Customer Satisfaction in the Consumer Applications Segment: GMX and WEB.DE

Managing and Increasing Customer Satisfaction

At the end of 2021, the Consumer Applications Segment had 42.79 million (2020: 41.77 million; 2019: 39.85 million) customer contracts and accounts. Of these, 40.32 million (2020: 39.40 million; 2019: 37.59 million) were free accounts and 2.47 million (2020: 2.37 million; 2019: 2.26 million) were fee-based customer contracts. We use detailed surveys to measure customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS) scores every month for our portal brands GMX and WEB.DE. These two metrics are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for all product areas.

We ask roughly three million customers a year for feedback in the e-mail, homepage, and editorial content areas. For example, we poll them on usability, storage space, and loading speeds, on editorial topic selection, and on the content produced. In 2021, the NPS and the user satisfaction score again remained stable at their high prior-year levels of 30 points/80% respectively. In addition, we continuously measured a third core KPI, customer trust. The figure for 2021 was 88% (2020: 88%, 2019: 87%). At segment board level, the CEO and the Chief Product Officer (CPO) are closely involved in customer satisfaction measures.

In line with our customer-centric focus, we have developed a customer value pyramid as a way of visualizing our three core KPIs: customer satisfaction, recommendations, and customer trust:

Our internal results are regularly validated in independent studies. For example, “WirtschaftsWoche” concluded that, once again, GMX was the e-mail provider enjoying the highest level of customer trust in 2021. The business magazine worked with ServiceValue and Frankfurt’s Goethe University to produce Germany’s most extensive trust ranking. A total of 1,823 companies in 139 sectors were evaluated. It should be emphasized that the respondents to the online survey were in fact past or present customers (users, consumers, and contract partners). Just under four out of five respondents (78.5%) said that they trusted GMX. The brand was awarded the “highest customer trust” ranking for the seventh year in a row. WEB.DE’s trust index score was 72.5%, resulting in a “very high trust” award.

In addition, “FOCUS-MONEY” magazine commissioned a second cross-sector study on German customer satisfaction with specific leading brands in 2021, once again together with ServiceValue. As before, both GMX and WEB.DE received “highest customer satisfaction” ratings in the “E-mail provider” category. A total of 1,418 enterprises from 67 sectors were assessed by asking more than 279,000 consumers what exactly they thought about a very wide range of different providers. Votes were only counted if the respondents were customers of the enterprise concerned in the last twelve months.

User reviews of GMX’s and WEB.DE’s e-mail apps are another indicator of customer satisfaction. The Android versions of the apps, which are available from Google Play Store, have a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars, while the brands’ apps in Apple’s iTunes Store score an even better 4.6 out of 5 stars.