The History of Focus Feedback

“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 customer feedback from a previous employer was 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 passion from the start: they wanted to give customers an unforgettable experience. They met while working in the hospitality industry and share a great purpose between them: wanting to serve guests excellently. Not for a direct commercial purpose, but because it truly makes them enthusiastic. Ultimately, the following always applies: “Whoever does good, meets well”.

After being employed in 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 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 the tickets were sent to Boston. Unfortunately, the reviews were insufficiently shared with the team in Luxembourg; they were only told the things that the manager was not satisfied with.

A new mission had arisen: to make organizations better, with input from their 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 also 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 Net Promoter Score (NPS) and employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). A day that would change everything.

With the Net Promoter System you don’t wait for complaints, you proactively measure satisfaction yourself. And not only that, with NPS a lot more is measured, specifically 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 meant that the business needed a new name. In 2019 Focus Feedback was born. Since then, Focus Feedback has grown into a Net Promoter Score expert, with the official recognition of NPS founders Bain & Company. Focus Feedback has grown from three colleagues to a team of 11 people.

What sets us apart 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 and enthusiastic customers, engaged 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 began.