Gemma and her team were facing several critical challenges in managing customer feedback across their seasonal travel programs before discovering Wordnerds:
Manual analysis was consuming valuable resources: The team were spending countless hours on spreadsheet categorisation instead of work that could drive real improvements. Everything was being managed by humans, which meant it was "mind numbing for the person doing it and "open to bias, open to error, open to mistakes."
Inconsistent human categorization led to unreliable insights: Different team members would categorize the same feedback differently, making trend analysis unreliable.
Critical time lags prevented seasonal optimization: With programs like Santa's Lapland running for just six weeks annually, "if we don't understand what those issues are within that six-week period, we can't act on it and it means we're potentially leaving it a whole other year." The manual analysis took so long that actionable insights came too late to improve the current season.
Siloed feedback channels created fragmented understanding: "Everything's kind of done in silo, not purposefully, it's just the way that it is and we've got different teams looking after different insights and different channels." This prevented a holistic view of the customer journey.
Overwhelming volumes of qualitative data: With "thousands of customers over six weeks giving us thousands of lines of commentary," the sheer volume made comprehensive analysis impossible with human resources alone.
After meeting the Wordnerds team at a CX event, Gemma was initially cautious about AI solutions but intrigued by what seemed like a tailored approach to their specific challenges in the travel industry.
Gemma's journey with Wordnerds followed these key stages:
➡ 1) Industry connection: Met the Wordnerds team at a CX event alongside colleagues from other travel brands who "all got quite excited about the opportunity"
➡ 2) Evaluating alternatives: Explored options including ChatGPT and other AI tools, but found they "all come with their own issues, the security of data plus being able to train it. We have a lot of nuances and lingo in our business that it just doesn't recognise"
➡ 3) Partnership approach: "From day one it just felt like they got what our problem was and wanted to help us... we wanted to be working with someone that wanted to go into a partnership with us as much as we wanted to go into a partnership with them"
➡ 4) Proof of concept: "Having that option to be able to do a trial and to do a proof of concept... was really important because I knew there was going to be a question about budget"
➡ 5) Business validation: The proof of concept "validated it and showed our data rather than just being someone else's data from possibly another industry that people couldn't necessarily relate to"
After proving value through the proof of concept, Ingham's now plans to use Wordnerds to:
Faster, more strategic decision-making: "We're going to be able to take a lot more time using the insight... we can actually spend more of our time on the strategy implementation and the actions that come out."
Proven impact from better analysis: When they manually analysed their Santa's Lapland "festive feast" offering scores went up that had an overall positive impact on the NPS, so being able to do this on a larger scale, quickly will only help those scores improve more.
Team excitement about meaningful work: "People absolutely aren't worried about that's what they used to do. They're like, thank God I don't have to do that anymore. I can actually use what's being said and spend more time on developing propositions and developing future strategies."
Competitive intelligence capabilities: "Having the ability to scrape competitor reviews... we would have never had the time or capacity to break that down to look at their customer journey alongside ours."
Elimination of human bias and error: "Knowing now that there isn't any human bias, there's not going to be human mistakes in there. I think that's quite a game changer."
Scalability for growth: With plans for a new customer app and recent acquisition by DerTour Group, "as we integrate other new pieces of technology... that's just another channel of information that would be able to feed into a platform like this and we'd be able to act on it really quickly."
Gemma highlighted the importance of the partnership approach throughout the implementation:
Patient, pressure-free relationship: "Any delays were met with patience which is really nice... I've not felt like there's been any pressure to get things moving" despite a year-long implementation timeline.
Genuine partnership feel: "We've not felt like we're just another business that they want to get onto their list. They actually genuinely are excited about kicking off the project as much as we are."
Industry understanding: The team showed genuine interest in understanding their unique travel products and seasonal challenges, making them feel understood rather than just another client.
Flexible implementation approach: "There's a lot of flexibility around the set up... adding more brands or adding more data or new channels" which works perfectly for a business going through acquisition changes.
Gemma's recommendation for other travel and hospitality organizations considering AI-powered feedback analysis:
"Don't get blurred by some of the businesses that say they can do it all. We didn't need something that could do it all... the main objective was just reducing the amount of time we were spending categorizing feedback and being able to pull things from it using a machine rather than using a person. Ultimately, that's what Wordnerds does. It takes all the feedback and turns it into actionable insight. Look for something that's aligned to your business, at a cost that's manageable, and with a team that genuinely wants to partner with you rather than just sell to you."