How Briggs Went From Single Digit Response Rate To Over 20% In 8 Months

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Hi, my name is Adam Durrell. Welcome to another edition of the Account Experience podcast. I'm joined here today by Liam Prince. Hi, Liam, how you doing?

Hi, Adam. I'm doing great, thanks. How are you?

I'm wonderful today. Welcome to to the podcast, Liam.

Thank you.

You've been a member of the team for a few years now and really dug into the sort of customer success. And I'm really delighted because you brought along a guest today from one of your customers.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm here today with Briggs and we're really excited to talk about their customer experience program.

Oh, I'm really excited as well. So I'm here to introduce our guest today on your behalf. And our guest today is Gemma Bellow. And Gemma's been with Briggs for quite a long time, I think 18 years, which is quite an experience in that she is the head of customer relations, especially for the key account managers, and also she runs customer experience Specialists in England and Wales. Hello, Gemma. Welcome to the Account Experience podcast.

Hello. Good to be here. Thank you.

And you work for a company that is about as B2B as it gets. Briggs Equipment, can you introduce about the company and about what it does?

Yeah, sure. So Briggs Equipment, we're an asset management and engineering services. We look after a varied range of fleet equipment. One of our key strap lines is we put safety first. It's really important to us and we like to keep business moving. So with everything that we do, equipments that we've got out there, 55,000 assets, 600 plus mobile engineers, customer service and experience, we deliver is really important to us.

And you're really keeping the country going, aren't you?

Yes. Well, what would you do without Fort Lift Truck moving? Every lorry that you see on the motorway, it's been loaded, probably been loaded up by a 40th truck or some machine that we maintain and support.

So, I mean, that's pretty important, right? Getting all of that infrastructure moving means that you've. I'm guessing here, you've got to deliver on time and, you know, get the right equipment to the right people. So I'm guessing customer experience is a pretty important part of what you guys do.

Definitely. We, we have to put the customer at the heart of what we do with. Without their equipment running, without clear lines of communication and repair updates, service scheduling, you know, customers are affected. We have to keep their operation moving.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, you really captured it there by just saying they're at the heart of everything you do and making sure that we're capturing their feedback. And that's everything that we've been doing together over the recent times since we met, I think in November or December last year. I think it was Gemma, wasn't it?

Yeah, it's really important to us and that's how my role has come about. I've been at Briggs for 18 years this year. But the management of our customer experience Specialist is a brand new role that started in October last year and that was really brought in and invested upon to get a feel of what our customers are feeling, what are they saying about us? Where can we improve? That's why it's really important to us.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think I took over the Briggs account myself before you were really involved. And there was a bit of a struggle there, I'd say, to get much traction and get much from anyone within Briggs. There was maybe a lack of ownership of the program itself and then there was a bit of a company restructure, I believe, towards the end of 2020, and that saw you move towards this customer experience role. You got a team underneath you to work with that are in the platform every day. So was that a big outcome from that restructure in 2020 to really put some focus back into customer gauge? Like, say, you've been with us for five years or so, but before then anyway. And really we've seen a massive shift in focus from BRICS in the last eight or nine months, I'd say, without.

A doubt, on the back of reflecting throughout Covid and the Pandemic, you do take a look at yourselves and you realise, what do we want to change? Where can we improve? And it's quite proud, really, the fact that Briggs equipment invested in such a role where we care about the customer's experience and to invest in a team that can dedicate that time to the NPS surveys, to delivering the feedback to our internal colleagues within Briggs, and not only that, to look at continuous improvement of where we can start to fix root causes that keep reoccurring.

Yeah, absolutely. I think we've done done a fantastic job of getting you guys up to date with how to use the platform. And, you know, everyone in the team has put in a lot of effort to clean up your data and make sure that we're following up, you know, not just with those detractors, but actually with. With all of your respondents as well. Whether that be just a quick thank you note to some of the promoters or even. Even. Even more than that as well. So you guys split the roles and responsibilities into cells. So you have a customer experience specialist in each different cell, is that correct?

