How Coca-Cola LATAM Aims to Deliver Experiences “Only Coke Can Do”

Hi, I'm Adam Durrell and I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. Regulars to this podcast know that in every episode I like to catch up with inspiring industry leaders or thinkers and those who can be willing to share best practices to help you develop your own business to business account experience program. We love talking about account experience, you know that. And for us it's combining account management with B2B customer experience. And I'm recording this special episode at the Coca Cola Latin America CX Summit in Bogota, Colombia. This event is in its second year now and it brings together Coca Cola bottling partners from all over the continent. There are more than 80 attendees in person or online of 30 bottler operations. So let's find out about the goals of this conference and what these giant B2B companies can do to teach us about their journey into account experience. So I'll be talking to the leaders of the companies involved and get their behind the scenes take on this as we go through. Stick with it and we'll do a summary at the end of the episode.

My name is Luis Carlos Mira, I'm customer experience director for Coca Cola company latam.

What an event you've pulled together here.

Well, thank you, thank you.

And this is the second year and as you said earlier on, 18 months have passed. What has changed in the 18 months that you've seriously seen?

Oh, there's a very strong evolution of all the teams now. They speak as CX experts that they have become in just 16, 18 months as you say. So I think I'm proud of, I'm very proud because the conversation, the level of a conversation is really high.

So let's go one step back. When you pull this event together and if I'm right, you know, 80 people, 30 bottlers, what's the reasoning behind this? Because this is a big investment, Coca Cola company.

Well, because this is the way we, we have to share and to really have everyone in the same place hearing to all those CX experts and futurologists and AI experts and well, that's really inspiring for them. And then also a place to do network to strong our bonds. And finally it's a platform for sharing, sharing success cases and for everyone to really, we call it the collective genius.

Yes. And it's also about what I really noticed. There's a real kind of brotherhood here and people are really keen to bring back best practices. So I think you've really been successful on them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's part of a Coca Cola.

And so for you, what do you Think you see as the biggest challenge for the people in this room.

The biggest challenge is to understand where are they at on the customer experience journey, to understand what are the gaps they have with the best cases to understand like the towards where they need to evolve. And the biggest challenge is to really cut that gap in pieces and start executing. I think that's a real challenge execute.

And what are you most proud of these two days?

Well, I think the quality of the speakers was really, really high and the level of the discussions have been very good. And the bonding I think like bringing all the people, all the cex coming community of the Coca Cola company Latam. It's really amazing to see everybody connecting and sharing not only sex practice, but a little bit of what they are.

Yes. And if you look going for next year, I'm guessing you probably want to start seeing value from the programs you're looking for use cases to actually show where the revenue is attached to it.

Exactly, exactly. Because I think that. Well, we talk about it on our conversation on my presentation that working on customer experience brings revenue and brings value to the brand, to the company. And I think we need to show that in numbers.

Lurice, thank you so much for first of all inviting me to be part of this but also taking us through what you think was.

Thank you to coming to Bogota. Really amazing having you here.

We can see the themes the day have been about artificial intelligence and really figuring out how to do closing the loop and getting this value to monetization. So let's check in with how one of the big bottlers out here, Arca Continental has been finding ways to do this.

Sure. So hi, nice to meet you, I'm Mariana Lozano. I work for Arca Continental, which is second largest butler in Latin America and between third and fourth in the world. So it's important. I am loyalty and customer experience manager for the digital and commercial corporate offices.

It's amazing because the scale that you operate out millions of customers, B2B customers, it's incredible. Most B2B organizations really can't understand that. So perhaps you can talk a little bit about the progress that you've been making in customer experience in our continental.

Sure. So our journey started around late 2022 where we just started measuring NPS and we started measuring not the right way, which now we know we started measuring like direct to our customers. So our salesforce was the one that was picking up these surveys for NPS and as we were moving forward through this journey and with the NPS methodology and with the help of customer gauge. We realized that we were doing things not in a wrong way, but not the ideal way. So we started in this evolution of moving towards a more digital measuring of NPS and where we embedded this NPS survey within our B2B application, which now, well, we do that indirect method now that's aligned with the methodology of nps. So it was a hard road ahead. Not everybody was happy to do that because, as you know, once you go to the digital, there's like a reduction in the NPS score. So there's certain things in that. But what we really wanted was not care about the NPS score, but really care about the voice of the customer and what we could hear from them that were their pain points and what projects we could develop in order to mitigate those pain points and become better, become a better partner for them.

So just to recap, you went from having like a call center type operation to Azure to going digitally. So. And you said one of the things that. And then NPS went down. I can imagine that was a big bit of a culture shock in the company.

It definitely was a culture shock. But I think it comes with the change of mindset that we have to work on where, yes, NPS score is important. Eventually we started seeing those numbers rising. Why? Because we started focusing on what's important that the close the loop process and having those interactions with our customers which make them see that we really care about what they were doing, what they were telling us, and that ultimately helped us increase our NPS score also through digital.

