“How Many Times Do I Have to Tell You?”

I mean, take that build. You look at it through the amount of people that are touched, from the farmer through to the logistics company, but every single one of those work for a business and the multiplication of those B2B relationships that have to work every time to get something at scale, to be able to work every single time for the end customer who provides a service to the consumer.

Hi, this is Adam Durrell. I'm here today with Nigel Taldoff in another one in the series I from the CPG Experience Council's talks about how you can help improve your experience and what it means. Today we're going to tackle our third in the series, which is about how many times do I have to tell you? Morning, Nigel. How are you doing?

I'm very well, thank you. This is actually one of my favorite topics of the five that we're going to talk through because the world has changed so much in my 30 years of being in customer roles. I wished going back 30 years ago I could do what we could now do today. God, we could have made such a difference. But the opportunity exists to be able to do that going forward.

It really does. I think technology allows us to do this, but also shared culture. We'll get into that because, hey, the bar has been set pretty high, hasn't it, people out there? So, Nigel, let's get into this. When you say, how many times do I have to tell you? And you talk about scale, can you dig into that a little bit more?

Yeah. Well, let's use scale as a starting point. It's only when you stop and pause and think about how many people touch a product, from the idea to it being produced to it being shipped to a distributor, to being shipped to a range of customers before it gets to the consumer. It's like that oil tanker full of containers. It's just huge. And my first real appreciation of that, I think, came from a piece of work that was done by the Oxford Economics Group. And it is about beer, because that's my background for so many decades. But they did a piece of work in 2019, which is still fairly relevant. But 23 million people across the world are employed to be able to get beer from a brewery all the way through to the end consumer. One in every 110 jobs, one in every $131 of GDP across the world, 1.6%. And beer is just one category of what goes on. And when you look at it through the number of customers you've got, it's hundreds of hundreds of thousands of convenience stores, bars, Restaurants, they're the end customers that touch the product before it actually gets to the consumer and they're the ones that provide the experience. That scale is huge. And then when you multiply by, I mean choose a whole range of different categories, but I picked out the ones that are inconvenience stores. Salty snacks, soft drinks, candy sweets, dairy, bakery. But you go further and you think about tech, homewares, apparel services. I mean the amount of businesses that are required to be able to get a product through to the end consumer. It's just on a huge scale.

Yeah, I'm just going to amplify this because this was an astonishing statistic when I saw ray, that almost 1% of all the jobs out there are employed in beer. I mean it's incredible. But if you think about it right through from the production, you know, picking the hops, I guess, to making it, to delivering it, to serving it to all of the associated roles around actually refreshing people, it's quite amazing. And you're right and all the other industries where, you know, for outlets, millions of them was around the world where they also support multiple people in the families. This is such an important part of the economy, isn't it?

It is. And again, I mean take that build. You look at it through the amount of people that are touched from the farmer through to the logistics company, but every single one of those work for a business and the multiplication of those B2B relationships that have to work every time to get something at scale to be able to work every single time for the end customer who provides a service to the consumer. Yeah, it's amazing.

Now Nigel, you're using the word Amazonification here. That's also something that I'm quite keen on talking about. So tell us a little bit about the context about what you mean with why Amazon or the likes of E commerce have affected the world of customer experience.

Well, I think you deserve the credit for the word as on Amazon Ification because I can't even say the thing. I have to keep slowing down every single time. But it's. The world has changed and everybody I think has seen Amazon. And if you're a business, I think the natural starting point when you see what Amazon has done to the world is almost a negative one. They focused on that consumer experience, they've set expectations right up there. They've got more data than you can possibly imagine. They can unleash the power of social media and they satisfy the demand for the consumer's need for something new all the time. And I think that can be quite scary for a business in how they look at this. But I think the approach we're trying to get across with experienced counselors, if you look at this through a completely different set of glasses, what an opportunity that provides. If you could have take that into the business, to business environment where you could have feedback switched on all the time for all of your customers, that you need to be able to get your product to the consumer. If you bring digital services right to the forefront of that relationship, you start to change the whole way that your customer experience DNA sat with inside your business culture. And I just think it changes the world when you look at these things through a different lens.

Yeah, I think the revolution that Amazon really helped us with, certainly as consumers, they just drove the ability to order easily online. That was something that was the easy thing to do just with one click. But then, and it sounds almost prosaic to say it, but just tracking your order so you knew when to expect it. And we know from work that we do in B2B that those two things are just so important. If you just get the basics right, if you can order simply without errors and then knowing when something is going to show up so you can plan around it, those two things are really, really important. And they've set that. That has set the bar, I think, for a lot of experience apart from anything else. Those two things. That's really an interesting thing. And my sense is that, you know this, it's. It's very difficult to make your own supply chain work like that if you come from a legacy system. But why do that if you can outsource it to somebody else? Because businesses, I think, really need to focus on what their core business is. And if that's the relationship, that's what they should be. That's what's most important.

