2x‘ing Value With Promoters Featuring Justin Warren @ Wajax

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Account Experience Podcast. Yeah, it's the podcast where we look and see where B2B businesses measure their customer experience and just, well, make customer magic out of it. And today we're talking to a company that is probably one of the oldest companies we've had on the podcast, founded in 1858. Yeah, we're talking to Wajax. In particular, Justin Warren, who's the senior vice president at wajax, who's responsible for the entire industrial parts and engineered repair services businesses of the company. I hope I've got that right. Justin, you can correct me in a minute, but this is a new role because just before that, you've been working in the voice of the customer. You've been using customer gauge full disclosure to bring that in. And today we're really keen on finding out what happened. And just before I get to Justin, I'd like to say hello to Kerry, my wingman today. How are you doing, Kerry?

Doing wonderful. Hello, everyone.

Carey Self is a regular on the Acade Experience Podcast. I'm actually in his shoes. I took over from him. Gary's got more experience in the customer experience field than anyone I know, and he heads up our education division. And part of, by the way, what we do is. It's really one of our missions, isn't it, Kerry? To bring education to the masses about what we do.

Yeah, definitely. The more, you know, the more empowered you are to help it grow.

Yeah. And that's a really good segue into Justin. Hello, Justin. How are you doing? Thanks for joining us today.

Well, thank you, Adam. I appreciate the opportunity to talk on your podcast. And as an avid listener, it's nice to be able to participate and discuss with you our journey today.

Well, I think you've got a fantastically successful program, so I really want to dig into that today. But the first thing I would like to do is to ground it for everybody. So for those who don't know, those people who've not looked at your website, which is, by the way, full of guys with hard hats on and big machines that Kerry and I really want to drive. Can you tell us a little about wajax, about the company you work for?

Yeah, sure. So wajax, we describe ourselves as really a leading industrial products and services provider serving B2B customers in the construction, resource, industrial and renewable spaces right across Canada. We really organize ourselves around 10 major product categories through an integrated distribution model. I won't go through all of the 10, but it's pretty much everything from Some of the heavy equipment, such as multimillion dollar mining shovels that you described earlier, right through to industrial mill supplies and just about everything in between. But really focused on providing an integrated distribution model based around the needs of our customers in those segments that I talked about.

Yeah, it seems that a lot of your customers are what I would describe as ice road truckers. I hope that's not unfair because I'm so full of admiration for those guys. But is that kind of like rough outback industrial digging stuff out of the ground stuff? Is that a fair characterization?

Yeah, I mean our customers are very hardworking people that. Yeah, our customers really range from everything through to the mining spaces, renewables people working in forestry and a lot of the resource based industries going across Canada. But increasingly we're finding and continuing to grow in certain renewable spaces and the servicing and repair of new areas such as wind for example.

And if we dig into that sort of the services that you're offering your customers, I mean, what is that? I guess it's pretty time critical you have to offer these customers. Time is money. Can you give us a characteristic of the sort of services you might be doing?

Yeah, yeah. So it's so broad because the product we're offering that we provide to the market is so broad. I gave you the kind of two extremes there. So I mean a core principle at Wajax is really that we service everything that we sell. So having equipment perspective, you know, we have a number of locations really across the country, have more than 100 locations and they would span from, you know, everything from a simple stocking location to make sure that we've got product closer to our customers and we're able to service them locally, just given the scale clearly of Canada through to a full scale service facility where we would be perhaps repairing a piece of equipment, would be doing a pre delivery inspection of a piece of equipment through to detailed engineering repair services where we may be working on a customer site, you know, really with a focus on how we can optimize their equipment, their efficiency and really their uptime. So it really is as broad as that.

You've been using Net Promoter as a key indicator of your customer satisfaction or your customers loyalty. How does that manifest itself? What does good service or a good Net Promoter score feel like for one of your clients?

Yeah, we're trying to be very focused in our approach. We started this journey back at the end of 2017 and I think like many companies, you know, we had a, you know, I think we have a pretty good idea of Some of our strengths and our weaknesses. But we really wanted to start down the journey of really trying to more clearly measure and articulate what our customer journey is through our four major different types of way that our customers would interact with us, either through our parts or purchasing a part, purchasing a piece of equipment, providing a shop based service or a field based service. So mapping out those journeys, really trying to understand what are the critical interaction points within those journeys, and then measuring how we're performing in the minds of our customers at each of those clear interaction points and then overlaying that really all with, at an overall net promoter score to understand customer satisfaction. So that's, that's a kind of broad approach to it.

