How Old Mutual piloted WhatsApp-based surveying to collect thousands of customer and advisor feedback responses, replacing telephonic interviews with a faster, richer channel.
How Old Mutual piloted WhatsApp-based surveying to collect thousands of customer and advisor feedback responses, replacing telephonic interviews with a faster, richer channel.
Old Mutual runs two major quarterly research programmes across its advisor distribution network: an Advice NPS study measuring customer experience with financial advisors, and a Net Employee Score (NES) survey capturing advisor and manager satisfaction with internal support services. Together, these programmes cover thousands of respondents each quarter and feed directly into executive and board-level reporting.
To evaluate WhatsApp as an alternative to their established telephonic surveying approach, Old Mutual's research team partnered with Yazi for a structured pilot on their Tied Advisor channel. The pilot ran both studies in parallel, with the explicit goal of producing a like-for-like comparison against existing methods.
Old Mutual's existing research operation was well-established but carried inherent limitations that constrained how far the programme could scale and how rich the resulting data could be.
Customers increasingly screen or decline phone calls, making it harder to achieve target response volumes through traditional telephonic interviewing.
The programme spans multiple distribution channels with thousands of surveys monthly. Scaling telephonic capacity in proportion is operationally intensive and costly.
The existing process required significant manual coordination — scheduling calls, managing agent capacity, and chasing non-respondents through repeated attempts.
Telephonic surveys capture structured responses but lack the depth of written verbatim feedback — customers express themselves differently when typing in their own time and language.
Yazi configured two parallel WhatsApp survey campaigns — one for customer NPS (10 questions) and one for the internal employee satisfaction study (30 questions, split by advisor and manager cohorts) — each designed to replicate the existing telephonic methodology for direct comparison.
The launch strategy prioritised trust. A pre-launch WhatsApp notification was sent days before the survey invitation, and Old Mutual's customer-facing staff received internal communication so they could confirm legitimacy when customers asked. Sends were phased across batches with reminders from day three for incomplete responses.
The customer NPS survey achieved a 33% response rate — on track to meet Old Mutual's target volume. WhatsApp's high visibility was the primary driver: 87% of delivered messages were read, giving every invitation a genuine chance of conversion. This compared favourably to the declining pickup rates of telephonic outreach.
One of the most striking outcomes was the quality and depth of open-ended responses. Customers wrote detailed, expressive feedback in their own words — often in their home language — giving Old Mutual a granularity of insight that structured telephonic surveys rarely capture. Over 2,100 individual written explanations were collected on the follow-up "why" question alone.
The Yazi platform gave Old Mutual's research team real-time visibility into response collection, regional breakdowns, and individual participant journeys — without waiting for a vendor to compile reports.
| Telephonic Surveying | Yazi on WhatsApp | |
|---|---|---|
| Survey delivery | Agent-dialled calls, limited by capacity | Batch WhatsApp sends, 100k+ per day |
| Response window | Must answer during the call | Respond in own time, any hour |
| Open-ended feedback | Agent transcribes verbal answer | Customers type in own words and language |
| Geographic data | Limited to what agent records | Branch and regional data attached automatically |
| Field visibility | Periodic vendor reports | Real-time dashboard with response tracking |
| Reminders | Manual re-dial attempts | Automated follow-ups to non-completers |
| Dual-study management | Separate vendor workstreams | Both studies on one platform |
The pilot demonstrated that WhatsApp surveying can achieve comparable response volumes to telephonic methods while delivering richer qualitative data, automated geographic enrichment, and real-time field visibility. The approach positions Old Mutual to scale across all distribution channels with a process that requires significantly less manual coordination once established.
Customers engaged on a channel they already use daily, in their own time and their own language. The short, mobile-first format reduced the friction of participation — no more scheduling a call or being interrupted at inconvenient times. The result was feedback that was more detailed, more natural, and more representative of the full customer base.
We achieved a 33% response rate on our customer NPS survey through WhatsApp — and the quality of feedback was genuinely different. Customers wrote detailed, thoughtful responses in their own words and their own language. That's a depth of insight we weren't getting from telephonic interviews.
We ran two parallel quarterly research programmes through Yazi — a customer NPS study across nearly 20,000 contacts and an internal employee satisfaction survey — on a single platform. The process largely runs itself once it's set up, and we had real-time visibility into responses from day one. That's a step change from coordinating telephonic fieldwork.
Old Mutual's WhatsApp pilot confirmed that a digital-first survey channel can meet the rigour requirements of an enterprise quarterly research programme while unlocking depth and scale that telephonic methods struggle to match. The 33% customer response rate, 87% message read rate, and thousands of rich verbatim responses demonstrated that WhatsApp is not a compromise — it's an upgrade.
With the pilot covering a single distribution channel, the path to full-scale deployment across Old Mutual's broader advisory network is clear. The infrastructure, the methodology, and the proof points are in place.
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