Building a World Class Experience Program at DHL Supply Chain

Hello again, it's the Account Experience podcast. I'm here with my co host Camilla Scholten. Hello Camilla. We have such an exciting thing coming up today. You know the way that most of the podcasts you hear, they've got consultants or analysts talking about the whole CX experience.

Yeah.

Well, today we've got a real insider. I know somebody who really drives a program. I think it's a world class program and I really excited to hear about this.

I'm also very, very grateful that he joins us because he really is sort of a power behind the throne voice, really instrumental to making a program very successful. So I think there's a lot of really great experience and tips and tricks that we can learn from.

We've seen Marcus on stage before. He was the star, one of the stars of our monetize event in Amsterdam and that was two years ago. So already the program has matured since then. I'm really excited about it.

I think he's secretly also proud.

I think so, yeah. So I'll just tell you, we'll talk about Marcus job title. He's the vice president of what they call the cdo which is the customer development organization within DHL Supply Chain. And you know the yellow vans that we see around, well, this is the, you know, the whole supply logistics, B2B part of their business and it's big, it's like $12 billion.

So it's huge.

Yeah.

So I'm really excited to find out how they manage this with their customers.

Me too.

Let's go find out.

Ok. Welcome Marcus, thanks for joining the podcast today.

Thank you. Thank you, Camilla. Thank you, Adam and really happy to be here. Hi.

Hey. So rather than me tell everybody about DHL Supply Chain, maybe you can tell us a little bit about the company and tell us about your role in it.

Yes, sure. So DHL Supply Chain is one of the divisions of dhl, I think mostly known for the parcel business. But DHL Supply Chain is actually the largest contract logistics provider in the world. So we manage in over 50 countries, 1500 locations. For our customers it's B2B business. And this ranges from procurement service to completely for pl outsourcing of your logistics supply chain.

So Markus, I think we've known each other for some time but for the audience it would be great to share sort of like the journey to where you got to here. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Yes, sure. So actually I started as a consultant at DHL who's running an internal management consultancy. From this I moved into One of the divisions obviously into DHL supply chain and always was in the area of self sufficiency, efficiency and sales operations. And in this function we actually already run survey, a customer survey, which was not the most agile one. And actually it was where my predecessors who started then the customer experience management program, which means we switched from a survey which was taking place every second year to a quarterly survey. And I think kudos goes to my predecessors. When I was leading the team, I think we continued the great work and we made it grow and professionalized, digitalized it further year over year and could really see it grow and be more successful.

Yeah, that's I think what won you an award. So you can say you have been very successful.

That's astonishing. So first of all, you went from doing it every two years to eight times as frequently to once every quarter. I mean, how does something like that impact you, the business internally and then also customers?

I think it was time for a change and I think this was listening to the customers and because we were just too slow, we got the first responses in and then after three months we would go back and had a lot of paper to work with. And I have to admit that, I mean during my whole time at DHL or my professional life, I've never seen something with such a tremendous change in a culture and in a business. Probably through the agility we created, but also through the transparency we created. So our survey is non anonymous and we can follow up and we do follow up with each and every one, which is then, yeah, I guess the big secret of the whole attention and the cornerstone is right now in the business within the last five years.

Okay, I really want to pick this apart a bit more. You know what a detail freak I am. So you're, you're surveying multiple people in each account. So how many people? How do you pick them? Can you, can you tell us really dive into the nuts and bolts of the program?

Yes, sure. I mean how do we pick them? We really have a button up approach. This is a little bit button up, top down. So we do have coordinators in all of our countries. We have some on regional level obviously we have seen on global level, which is then the global team, my team. And we nominate them kind of everybody can nominate them. We have a few, few review cycles through it, but we're really knowing kind of because people in the business know who to ask best in the end. And when we nominate them, we always assign also follow up owner to them. So every one of our nominations has a dedicated DHL person behind who probably works closest with our customers or with the specific contact. And this is all what we maintained digitally with our tech suite as a backbone. Cross check, validate. And then every quarter this goes on. And I would say every quarter, I mean you're still not at the end, I would say. But we see that every quarter we add around net 200 to 300 new contacts on our survey.

Wow. So it's growing as well.

It is growing.

And so they get nominated from the, from the sales or the frontline teams across.

It can be a complete mixture. We do not make a difference who can nominate. I mean we usually know who's nominating. Yes, we have some central people coordinators in the countries who probably do bulk of the work, but we do not limit it to anyone. But we kind of control again the list who's on it.