That's great. Now I'm really interested in finding out how you made your personal journey to this because you, you kicked off the program and I'd love to find out how you got into it. And as we go through that, you know what you've been learning from that.

Yeah, sure. So, you know, this is an area that I've always been very, very passionate about. And to give you some idea of the kind of size and scale of what we're talk product, you know, business such as, such as Wajax. I mean we have something like 700,000 transactions with our customers a year. And you know, really when we, when we think about it, you know, depending on, you know, some of those, there may be an average of say, three to four different interactions that we might have with a customer through that individual journey to the point of purchase. So, you know, there's somewhere in between 3 and 4 million different customer interactions that our teams have each year with our customer base. So, you know, the importance of making sure that we provide consistently a good experience for our customers was something that's really important to us and very passionate about. And, and I think as well something that our whole team was very engaged in. I think one of the things that probably really helped us as well is, you know, our teams on the ground are extremely customer focused. So there was actually a real kind of natural desire to really develop a program based around measuring customer satisfaction. But then a real desire to see and understand, well, how are we doing locally, how are we doing at a branch level, how are we doing nationally, how does my region compare to another region? But most importantly, you know, measuring the data is one thing, the most important thing to us is, you know, what you do with it. And how do we kind of focus our efforts as an organization around some very specific improvement priorities that our customers value yeah.

You know, you think about, first off, if you haven't visited the website, go to the website. Adam's right. Because we're not talking about, like, burgers or a hammer or something small. We're talking huge investment. Right. That's very. These businesses, it's at another level. And, you know, and I remember when we talked last, you talked about building this from the ground up. I don't know if that was a pun. It was intended or not, but, you know, you literally built it from the ground up, and it was this whole new premise of, you know, that voice of the customer, how important it is. So I guess hearing you talk and I hear your passion, and I always love hearing you speak about it, but how did you make this important to the rest of the organization? I know it was important for you, and you saw the value of it. And we'll get to leadership here in a minute. But how did you get the team bought in? How did you get them to see the importance in this?

Well, you know, I kind of see this as a journey, and I think there was the underlying recognition. This is very much a people business, is very much a service business. And the quality of the service that our people can provide is absolutely critically important. But I think one of the things that really kind of sets us apart, that ground level, is just that predisposition to providing a great customer experience. So to me, that was kind of half the battle in terms of driving the engagement, in terms of some of the very specific things that we did. You know, we're continually educating our team all of the time. You know, this is, over time, really become ingrained as part of our culture. We want people to really work around the voice of the customer program using a common language, a common understanding. We spent a lot of time training our individual teams so they can understand the program, understand how to interpret the results is something that we talk about all of the time on monthly, all employee calls and town halls. So really, any opportunity to increase the visibility of the program and really share some of the results, both good and bad, because no organization is perfect, has really helped us to kind of propel that forward. But because we have a very kind of customer centric culture at our core, you know, that that journey was actually pretty easy, and there was a lot of thirst for understanding of the results and how we're doing individually and as a company.

Yeah, you know, you used a couple of words in there that just really gets me fired up. Education, communication, results. And we're big on transparency. Right. The more you bring into that loop. So. And I know I'm going to ask this. This is a loaded question, right? But I guess everyone was bought in from day one. Like, everyone was fired up and excited to see that out there. Or did you receive some resistance from the team? Yeah.

