with complaints, namely by measuring the NetPromoterScore (NPS). A day that would change everything.

With the Net Promoter System you don’t wait for complaints, but you proactively measure satisfaction yourself. And not only that, with NPS a lot more is measured, namely also what is going well and what could be improved. A much more positive approach that gives an organization and all its employees much more energy. From that moment on they changed course.

Focus Feedback

Working with NPS and thus with feedback deserved a new name. In 2019 Focus Feedback was born. In the meantime, Focus Feedback has grown into an NPS expert, with the official recognition of the NPS foundersBain & Company. Focus Feedback has grown from 3 colleagues to a team of 11 people.

What we do differently from others? Focusing on the content and not the number. We focus on the quality of the data, so that we can analyze data and complaints. This enables us to offer a lot of customization in the form of reports and modules. Transparency and honesty are paramount at Focus Feedback. Feedback returns unfiltered to the organizations and employees.

The purpose of all this? Loyal customers, enthusiastic employees and better organizations. All these factors are interrelated. And it can all be brought back to the core: making customers happy. That’s where it all started.