But I love that that makes it also very inclusive. So that probably also helps with the kind of the adoption in the organization because people are all responsible for bringing forward who can be serving.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I guess it's a little bit. I mean this is probably where we have advantage that we had a survey in the previous year and we were known. So the survey was not new. And I think the concept of having a follow up owner of getting high response rate, this was all kind of already there. Also the way of elimination, we just made it more agile and switched that. And I think in the combination with transparency, it's just a huge success.

I think all these are linked together because I mean, for me you've got. There are two phenomenal statistics that come out of your program. Number one is that you have this incredibly high response rate and contacts in the region of 60% which is world class. And then you've got this 100% follow up of detractors within 48 hours. I think there's some magic about the two things that work together to really do it. And then for me, the astonishing thing is that then you're doing it every quarter. I mean this is like a, this is a real machine you've built.

I think I can actually correct you on behalf of Marcus. I don't think you guys do only follow up with detractors, do you?

No, we do follow up with everyone.

Yeah.

So when we started, we do follow up with everyone. We set our timelines to two working days for detractors, seven for anyone else. So this is where we want to be in contact with our customers.

So there you go guys. That the audience out there listening, that's your New job.

Okay. So a lot of the, you know, sometimes when I go into customers or read on LinkedIn that there's this thing called survey fatigue. And yet you are reaching out four times a year, multiple people in the organizations with a phenomenally high response rate. How do you keep that machine rolling the whole time?

It is some effort, so some dedication of the team. And this is, I think where we all really look in the nomination, how we do that. I mean we're really very much caring about survey fatigue and these things. So it's not that it might be that we not interview every interview center survey, there's no interview, but that we do not send a survey every quarter to the same person. So we're very sensitive about these things. But we all see that our customers appreciate it and once they've been onboarded and this is also what the numbers show, that our customers who are onboarded on the program usually show higher loyalty scores, higher satisfaction scores than our newly onboarded customers. Which does not mean that, as I said, we are still onboarding new customers. We want more, we want to have an unbiased feedback. But indeed we see that this process is being also accepted, I think by our customers and they're getting used to it. And this is also what you can see in the comments.

Right. And so in terms of the follow up, is that like, is there anybody in your organization that does that follow up?

It could be anyone. It could be anybody. We take special, special care about what we call low scoring detractors. So very low numbers or also very positive feedback where we involve our senior management. So usually follow up by low scoring factors should involve or should be done by a senior manager. But as we do not only want to have it one sided, we also share very positive feedback. Feedback of our customers with the same senior management.

Yeah, I think even very senior. Right. I remember one anecdote that you shared a long time ago, but it was I was wondering if your CEO is still calling customers.

It might be our CEO as well as my manager as well as myself. We get daily report out of customer gauge and what I can say, they have been daily looked at. And my manager is actively involved in chief growth officer of DHL supply chain. He's involved in making sure that follow up timelines are being met. This is why we established alerts, push emails, all these kind of things.

Yeah, I think that's actually amazing. It still makes me giggle that that happened in your organization that you know, just out of the blue your CEO picked up the phone and that Must have unsettled quite a few people. But I also think why I mention it is because I think it's inspirational to a lot of organizations. Because if that's the kind of buy in that you have, you know that what you're doing is really taken seriously. Right. So might have shaken a few people up, but it also motivates.

Absolutely, absolutely. No, I think we live and breathe this in the company and I said, if you think about that CXM, how we call it customer experience management started in 2016, rolled out very small and it's one of the cornerstones. It's one of the known elements internally. Definitely this supply chain, where this is almost a KPI like any other key KPI we have, any other metric we are looking at.

Yeah, that's really impressive that it's just as important as all of the other business makes you've got. I think that. I think it's a real credit to what you've done with your team, Marcus, that you've made this so sticky and that this is really part of the customer relationship experience DNA you have. It's really quite, quite something. Can you share any tips and tricks about how to make it so sticky?

Yeah, sure. There are many things, but I think starting with it is that it is not just my team and it's really. I said also when in the award ceremony, I think it's in the end it's everybody at DHL supply chain, but obviously the ones who are actively involved and looking at the feedback and acting on it. And then I said we made it really a cadence. We really made it part of our. Yeah, I also refer to it as a machine. So I think it's on one side, it's a machine. We keep going and growing. But we at DHL supply chain have also the continuous improvement mentality. So we do not just keep it where it is, we continuously want to make it better. So also internally better for our people to use it. And these are then small things. Where can we get an alert here? Can you get a different report on it? Can we put senior management differently on it? So. So it's more and more involved in all what we do.