So I think what really helped us, to be perfectly honest, is, you know, the kind of. I'd say the first year we really focused on measurement and really kind of getting that baseline and making sure that we have a sufficient kind of proportion of our customer base covered. What we did really in the second year was really, really cool experiences that we have more than 100 locations across the country. And based on the overall feedback, so there's three specific areas of focus that we wanted to look at. We really worked with each individual location to build an action plan specific around those three areas in order to drive that improvement on the ground. And I think that was one of the things that really kind of, you know, it's one thing, you know, somebody going through a course and maybe doing some training, but when you actually get to kind of live it and have to build an action plan and see, okay, how is this going to be relevant to my particular branch location, then it kind of made it more real for everybody. And we went through that process, really through the second year. You know, it's progressed further than that. And we have that, I think, really good baseline of, first of all, understanding the program, making sure that we're driving clear actions from it. You know, really from this point forward, it's really been about, you know, refining the program. You know, a key area where I think, you know, that we love the work that customer gauge does and where we're very well aligned is a clear focus of us is what we call our key accounts program. The traditional approach from an industrial company is very just a B2B approach, but we're more living in a B2B to C, where a lot of our work is really understanding okay with our major customers. You might be talking about 100 or 200 people, not just one company, and really understanding our strengths and weaknesses both from an overall perspective with that particular account, but then also really trying to drill down in terms of, okay, well, what are our strengths and weaknesses with different people within that account? That's where we're really trying to develop and advance the program further. So, you know, we're continuing to try and build on more layers of advancement and. And really recognize, okay, if we want to grow as a business, then the kind of first step in that journey is making sure. That we have really good customer metrics because it's kind of hard to grow an account if there's some underlying issues there as well. So over time, it's become a key part of our growth strategy as well.

Yeah, you hit our key points and I could write a playbook on that. Adam, I'm stealing it. It's perfect. But really taking first year to measure. Right. We talk about this with customers all the time. It's, you know, really listen and understand. Then you have that strategy of that second year and going out and specific plans. That's one of the things in account experience that I think some people get hung up on. They think it's a. It's just a formulated cookie color solution. And it's like, no, these business to business relationships are dynamic and you need to understand everyone that's involved in it and have specific actions.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm going to unpack it a bit more because I also want to pressure on that. Justin, you're saying that you didn't try to boil the ocean in year one, I think is quite powerful because when we. My experience with customers is like, well, why can't we just get going straight away? And there's this culture shift that has to take place. You said about using it for key account managers. I've met some key account managers in my life and well, they have big egos and they're like, I know everything I know about the customer. So you've got this, you know, you've got a tool that aids them, but also is confronting them with the feedback. So, you know, how did you. Can you give me some examples about how you were able to get that to stick in the business and.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I get back to the fundamental, I mean, linking it to, you know, dollars and cents. I mean, we've found one of the things that we've communicated very widely and it's borne out in our sales results each year that, you know, a promoter Wajax or a promoter customer spends more than twice as much as a detractor. And that is a powerful tool and really kind of driving the requisite focus. Okay. We need to shift more of our customers to be in the promoter side of the promoter side of the account. You know, there's a real tangible business value in terms of being able to do that.

Wow, Justin. Let me just see if I got that right. You say a promoter is worth twice as much as a detractor. How did you. First of all, I'm blown away by that, that you've got such a sort of simple but great mnemonic on that one. First of all, how did you calculate that? And second, how is that accepted in the business? Is that now rule of thumb that works?

Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's something that we've been able to compare all of our transactional data and revenue and tie it back to individual customers in customer gauge who have actually responded and the account revenue that they represent. So it was a fairly simple calculation, but it's something, you know, since we first measured that, I think back at the end of 2018, the first full year drive in the program, it's been a measurement that's really stuck fairly consistently. In fact, I think the gap between the amount of annual revenue spent by a promoter versus a detractor, that gap has actually increased over time, which is interesting as well. I think that's one of those, you know, simple messages that we've shared in the organized with the organization that's helped to be, you know, go back to your original question of, you know, how we've been able to get engagement. That I think is something simple that's resonated.

I love that and that. But that's also well accepted in the business. I mean, again, you've got these, these, these tough sales directors that have got an ego. They didn't always like to be shown what the customers are thinking, but they get it. Is that like, you know, well accepted?

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think one of the things that, you know, for me, the value of the program is not only the measurement of customer satisfaction and our baseline, I think what we're just seeing increasingly as we've gone through this journey in terms of the value is actually the follow up. You know, it's those customers who, I mean, we do a telephone follow up with every single detractor and every single passive with an outside organization to really try and provide more context around, you know, the specific issue that they face. And I think, you know, that's one of the way that we've been able to engage the team because that's really created another contact point or an opportunity to interact with a customer. And those always end up as good conversations because even though the customer may have originally been dissatisfied, the fact that first of all their information didn't go into a black hole. Somebody actually read that feedback. Not only did somebody read that feedback, somebody actually took the time to follow up and call the customer. And then the third step in the process is to feed that back to our local sales and branch management team. And then we have to work through and drive an individual close the loop process on each one. So it might be something as simple as maybe it's a learning opportunity for the specific location or maybe there's something a little bit more systemic that we need to go out and fix. So again, it's a way of, while we have these kind of broad areas of focus that we always want to drive continual improvement from an overall perspective, it's a way of localizing the information and feedback and making it very, very specific. And again, I think without talking for our team, that's something that certainly helped from my view, drive engagement.

