The HERE team is listening to you

HERE Maps, HERE Drive, and HERE Transit are the location experiences that people are using to get from A-to-B with pinpoint accuracy and in optimum time. Behind the scenes at Nokia, there’s a team responsible for collecting all the user feedback from this suite and turning it into action points to improve the service in the future.

“Within each HERE location experience, there’s a little feedback button. We sit at the other end of that link. If you press it and send feedback, we see it and begin our work to catalogue it.” begins Conny Petrovic, Senior Manager Consumer Insight for HERE.

  

Conny doesn’t work alone, though, she works with Simona De Rosa and Chao Su, Consumer Insight Specialists for HERE to sort, translate, and score each and every piece of feedback that enters their database.

The team is small, but extremely busy, on average currently handling over 400+ pieces of feedback each day.

Naturally, if there’s a big event or an app update that gets lots of attention online, that increases the amount of feedback received quite significantly.

Keep it coming

However, Conny tells us that they want more feedback.

“We enjoy reading people’s feedback, good or bad. It’s vitally important that we understand what people need and the best way for us to learn that is to have people tell us directly.”

“We’re actively listening, so send us your feedback. The more the better.”

Once a user of HERE Drive, HERE Maps or HERE Transit taps the feedback button, they’re asked to give that app a rating between zero and ten to show how likely they are to recommend that app to other people.

Rather than just submitting your score, which you can do, the HERE Consumer Insight team would encourage you to leave a sentence or two (or more, of course) explaining why you gave the app or service that rating.

“It’s these details that really allow us to understand what people like or don’t like. It also helps us to fix or improve things if needed.” explains Conny.

Once the feedback is in the database, it’s translated into English, if it’s not already, and another program mines the database for keywords.

While the database is useful for collecting the data, a specially designed dashboard provides them with the information in a more glanceable way, which makes dealing with feedback much easier and faster; especially for people in the product teams and management who look at the feedback as well.

It’s the product teams that actually decide which feedback, feature request, or problem is tackled first, usually by the number of keywords present in the feedback list. The higher the frequency of the same or similar feedback, that makes the top of the list.

However, on occasion, there are times when something might not be fed-back by many people but it’s significant enough to ‘jump the queue’.

“There is a certain amount of automatic processing, but we also go through the samples of comments manually to make sure we don’t miss something important.” tells Conny.

Who is listening?

But the feedback these guys have access to doesn’t just stay within the team and the relevant product teams, every Nokia employee has the opportunity to see them.

“Once a week we pull out one representative comment from HERE and publish it within our internal ‘Nokia social network’, based on Socialcast.”

“It’s a bit like Twitter and Facebook combined. It’s so important that everybody at Nokia can see what our customers are saying about our products.”

Feedback varies widely, depending on the market. For instance, Germany, France and Italy are super-enthused when it comes to HERE Drive, and they use the feedback option to let team know.

However, some markets aren’t so expressive with any feedback, good, bad or neutral.

“We receive a low amount of direct feedback from the UK, USA, and India.”

“Wherever you’re from, if you’re using HERE Maps, HERE Drive, or HERE Transit, press that feedback button so we can help make the HERE experience as great as possible.”

As a direct result of customer feedback through the in-app form, many changes have been made. The compass has been requested many times, as has for routes options to be added within HERE Drive – now included.

The HERE Consumer Insights team, together with a number of other teams, are working with consumers on in-depth research activities as recently spotted on WPCentral. Participants are rewarded for their time with vouchers and the feedback received by the Insights team is used to improve the mapping services.

Whatever hurdle you come up against on your daily commute, shop or even general day-to-day navigation, HERE is listening and responding to your needs. You like the app? The teams would like to know!

So, the next time you use HERE, such as HERE Maps, HERE Drive, and HERE Transit, don’t forget to leave some feedback and help the team help you – it only takes a minute.

Also, any comments left here or tweeted to @heremaps are also added to the feedback list.