It's great to hear about the details of the program, but this is not just a nice to have in your business. There is a commercial, direct commercial imperative as to why you do this. Are you able to speak a little bit about what the business impact of this has been in DHS supply chain?

In the end, in DHL supply chain as well as dp, DHL Group, we believe in our three bottom lines which are our strategy bottom lines, so investment of choice, provider of choice and employer of choice. And I think we strongly believe that there's a virtual cycle. So if you're successful in the one, you will be successful in the other. And I think with CXM we have all the ingredients to listen to our many of the ingredients, I would say to listen to our customers and get this right, which in the end, you know, makes our results with the customer looking better and in the end then also make our employees happier because in the end it's more fun to work for a satisfied customer. So indeed we see that when this all comes together. And I know we talked a few years ago about benchmarks and I think the answer we got at this time, who is ahead of 50 is a good company, now we are around 50, we've been ahead of 50 already. We are striving for more and business is doing good right now.

In your profile you describe yourself as being able to combine green and blue capabilities. I'm really curious as to what you mean by that.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with these color types, but there are these personality tests and so on where you have blue stands for more data driven, structure driven, yellow for being more innovative. Think about the company color here. And green in the end is more emotion, the social factor. And I think this is also what we drive through cxm. It's a complete digital or widely complete digital survey or program we're doing. Nominations happen only in the system, the survey, the feedback, we all link it together with our CM tool. So we have a lot of data which we leverage and combine with the other company data we have. And this is also, I think something where we just embark on the journey, but there's more to come or more ideas what we can do. And on the other side, like the exam, it's about the emotional part. I mean listening to the one on one feedback we get by our customers, we have a comment rate which we are also very proud of, of 50%. So every second survey participant leaves a comment which is a direct feedback and it's probably the best we can get beyond the score. This is direct feedback, this is emotional, this is I think where you need to take people emotionally with you and then you still have the power of the data in combination, I think, which makes this a very powerful combination.

So you read every comment, right?

We read every comment, yes.

I think that's worth mentioning because I really appreciate you calling it out because I think we sometimes forget that, you know, emotion is like a scary word, but in the comments is actually a lot of the times the gold dust because that's the immediate hook that you can use for any conversation. So even if you find it scary to call an angry customer, you've got something to start the conversation with.

So we are extremely proud and appreciate. And this is. Our customers are directly telling us this channel their feedback, the scores, one thing ticks one thing. But we get direct feedback. And this can be almost like half a letter long or so.

I remember some of yours and I remember that we were joking about there was some requests from some other customers to cat the text, but we never wanted to do it because we felt like once somebody's on a roll, let them finish, there's nothing worse than suddenly, then you've run out of characters.

The trick is, and this is again where I want to come back to the excellence of your program because you're showing the customers every time, whether it's attract or a pressable promoter, that you are listening. So you're reinforcing that communication loop. Again, I want to come back to that. I mean, how do. That's quite rare. We don't see that with many other companies. So how do your customers react to that? Are they invested in it?

Are they.

How do they work?

I think they are. I mean, you see a lot of revenue where we see. They already think in quarterly cadence sometimes. Yeah. So we got better than the last time or last quarter. So. So I think they are on board with it. And this is also where we strive. So we have our benchmarks. We want to have a certain degree of our. I mean, we want to have a significant coverage of our business being onboarded. We think it's one of the basics you should do when you work with a customer to onboard them on this program. And we see. I said the ones who are on it, we are. They are not only more loyal, we see this as also mentioned in our business numbers. They are also indeed more loyal to us. Even the ones who might not be so happy, the ones who are on it are quite successful.

Yeah. And you already said it earlier, your score's been going up gradually over time quite nicely. So I think it also, even on the. On the blue side, you get the proof from it. Right. So that was the whole matching it. So it's not just getting caught up in a feedback that's maybe sometimes even anecdotal, but it's marrying it up with the data that you can do over Time, which I think is also right.

And the feedback goes to the one who's immediately responsible or can take an action. And that's a great thing where in the past we created reports on a customer level in a certain country which again took maybe three months and again it was not such bad process but it was the best we had at the time, I guess. But now you have it immediately out there. It goes directly to the person, they can immediately take an action on it.