I love hearing that you're really talking our language. That whole thing about going back to customers, that closing the loop is that virtuous circle.

Yeah, I mean to me that's the, you know, the measurement is one thing, but that's, to me that's just the starting point is what you do with the information. You know, the value only starts to get created when you actually do something with the information. Whereas I think, you know, I've seen perhaps programs before, all of the focus has been on gathering the information and reporting it, not necessarily doing something with it. So that's certainly something that we're very passionate about. I love that.

Action oriented.

So many people get stuck in that measure phase and they can't see the belt out of it, Right?

Absolutely.

So, okay, so I hear you've got success. I hear there's movement and action taking place. And as someone who's done this personally for other large companies, I know it's not an easy task. And I have to ask because I keep hearing the word people multiple times and you brought up a word in there that I want to press on just a little bit. Leadership. So. And I think we all know where we're going because we talk about this all the time. But tell us a little bit about that role in leadership. What have they done to make this easier or harder? But I think it's going to be easier. I have a feeling when it's working, it's working well because of a reason. But tell us a little bit about that. Leadership buy in and support.

Yeah, no, I think it really started from the outset of the project. A lot of our leadership team and key members of our business were involved. You know, it really started with, of a customer journey mapping process and really understanding through the four major customer journeys that somebody would experience with wajax. Really involved from that kind of basic mapping and understanding. Okay. What would create a positive and A negative experience. So having that engagement early on in the kind of design and architecture and feedback on the program was important. But from a company perspective, the focus on the customer and customer satisfaction is a core value is something we talk a lot about within the business, both internally, through some of the things that I talked about through town halls, through continuous communication. Just before I got on this call, we just published our monthly NPS results for right across the business in October. So we can kind of compare very easily where people are. So that kind of constant communication and alignment has been super important as we've gone forward, but then also externally, our net Promoter score. I know there's no hard and fast standard, and Adam and I have spoken about this before in terms of how it's reported, but we certainly communicate our score and our annual report. We talk about our program and we talk about lots of examples of where we've helped customers and the value that they derive of that. So over time, it's just really become a core part of the DNA of the business. And I think it was always there. I think the program has just been a way to kind of, you know, tie a lot of those things that happened anyway because of that nature of the business.

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So was it a bragging meeting? Did the scores. How'd you do?

Sorry to.

I was gonna say the meeting that you're on right before this one, was it a bragging meeting? Did you have. Were the results good?

Yeah. No. I mean our schools have continually improved in time again by focusing on those areas. I think, look, at the end of the day, you can't be everything to everyone. And I think part of the path for us is not only do we do transactional surveying, but we also do relational surveying focusing on customer drivers, which has been really being led by the learnings of working with Customer Gauge. And that's really kind of helps us to hone in on what our customers are telling us are the most important areas for them. So we're not going and focusing on things that perhaps customers don't value or aren't quite as important in the journey to them.

Yeah, sometimes quite hard to do, isn't it? It's very tempting to try and solve it. You know, Justin, keeping a program alive is really hard over a series of years. And one of the things we like to find that people is how they motivate people to do this. Of course, some people are using bonuses to make this work. Maybe it's on net promoter, that sort of stuff. Can you give a characteristic about how people on the front line, are they compensated for net Promoter scores?

No, we thought it was pretty important in our program not to necessarily tie people's compensation to net Promoter score. Nobody really wants to be in the Position where a salesperson is perhaps applying pressure to a customer to score me a 10. So it is part of our executive compensation program for some of the top managers within wajax, but it's not really driven down to the frontline to avoid some of the negative impacts of that.

I think that's a really good organization. So you got it being driven at the top line. So it keeps the focus on it. I just wanted to bring it up because Kerry and I did a recent podcast all about fighting the fear of feedback, and it's really about that. Don't want it to be. Kerry, you've nailed it. It's about weaponizing the net promoter score as a way of beating people up, and I think that's it. Kerry, I know you're as interested about where programs are going to.