So for me, it's obvious that their goal certainly for the next year is to really think about adding value to these programs. They've invested a lot of money in CX and now they're looking to find ways of proving the value. And one of the challenges that was given out in the conference is that the use cases that we have been shown should come from this room. So that really fired everybody up. So let's find out what FEMSA feel about this. And so what's interesting is you've moved much more to the close the loop process. I can really see how you've embraced that. Can you give a bit of color about how you managed to do it? Maybe some challenges you had to overcome?

Yeah. So since the close the loop process has very much to do with the activities that our salesforce has. So our salesforce has a lot of activities to do in a day. So one of the big challenges was to how do we incorporate that close the loop process with our salesforce and how do we really get them engaged with the importance of making that closer loop process and how that's gonna better us as a company and it's gonna better our service and it's gonna be make our customers more happy and eventually we're gonna, well, maybe have more sales, have more execution. And so we started a little bit of, we developed a program where we talked about the importance of nps. What's the objective of nps, what we're doing with it, so we could start really changing that mindset in our salesforce that what they were doing was also important and it wasn't just another KPI that we were asking for them, but that we were really trying to do something with it within our company.

That sounds great. Can you share a success story that you've had this year?

Well, Peru is a country which, since we started to have really low NPS, they started around about 30. When they saw what other countries were getting for the nps, they felt like, hey, why am I so low? And I say again, not that NPS course is the most important indicator of nps, but it matters and people tend to make that comparison. Right. So what they did was they didn't just leave the closed loop process to the commercial side. They really permeated that to rgm, to logistics, to other areas of the company and made it really more a fun holistic KPI that involved all areas. Because maybe they weren't closing the loop in a quality way because maybe the commercial didn't really have the answers to close the loop with that specific customer. So when the perfect area was the one that was closing the loop, then that will make the customer feel more like, oh, they really valued what I was saying, you know what I mean? Peru eventually rose their NPS score. They rose it about to 40, 40 something. So yeah, it was a big jump there. Their closed loop started at like 15% when we started. Right now it's like at 85%.

Congratulations.

Yeah, so they've done an amazing job and I think most of it is because they really saw the value in nps.

Last question, what are you taking away from this conference over the last two days?

I mean, I loved how we have exterior persons coming and telling us about AI, all the advancements that we can do within customer experience with those new technologies. And I just think it really opens our mindset of what we are capable to do. And I mean, I love this phrase, like the fear of moving forward. So it's like, stop having that fear, stop having that fear. Try Things out. Go out there. If something doesn't work, you can change it. So in every challenge is a learning and then you get better. So I think that's something that I take from here. And also just like hearing from other butlers and their stories and how they are changing their mindset within their companies and how we can apply that to our company as well. So those stories, shared learnings are a good takeaway. And don't be afraid of detractors. I loved, like, really? That's like, don't be afraid of detractors. Like, you need to have detractors in order to get better.

Yeah.

I believe it was Bill Gates that said, the best learnings are in your most unhappy customers.

Yes, I think so.

So I really want to apply that within our company and just don't be scared. Don't have that fear. Just get better.

Mariana, thank you so much for your time today. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Thank you, Adam. Thank you. Bye bye.

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Hey, I'm Cristian Nunez. I'm working in Coca Cola Fienza for all ATAM operations. And we are now in this journey of customer centricity, customer culture in all of our 10 countries. So it's been a huge journey, but a very interesting and challenging one, but very fun also.

So what I really like today, you were talking about the culture. So talk about how you managed to embed the culture in the organization of customer experience.

It's a nice question, a tough one because culture is the main thing I think to prove or to put this customer centric culture in the company. So we are trying to put this in our mission, in our vision and also to tell everybody what as a company we are doing and how this bring us value for the company. So we are challenging with different kind of cultures in all of our operations. But at the same time we are setting the base with culture initiatives like cxd, CX community in all of our countries to teach all the people what we are doing and the basic level of MPS customer service metric. All these things that are very, very good for us.

And I could see that you were doing things like embracing CX day and events and your leadership as well talking about this. How did you manage to persuade the leadership to get so involved in this and to talk about.

Well, in cough we have the blessing that our strategy, our directors, teams are very aware of this project and is impulsive by them. So they are telling us that is this is a priority. So the CXD is a is a event that we are going to do in all of our countries to reach three main goals. First one awareness. Second sensitivity. I don't know if that is the right word. Sensitivity, Sensitivity. Right. And third one is to capacitate, to teach everybody all this set the base CX thing that as a company we need to know.

So if you think about your B2B customers, I think 2.1 million customers you have in this region.

Yes.

I mean so where are you already seeing signs that the CX program is having an impact? The scale is enormous. So how are you, where are you having successes?

Well, that's a tough question but I think the main thing is that all our teams at different levels, all aware now of this new culture, new strategic and also our customers are seeing the transformation in our company in the things that we do, our strategic decisions, all our strategic is now based on them. So clients are also being aware of that. So that's the thing I think and.

Going forward for the next year, what are some of the things that you want to try and bring in there.

To have better analytics of the things of the inside that we have? I think connect those things with business insights also to have the value of that and still pushing the culture day by day, people by people. Everyone has to be part of this.