Yeah, I think the B2B world is made up of lots of businesses interacting with each other. And digital allows you to be able to seamlessly present. If I'm the end customer, I just need to see the things that are important to me. And the way that you can do that is through replicating some of the things that Amazon's done. It is possible. It sounds scary, but it's absolutely possible. And if you get it, look so it works and it works well. What an amazing feeling that is.

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So if these guys have set the bar, Nigel, how do you translate that into something you know, how do you talk about what good looks like?

Well, I think let's focus in on the end customer, the last person to touch your brand, your product before it gets in front of the consumer. There's often a whole host of these end customers in any single brand owner business. And the reality is every single customer is important. And if you want to get feedback from your customers to be able to understand what's going on, don't just ask your biggest customer, ask 80% of your revenue base. So if I'm a manufacturer and I'm selling to a distributor who's selling to a whole host of end customers, we know how much is going through to every one of those end customers. You need to be talking to 80% of that revenue. And that gives you a pretty good benchmark of knowing what good looks like from each of those end customers. And the reality is things change all the time. What I might think is true today might be very different in 12 months time. I mean, you got a lot of experience on what regularly should look like. But once a year for a bit of feedback is probably not good enough. Once an hour is probably too much and the answer lies somewhere in between. And it'd be different for every single customer. But having the ability to be able to know what that looks like on a regular basis is pretty good. I think the third one I pick out is ask the right questions in those surveys and you're looking for the feedback. The hardest Thing is, if you're not getting more than 20% response rate, you have to look at yourself first to see if you're asking the right questions, are you actually in the right zone to begin with? And if you are and you're getting a 20% response rate, then you've got to be able to think about every time you give a piece of feedback. As a consumer, you expect the end customer to do something with it. It's even more important as an end customer that you've given feedback back into that B2B relationship, that you get some response back, you close the loop, the feedback's been heard and it's played back to you with a fix.

I agree. I think this looks like a hard work from any company. It's like, wow, that really is a lot of stuff. You mean we've got to ask everybody, we've got to ask them two to four times a year and then we've got to follow it all up. I think that looks like work on top of the existing relationship, but I think that what I believe is done correctly, this enhances the existing relationship. It's not. And it's also work that you can avoid in other places because if you can catch problems before they happen, well, that's a time saver. They.

It is. Well, it's where we started. I mean, when I first started in a customer role, this was done manually. This was done by a phone call or an individual walking through the door. And that sense of scale and that digital environment of Amazonification just means you can do this now in a completely different way that you couldn't do even 10 years ago would have been difficult to do this.

I think that the. I mean, this is such an important. These are really good metrics. Nigel. Thanks for. Thanks for highlighting them because this is also what I believe is good practice in the business. We don't have enough time to talk about it now, but we should follow it up in a future episode down and see what this is about. But this is great. That sets it out there for a. As a benchmark for what, as you say, what can good look like?

And I think that the interesting part then is where do you start? What's the first step on that journey? And you and I could talk about good practices and best practices for hours, but you've got to start somewhere. And I think a nice place to think about starting is the people who have the relationship in that business to business world. There's an account team somewhere that deals with the next transaction along the journey. Of that B2B relationship. Think about how you make those business teams, those account teams, heroes in the eyes of that business to business relationship. So they've got the feedback that's live you focusing on to be able to close the loop. They're thinking about the processes that need to change to be able to make this a better experience time and time again. And you could go into so many different places, but arming those account teams with the information is a really good starting point to be able to get into this journey.

Yeah, I agree. But again it's, that's the spinning around. It's like if you think about customer feedback as being something that's negative, it's the wrong way of doing it. You know, think about it something that enhances a relationship. That's the key learning from this.

One of the things you've shown me over the last couple of years or so is when you can pull that information together and you realize this is not a individual problem for one customer. It's a problem that's affecting 70, 80% of your customer base. That's again through that same lens. Imagine fixing that the opportunity and the growth potentially unlocks because you know it's true for all of your customers allows you to be able to fix things and step into growth so much faster.

So let's sum this up, Nigel.

So I think four things I take from our 10 minute chat. The starting point is map out the processes and the scale that you've got to your business to begin with. When you think about all the different transactions that you'd have in business business embrace that digital Amazonification, the capabilities that now exist in this world. And it allows you then to think about how you can reach 80% of your revenue to ask them for feedback in the first place. Are you asking the right questions to get a 20% response rate back and can you actually close the loop on 100% of the feedback that you're getting from your customer base. And if you really want to be able to step change this whole experience program to be able to grow your business, then how do you systemize that experience for every customer going forward? Sounds easy, but it's not. But you've got to start somewhere because this is a world that we all operate in now.

Thanks so much, Nigel. It's a really good look at it.