Yeah.

And I think, again, being someone that's been in a similar situation and run a program, I know that as great as we're doing, as much celebration, there's always that vision. Okay, what's next? What's in store for our program? Or what would we like to get better at? So, Justin, tell us a little bit about what do you feel comfortable with? What are some areas, and what are some of the focuses that you and the team are working on?

Yeah, I mean, I think from a very tactical level to start off with, then a key thing is continuing to make sure that we work on our response rates and making sure that the coverage that we have in terms of our customer base continues to grow over time. I think we have very good coverage, but you can always get better at that. As we look further into the future, I think there's already a couple of areas we want to continue to utilize the tool in terms of expanding our key account program and getting into some of the things that I talked earlier around, really just understanding some of those drivers and within some of the complexities of working with a very large customer and how do we positively influence more of that customers within a major account to be promoters versus detractors. And then I think, you know, as we go further forward, you know, one of the things that I've always really liked about the customer gauge platform is the ability to kind of link hypothetically increases in revenue based on moving the score over the time. So some of the revenue simulation tools, that's how we get back to what we talked about earlier with what's the average spend of a promoter versus a detractor? And really trying to drive some of those models forward and get those better dialed in. So those are some of the things that in our immediate horizon we're working on.

It's really good to hear. I think that getting that value in front of people just really works. However you do it, I think it's really good. Justin, thinking back over your last few years as you've driven the program, you know, I just want to say here, you've now been promoted. You are now people that run the program for you. Congratulations on that. What are some of the things that you learned personally on that journey?

Yeah, no, I think, I mean several things really. I mean I think the, you know, the communication and the alignment is just super important. And I think it's almost to the point of over communicating what we're doing. Making sure that there's understanding, you know, not really kind of resting on our laurels, making sure that we've got kind of, you know, if you think you've communicated it too many times, communicate it once more. You know, really driving that understanding. You know, we've really made sure that we don't just kind of train people once or walk away. You know, we continually training teams, I think sharing successes, good and bad, and the bad ones are tough because I think, you know, sometimes there's a tendency, in the early days perhaps we were following up on that feedback and closing the loop for people to be kind of defensive. And I think over time we've been able to start to overcome that and make people realize that we're in the business of managing people's perceptions and that's the most important thing. It doesn't matter what we think is an organization. It's really what our customers think because they make purchase decisions every day based on their perception of our performance. And so that's been kind of super important as well. And then I think the other thing is probably fairly unique for us. I mean we have a very, very diverse product range. Most of the products extremely technical in nature. One of our competitor differentiators is really our expertise. And one of the areas that we're really trying to continue to focus on is how do you provide a consistent experience. We talk about more than 100 locations, 10 major product categories, everything ranging from very sophisticated multimillion dollar mining shovel through to simple industrial supplies. So how do you consistently connect the customer with the right person that can help them quickly, efficiently and to make sure that the person that you connect with has the relevant expertise. And that's something that we continue working on as well.

I love that. To hearing that, you know, your focus on people is quite incredible. When you Think, you know, again, if you look at the website, you've got these big machines on there, these big horny guys in hard hats and you know, it's almost like we have feelings too. And I think it's really wonderful you're leveraging that to really dig into it. And of course, you know, it is a people business where you are. You've got to rely on somebody to do that. I just also wanted to add one other thing. We gave wayjax an award for follow ups and I just wanted to call that out. As far as I can tell, you're still following up 100% of all your detractors and passives. Yeah, exactly. I should have said that. And that is a fantastic achievement. And I think you've really got a great template here that many other industrial companies can follow. You really listen to the customers, you go back to them with the feedback, you measure it. You've brought everybody along and it's driven from the top. I don't know what you think, Kerry. It sounds like a pretty perfect program to me, don't you think?

Yeah. You said industrial. I would say there's all kinds of companies out there. Whatever industry you're in, there's some best practices there. And, and again, Justin, just congratulations. I always love celebrating with you guys and hearing what you guys are doing.

Justin, thank you so much for joining us today on the Account Experience podcast. I think you're a real exemplar of driving an Account experience business. Thank you. And best of luck in your new role. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me. Enjoy talking with you today.

I.