Yeah. So we. Into regions, so north, east, south and west. And we have some specialist cells as well that look after bespoke equipment. So it really gives the customer experience specialists an opportunity to build strong relationships within those regions. And that could be from the planners dispatching engineers right through to the engineers that are on the front line, you know, fixing and servicing our customers equipment.

So, Gemma, was there an impetus that made a change in your program from the outside? And it looks like you went through a big uptick in the. In the things that you were doing. Was. Was that Covid related or was there a management impetus? Can you give us some color on that?

I think it's. I think the pandemic played a big part and the fact that, you know, we've had a strategy within, within Briggs Equipment where we've got to focus on the customers. You know, when I've listened to other podcasts and everybody talks about numbers and revenue and profit, but really if you get it right with your customers and they're happy, then guess what, they're going to stay with a company that they're getting the service and support from. So retention is key to us. And I think tying NPS with retention is what will keep, you know, our customers going and us, you know, without customers, we, we wouldn't operate.

And did you see that as you went through the pandemic that, you know, that kind of looking after clients helped you through it?

Yeah. I mean, if you think with rental of your forklift trucks, you know, bit like your mortgage, they're paying for a monthly fee and a lot of our customers, like everybody, they were parked up, customers closed down temporarily. So we supported a lot of our customers with holiday payments and breaks in their payments, which helped them out massively. And we had some great feedback from the support that we provided at that time. So I think it does make you realise and reflect that we need to take more notice of what our customers are saying and not to take it personally. You know, you've got to take the emotion out of it. It's not a personal attack on anybody individually. That feedback is there. You would rather know about it and you can fix it than a silent customer who says nothing.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely bang on, Gemma. And I think it's a conversation that we have with a lot of customers that when you're implementing this, when you get a response and it might be about a job that you've done in particular, they're not Putting blame on a specific person. And no one inside that company is going to turn around and point the finger at any one person. They're blaming the company as a whole, probably. And it's very much, you know, making sure that what's the company not done to support that person, to do the job, to get a 10 from that customer, rather than what's that individual done themselves. So I think it's a great reflection of the culture there that you have at Briggs that you turn around and say that and there's nothing that one individual has done. It's a company as a whole.

Yeah, I was going to echo that, what you described, Jem. It's quite a mature program really. You know, when you're talking about. Well, I like to say feedback is a gift. Right. You know, but it's like, but it's not always easy. People do take it personally. How did you get through that in the company? Was that through education or examples? Can you tell us some, you know, how you manage, how you steered the program through?

It's important to share case studies with, you know, how have we changed something from when a customer has flagged an issue and it's turned into a positive? I think that's really important. Where we've been able to demonstrate that through sharing and retraining through our. We have an internal magazine that goes out, chatter magazine sharing the communications through those channels and just regular communications with, with the people, with all key stakeholders to just reflect and remind them that it's positive to gain some feedback. And you know, in most cases, if we've got a forklift truck, for example, on a five year contract and it's due to come to an end. As a sales executive within our business, you would want to know where they've scored us, you know, in the last five years. It helps with forecasting. You know, are they happy with brics? Are we doing everything well or do we need to look? Is there room for improvement to help with our forecasting of our renewals as well?

I like that. So you're helping, you're using the NPS to help forecast. Do you also give the feedback to your frontline key account managers and does that help with their day to day job when they're dealing with customers?

Yeah. So we share the data in a variety of formats through daily comm sales, through monthly reports that are shared within our business and the whole business. And it's important that engineers see this feedback as well. They're the ones who, they're the ones, they're the drivers they get fantastic feedback. They're the ones that help the customer get their machine up and running when they've got four or five wagons that could be queuing up that haven't been unloaded. So it's important that we get the key stakeholders buy in. That's really, really important. And we do that as well. There's another method that we use to encourage that buy in. If a customer scores us a 9 or a 10 and there's a personal mention to an engineer or a sales exec or a key account manager, we send thank you letters internally and also load it to what we call a perform review. So when that person has their one to one with their manager, they get to see that feedback as well, which is really important that it's shared at that level.