Yeah, it's federated at the front to really. To the front of the business.

Yeah. And we can see what happens because yeah, we keep them on. So obviously I said we are reviewing our nominations but if the customer is still there and wants, we keep them on. So once you're in, you're very happy to stay.

Yeah, yeah. Do you also sort of like. So apart from the follow up, just curiosity, do you send like email type newsletters? Like these are the things that we heard, these are the things that we've changed or that we're working on or to our customers?

Not in a large scale. No, we are. I think it's a combination of both. I think we are proud of what we achieving here. I think I said we are striving for more. We still have this continuous improvement mind. So I think that. I think our first, I think our paradigm is we do this for the customer and maybe secondly it comes to, yeah, let the world show how good we do that. But in the end we are taking care about individual customers as such. And then our customers are maybe a little bit diverse where we need to see how we tackle and get the answer to everybody of them. So it's more about individual solutions, but not necessarily one where we could say this is now what you've done. You told us we did. Because it's indeed difficult to apply certain things to a very heterogeneous business.

I think you're very humble, Markus. I love that about you. But I think this attention to detail, it really says a lot about your company. And I'm certain that your clients that work with you really also feel that as well. The fact that you're taking their voice seriously means that they're being taken seriously in other part of the business. I think it's a real part of the trust equation that you guys are.

Building and also probably very fitting for your model. So I guess that certain examples like you just said, don't apply to everybody. I was just curious about that. So it's kind of like how did you model out your program? And you Seem to know very well what works, what you want to do at the moment, what is important and what fits the DHL culture, the DHL supply chain culture.

One thing when you talk about process, I think this is something which comes very natural to us and that's probably indeed when it comes to DHL supply chain. Yeah, we like processes and I think you want to be good at it. So indeed when I've been at your conference and you said you have such a great process, I was like yeah, but how do you do it without a process? What's the special thing about it? But I think I slowly get it and how we build it out it is I think we work it out together with our regional counterparts. So it's indeed the same what we do kind of with our customers we do internally. So I perceive especially my team as a service all must as a provider to our regions, to our country managers to listen to their customers. And this is how we position it. So when we evolve our program it's about doing it so that they can serve best for their customers with keeping obviously the customer in mind or even the customer on top. So we want to do obviously to get unbiased feedback from the customer but we want to allow and put our regions countries managers in a position to easily digest this information. And that's where we do a lot of communication when we onboard new coordinators, people, new follow up owners. We have calls with hundreds of people who we drive through the process as we call it, what's important when you nominate and what's important when you follow up. We have central areas where we share all the information, kind of guidelines. How do you follow up these kind of things? We have elearning trainings how to use the tools. So there are many things and they all evolved over time and what has been maybe a webex in the past is now in E learning and what wasn't important in the past is now more important and we try to listen as well and evolved.

Did you also because that whole internal piece of bringing every on board and educating everybody and getting everybody to a certain standard so that they can understand what's expected of them. Do you also benchmark because you mentioned benchmarking in terms of the actual scores and the results that you drive. But do you internally share data like somebody doing really well or parts of the business doing really well, is that something that you use?

We exchange, we have something we call best practice calls. So we are a strong believer that a lot of innovations not necessarily only comes from the central team or any central team. But also comes a lot from the people actually working on that. So we use these best practice calls where our managers, I mean the people involved in customer gates share they are examples and that can be from ranging from an account manager who uses the feedback in their business review with the customer towards a country which has a certain report built up and you know, using CXM or as part of a strategic workshop internally. So we share these and we. We have a recognition program especially in the beginning where we also have an internal reward who's doing the best follow up or the closest loop. But I think the more we mature it's still going on and we still appreciate it. I think it was maybe something in the beginning but now it's so much business as usual that it's still going on. But I think it doesn't have the same prominence because. Because we know it's what we want to do.

So you've really embedded it into your business process and therefore awards and all the ceremonial things have become less necessary.

Yeah, I would say so. I would say so. We still do. But I think it's. And be up for it. Don't get me wrong. But I think it doesn't have the same prominence anymore as when we started.

I like that because. So. But would you recommend doing it to anybody starting a program now? Would you say it is quite a good way to get buy in? You said your one top tip was get everybody involved. Right. It's like make sure it's not just one team but it's everybody in the business. Would you recommend doing something like an award ceremony or.

