RightShip CEO Martin Crawford-Brunt on our customer engagement survey results

After two years at RightShip, I have spent a great deal of my time talking to customers, stakeholders and industry partners to get a true sense of what the industry needs and expects from RightShip. I really appreciate all the honest and considered feedback that has been used to prioritise and guide our product development and service enhancement.

As a result of these valuable conversations, we have developed a range of product enhancements, which will be deployed in September 2020, that we hope will improve your workflows, provide increased transparency for decision making from our data, and ultimately improve business and safety outcomes for all.

Why our customer engagement surveys matter

I know that everyone who takes the time to complete our survey is busy, which is why I’m grateful for the considered responses. This research is one of the strongest tools we have to ensure we provide a service that meets and exceeds your needs.

This year’s survey opened on March 12 and closed on April 2, providing a total of 22 days in the field. All RightShip customers were invited to partake – that’s a total of almost 3500 people. We achieved 701 responses – a rate of 20 per cent. This might not seem significant, but it’s a big improvement on our previous result of 14 per cent and much higher than the organisational average of 10 per cent. It provided a good cross section of responses, including ship owners and managers.

This is so much more than a feedback resource. We take on your comments and implement strategies that prioritise your expectations. In the past 12-18 months we gained valuable insights regarding the limitations of the Qi platform, including its usability, speed and stability. We learned that customers found the risk rating complex and sought to improve their safety profile.

We discovered we needed to provide a superior user experience and mirror this in our communication and interaction with you. All of this feedback has driven our product design and strategic thinking.

The key findings

In general, we’ve heard that you’re happy with the benefits that come with working with RightShip..  However, as outlined above, we’ve also had suggestions about how we can improve our products and services, which we are proactively addressing with our upcoming product launches.

The key requests for improvement included:

• Improved response time on vets and emails
• Qi platform improvements: speed, stability and usability
• Improved explanations of our analytics model and the risk rating in Qi
• Improved explanation of changes to the rating in Qi

These points of improvement are consistent with the feedback we’ve received previously and we commenced our product development on this basis some time ago. As a result we are quite advanced with our product development process to address them.

Positive feedback received included:

• The deep industry knowledge and experience our staff share with our customers is highly appreciated and recognised

We have added resources in all of our offices to increase the support we provide and the positive comments on the support provided by our experienced frontline staff is really appreciated. An overwhelming 70 per cent of respondents to our survey said they would happily provide a positive testimonial.

Here’s one great response:

“In its line of work, RightShip has no equal according to our point of view. There was almost no other viable choice for us to go with, especially since your recommendation makes our charterers’ lives easier as well as minimises our vessels’ off-hire status to almost zero. It is a major win-win situation from which both sides benefit.”

What will change as a result of the survey?

As you may have heard, we have enhanced our digital offering in line with your feedback and will begin to roll out the new platform in the coming months. The features include:

• New ways to communicate with our experts through the in-platform communication channels. You can now request inspections and vets within the platform as well as submit GHG verification requests.
• Our vetting staff can now send automatic requests for information to ship-owning customers, resulting in a faster vetting process
• More stability to our platform provided by utilising state of the art cloud based technology and infrastructure.
• More versatility to the platform – it’s now optimised for mobile and tablet use in addition to PC. This means you can access our platform and supporting information on-the-go
• Ship-operating customers can take control of their data about their vessels and what is presented on the platform including a RightShip dry bulk inspection badge, GHG verification status, additional energy saving equipment and providing date to close out incidents.

What does the future hold?

Overall, we are pleased to hear that our customers really value our services and support our ongoing role in the industry. There has been a great deal of passion, energy and time injected into collaborating with the industry to develop our new platform. During this process it’s been difficult at times to hear that we need to do better.

But what’s important is the fact that our team is experienced, helpful, supportive and committed to significant improvements that we’re looking forward to rolling out this year. We hope that listening to feedback and taking it on board during our development process that we will have managed to address your top improvement suggestions within this year. We appreciate all of the feedback received from customers and stakeholder..

Our expanding team at RightShip is here to help you and support you in your daily operations. Our colleagues all bring significant industry experience, at sea or ashore and work in teams to support your daily due diligence and business objectives.

At RightShip we take our industry role and responsibility to improve based on your feedback very seriously. Thank you for taking the time to give us your considered feedback. We are looking forward to providing you with updates on our products and services in the coming months.

In the meantime, head to comingsoon.rightship.com for more information