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I wanted to move on a little bit and chat a bit about your response rate, Gemma, and I don't know if you're happy with me calling out your response rate. I'm sure Todd can probably edit your actual numbers out if you don't want them shared publicly. But we were in, let's say, single figure response rates back in 2020 when I first took over the program. You know, there wasn't, not really many people looking at it, not no one looking at optimizing the open rate of your emails, changing the content of your emails. We're now seeing, you know, 20% plus at times in your response rate in some of the recent months. So it'd be great to hear, you know, some of the stories about what we've done together actually to really push up your response rate. And you guys have been, you know, really welcoming of suggestions and it was great to have that, you know, willingness to look at something that was really a very, very low response rate and how it's progressed over and the hard work that you've done and the team have done as well with their different ways to making sure that, you know, the response rate for Briggs is now a lot higher than it was before.

Yeah, that's one of the. I'm really proud of where the response rate has gone. When we started this journey, I was more worried and concerned about the response rate than I was the actual score because I really wanted customers to reply and not only reply, but leave comments. That's where it's most powerful, where we can act and do something about those responses. So we changed the letter introducing the customer experience specialists. As Liam said before, it had become a bit dated. We'd had the program for a number of years and not really changed much. So we introduced the customer experience within the letter itself and we also introduced an incentive. So linked to our charity of the year, which this year is Prostate Cancer UK. We incentivised by every survey completed, we donate 5 pound to prostate cancer. So already just through surveys alone, we're over the 4,000 pound mark. And as a business, it's contributed to £35,000 so far this year, which is fantastic. And we've had some lovely comments from customers that have, you know, they've said, oh, great, not only have I been able to provide feedback, but I've given £5 to a charity that's really close to my heart. So it's been a win, win, really revamping and getting the responses up.

I love what you've done with this program, Gemma. I think you've really got great template here and the fact that you're doing this giving back to charity also says that you value the responses from your customers as well. I'm really very impressed by the way that you transform this. I know how difficult this culture change is to take. This is a great template you've got. So apart from the mechanics, I mean, what are some of the things that you've learned from this as you've gone along?

I think it's important to keep it fresh. Don't just stick to a particular letter for years like we had done previously, update it, refresh it with what's going on in the world. We've just done another bit of a revamp because a lot of people are coming out of the quarantine, the lockdown, more businesses are opening up. So we're trying to keep it fresh in that sense. And as well, the team themselves, the customer experience specialists, do personal chases. So rather than just them going out via the customer gauge platform, they personalise the chases as well. And we do get quite, quite a high response rate on the back of those personal chases.

Yeah, I think that was two things that I was going to highlight that I think as we've done as well recently and that's, you know, the team that you have are really fantastic at following up with almost every non respondent with a personalized email using those non response links that you can pull out of the customer gauge platform. And that's definitely contributed to what we've seen as almost four times increase in your response rate over the past eight or nine months. I think another really nice thing that we've started doing recently is the quarterly summaries that we do as well with the manual campaigns, making sure that everyone that doesn't respond gets an email to say, because you're not following up with those customers. You don't close the loop with a customer that doesn't respond unless you send them these manual campaigns. You do these fantastic summaries reiterating the fact that you're doing these donations to charity and telling them how much you've raised, but that they could have raised more if they'd actually responded themselves. And also, you know, summarizing the learnings that you've had from that past quarter and not, not just doing that with your respondents, but also the non respondents. And I'm sure that this is one of the key contributing factors to helping boost that response rate. We see around a 35 or 40% open rate from the non respondent still of that manual campaign that we run out through Customer Gauge.