Cool. Christian, thanks so much.

Thank you.

The two days of the event were not all PowerPoint. There was one session towards the end where the companies came together to have an experiential session so they could put what they'd learned into practice. There was a great animator that was on stage and here's my interview with Maurizio Hernandez from the company the Click that provided the services to Coca Cola. Hi, how you doing?

Hi, I am. Nice to meet you.

It's great you've been here. You're pulling the things together in this workshop. There's been a lot of data with numbers, but this is really the human part. So what are you getting the team to do now?

Well, I trying to take all that they got in the ring and put it in some kind of initiative that can take the knowledge into action so they can take all the learnings of these two days and make that the other people live what they lived but through the actions in the day by day.

So I see you doing this. They're being very creative out here. They're putting things together and really what you want to do is get them to embed it in their culture.

Yes, yes. Well, make. Make that anything that they want to. To achieve in CX that really goes to the operation and the day by day. As I said that, that everything that they want to happen be so easy to.

To.

To put it into implant. So they sort of live it. Mauricio, I really appreciate this. Now I know English is not your first language. No, sorry. But Spanish is. And you have a Spanish language podcast that talks exactly about this. So do you just want to make sure that we know the name of the podcast?

Yes.

Spanish listeners.

Yes. It's called the La Cocina Creativa. This is the creative. How you say? I say Cocina Cuisine. The Creative cuisine kitchen.

Creative kitchen. Yeah. Cucino. I wanted to get a view of the strategy of the entire region. So I was lucky enough to speak to Paolo Mendez. He's the value to market and consumer head for the Latin America region for the Coca Cola Company. He's based in Brazil and here's what he had to say. Paolo Mendez, I have one question for you. We finished up the conference today. You said something earlier and you said about you're really aiming for becoming a relationship company. Does this help Coca Cola go on that way to becoming a relationship company with its clients?

Let me correct you. We are relationship company. We will not be. We are. That's part of an intrinsic. Part of our business is to create long standing relationship with our customers to help us develop their business and ensure that they can be strong in the market.

And you said one of the things I really loved, which is about wanting to create the experience that only Coke can bring. What did you mean by that?

I think the experience that only Coke can do is to surprise with things that people don't expect, solutions that the customers don't imagine, and things that they're going to be able to implement their business even though they even don't imagine, but they're going to help them to grow.

Paolo Mendez, thank you so much.

Thank you. So.

Here with Carey Self, he's from Customer Gauge. You'll know him from the podcast. Carey, you've been here with me for a couple of days. What are some of the things to Standing out?

Yeah, I guess I'm overwhelmed. Just kind of really excited. You think about over 20 different countries, so culturally different, similar businesses. Sure, right. It's Coca Cola and they're, you know, their distributors. But just to think about their different stages of their maturity, where they're at, what they're trying to accomplish, different obstacles they're running into, and just to see the unifying what's happening as they're kind of coming together. Just in the last couple years since we've been working with them, just to see how much they've created this unified program. And it kind of came all together in a head just a few minutes ago, seeing that unified reporting up on the screen.

Yeah, I think that for me was really interesting because, I mean, they've adopted Net Promoter across the entire continent and they're running it pretty consistently. I mean, we can see some variances in it, but to the extent that they can actually compare all of their programs and load it into one dashboard, I think it's pretty cool.

Yeah, it's amazing because I think it was one of the talks actually that got the most questions and people were really worked up because, you know, everything's in theory until you put numbers on the board. And I think the minute they put all of those results in there, what their response rates were, people woke up. People were paying attention, asking a lot of questions.

There's transparency and it's. It's welcome, but also can be scary. Okay, so that was one thing, but one of the real big features is, and I know you're going to actually run a workshop in a minute on culture. How have you noticed the cultural aspect come through this year?

One theme, and I'm not saying this because of our academy, I'm saying this because it was one of the words that came out is you really have to Win the hearts and the minds of your people. Right. This is not about two or three people running a program and hoping that you get good results. So every single bottler that stood up there and talked over the last two days talked about how important it is to educate and to really get the frontline bot in. Let them know why we're doing this, how we're doing this and what role they'll have.

Yeah, I agree. The investment that they put into bringing people along, getting top management to speak about it, I think is really impressive. So. Yeah. And. Well, we'll, we'll figure out how it's going to go for the next session. Thanks for being here with me, Carey, and bringing us some of the results.

Thank you for having me here.

So that's a wrap on my trip to the Coca Cola Customer Experience forum from Colombia. It was a real eye opener to see how the Butlers are working together and I'm very much looking forward to coming back next year to see how they're putting in practice these real value programs. So they're understanding about how Net Promoter is contributing to actually winning them extra business. It's a fascinating project to see and the scale of this can only be imagined with millions and millions of outlets and thousands of people in the field actually enacting this business to business customer experience. Really this, I think, is B2B customer experience at the cutting edge. And I'm really impressed with the work that they're doing here. Okay, until next time on the Account Experience podcast, please don't forget to like and subscribe and we'll see you soon.