Definitely, but. Definitely. And I said but because I think it needs to be relatable because in the end our follow up owners are the people in the country working closely with the customer. And while I'm part of the sales organization, most of our follow up owners are not. And an appreciation from an executive manager in another function might be even be surprising. It's great. But how do you relate to it? You know, so I think the more you can make it even the local thing where the country manager or the, you know, the country management appreciates the better, I guess. But what we've keen on. Exactly. And this is probably also how we want to do it. We develop this concept together with the regions and kind of standardize it and then every region still has their freedom how to apply it but use the same awards so to say the same certificate.

You know Marcus, I'm really reflecting on the way that you've built this whole process with the customers, where you've gone with agile, I'm really admiring it and it really brings to mind to me the sort of Kaizen manufacturing process that was pioneered by Toyota, which is about bringing continual quality improvement into the business. To me, I think you're at the pioneering edge of customer management by putting this process and this continual feedback loops inside and outside the company. Is that something that you're striving towards.

And.

Is a deliberate movement towards that?

I think Kai, then it's definitely something we internalize. At dhl, we call it first choice. We do it for our operations and I think that's why quite naturally we apply very similar methods to what we do on a customer experience management. We do think actually that customer experience management is only one part of customer management. So we do think it's important. There are other elements to it like planning to all the customers, account ownership and customer ownership. But it's definitely one element we believe which is essential and also guru. And when I call it basics, it is one of what we internally call basics towards our customers.

Yeah, I think having the metrics on that is something that you should feel very, you know, as a company should feel very proud about. It's really impressive.

Yeah. I'm just curious, in all of this year, maybe specifically what are you most proud of when you look back at your program to today?

As probably many things, but indeed I think I'm most proud of that we, especially in the special times, we could be so close to the voice of our customers. So through our quarterly survey, it really enabled us to get direct feedback. You know, when the pandemic started last year, we got feedback in and most of the feedback was amazing. How we treated the DHR supply, supply chain, health and safety help them to keep the business up. And I think this is where I'm extremely proud of being part of the company who achieves that.

I'm most proud, I think from our side as a company, Camilla, that we were able to give Marcus the award.

Yeah.

For best in class account experience. Again, you know, the phenomenally high response rate. Awesome. Close the loop rate. This is something you should really be proud of and probably goes with the DHL slogan together, unstoppable. Really great to work with you, Marcus and the team. Really awesomely impressed by you and thanks for coming by today and sharing the secrets with us. We really appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you.

I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

Wow, that was a great, great session. What were your key takeaways from this?

Well, I love the way that Marcus is very humble about what he's built there or the company is, for me, it's this whole process about embedding customer feedback into the whole account management process. That's not to be taken lightly. That is so hard for businesses to do. And I think that is really overlooked and very impressive. The business.

Yeah, he was trying to sort of let go. What's the big deal about that?

Yeah.

I think what I also really liked was that they've made Net Promoter just part of their financial monitoring and the performance monitoring of their company. And if you go back to when we started, that was actually a whole idea that we had with Net Promoter. It was this whole way that you could manage performance and monitor performance beyond just a nice soft score. So they've really done that. They've made it part of their heart metrics that they monitor. And I like that. What did you think of his top three tips? They were golden. It was like, get everybody involved and then it's like, make it kind of like a cadence. So do it very regularly and predictably. And then it was that whole continuous improvement, small and big. So don't just focus on one thing, but just make it part of your improvement process.

Yeah, I think those are gold.

Yeah.

And again, delivered in such a calm way.

Matter of fact. Yeah.

I took away a couple of other things, which for me, I wrote down the way that they started small and they just moved in an agile way. I mean, they went from doing it every two years to four times a year, which is amazing also that they were bringing in the best practice from around the place. So it wasn't necessarily driven from the center. It's like, who's got the best idea? And yet it's driven from the top. So these things are, as you say, really taken seriously by the CEO. And at any time somebody from the top might call a customer. So really an incredible program to learn from. I'm also really excited to see where they're going to go because these folks are really out there. They won the award.

Well, 100%. Closing the loop.

Yeah.

In 48 hours. That's a story.

The tractors, 48 hours, everybody else, seven days. I think that that is just. That is world class.

Yeah, it really is. That's really impressive. Well, really excited to do that. Thanks for joining me today, Camilla. And we got loads more guests coming up on the Account Experience podcast, but really, that was a real corker of one today.

Yeah.

What was it again, the award was called that he won the Legend Award. Yeah, yeah. It was a legend podcast. Thank you.