I've just got one supplementary query on that and that is that how is the program valued by your top management team? Is this something that is, you know, I know you said about some of the internal things, but is this something that your management talk about as part of their, you know, weekly or monthly meetings?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's another proud moment really for me. I was invited to present to our exec team a few months back and talk about nps, what our customers are saying, customer concerns. So it was great for me to basically bring them up to speed with the new role because it was brand new. We built the customer experience specialist role from nothing and to share with them, you know, what, what our customers are saying, what are we doing with the letter, how we're improving the score, the response rate. So it's been a joy really for them to be involved and I've actually got a follow up meeting arranged with my director and the managing director to discuss as part of our strategy moving forward. So it's exciting.

I think that's great. Now let's try and bring it out to the community because lots of people will just be looking at your program going, that is exactly what I want. So could you pass on a couple of tips to people who are maybe struggling to get their program to the same level of maturity as you? Anything you think are silver bullets to work on.

I think the passion within the role is really important. I mean, the team that I have working for me are, they're very resilient, they're very passionate about customer service and they're fully on board with the program and delivering the surveys, getting the responses. They get a real buzz out of seeing the programme working. And I think really the data is key as well. We've done a lot of cleaning up with our data and just encouraging customers really to complete the surveys and embrace it. Just don't be afraid of any negative feedback. If anything, you can do something with it. Silence is worse than no voice at all.

Great. Okay. And what's next for the Briggs program?

I think we're going to continue to review our data because that's been probably one of the biggest challenges, as Liam knows. We discuss. We have a fortnightly call with Liam, me and the team. So to review the data, to fully embed it, I think, in our strategy moving forward and really work with our continuous improvement department that we've got within Briggs Equipment where we want to start fixing root causes, root cause analysis, find out if there's reoccurring issues and how we can stop those from happening. That's ultimately where we need to be. Whether that's reviewing processes, whether it's a structure, whether it's more training that's required, I think that's the next step for us.

That's great, Gemma. Thanks for sharing that with us. I think if I were a Briggs customer, I'd be really proud to listen to this. I think that's. I would really feel that you were taking care of me. And I just want to say congratulations on such a great program. Well done, Liam, also for boosting this. But, Gemma, well done for you and the company that does this. It takes a lot of work to do this. We know this. But you have just got about model program and you should feel very proud of that. So, look, thanks very much for joining us today on the Account Experience podcast. It's a really great example that you're setting out there and just hope that you and the rest of Briggs equipment continue to help the construction workers in the UK with their equipment higher, but also contributing to charity. So well done for that. Really. Also really heartwarming to do that. Thanks again for joining us today, Gemma.

Thank you for inviting me.

Hey, Liam, what a pleasure it was to have Gemma on today.

Yeah, absolutely fantastic. Adam. I think it's been a pleasure working with Gemma for the last eight or nine months and the rest of the her team as well. And their enthusiasm for customer experience is infectious.

I'd say I take a few things out of that. First of all, there's a real commitment there to tie retention and net promoter together. The real maturity of the program. I love the way that she talks about bringing people on and educating people that all feedback is good, even if it seems negative.

Yeah, absolutely.

The thank you letters part, you get a 9 or a 10 internally, you get a thank you letter from the boss.

Yeah, absolutely. I think they're really making sure they're really celebrating personal feedback that they do get. But also they were very much not pointing the finger when there is anything negative coming through.

Yeah, I really agree. It was. And it's not about the score. It's about engagement, which is also what Gemma said. And then finally the fact that they're helping charity with the, with the feedback, it really shows people that they value the feedback.

It's just great stuff, 100%. I think it's one of the best things you can do is make sure you're giving to charity at all times. But to tie in with your, your customer experience program is a lovely thing to do.

Yeah, some really great tips for everybody from, from one of the real pillars of the Account Experience community there. And it's as I said, it's about as B2B as you can get the rental of equipment. But it just reminds me to to thank Liam for joining us today and also thank you for listening. And if you're enjoying the content we have on the Account Experience Podcast, please do not forget to like subscribe and share the content on your favorite podcast platform. It all helps to spread the word of what we're doing. And thanks again and until next time, catch you soon on Account Experience Podcast.

Thank you very much.