How Rentokil Is Building Their Brand On Exceptional Experience

Hey, Dave, how you doing? It's good to be back.

Very good, thanks, Adam. How are you doing?

I am great. I'm in Denmark today, enjoying the weather. And you are?

I'm back in Amsterdam. After some time in the UK and plenty of quarantining, I'm now back in Amsterdam and not going anywhere for a while.

Oh, that's great. Hey, listen, you live in Amsterdam, I live in Amsterdam. Do you have any problems with mice in your house?

My current house, Touchwood, no, but my previous house, they were everywhere.

I know the feeling. It's the same at our house. Or I should say, it was the same in our house because we bought this pest control as a service. I was really interested to see that. Recently, actually, we phoned up the company who we're talking to today, Rentokil Initial, because, hey, there's also a client of Customer Gauge. So we got them in and I was really delighted when the chap said, hey, we also offer this as a service. So I was really interested to see that the pest control business has gone into subscription, even for domestic houses. Now. What I hope we can do is I hope we can talk to our guest about that, because I'm guessing their business is shifting in the same way that, well, we're a software as a service. I'm really interested to learn about that. So, yeah, this is Randolph Carter, who we've known for some time, Dave, haven't we? And Randolph is the regional marketing director of Rent a Kill Initial Europe. I'm really excited to hear him talk about the company and what he does. So without further ado, let's welcome our guest onto today's show. Hi, Randolph. How are you doing?

Hey, I'm very good. Adam and Dave, how are you guys? Good afternoon.

Good, thank you.

Yeah. And, hey, mice free at home for three months, thanks to your guys.

I'm delighted to hear it.

Hey, so, Randolph, perhaps you can just introduce yourself, tell us what you do at Rentokil and what the company does.

Absolutely. So I am the marketing director for Europe for Renticle Initial. In that role, I look after not only marketing, but sales as well as our customer experience. Function, if you will, at the regional level, helping set the strategy for the different countries and for the region and helping them implement key projects as we go forward. And, yeah, that's me a bit, I guess. I've been in the company for 15 years, worked in the US as the marketing director in the UK in our central marketing function. Kind of moved around a bit, which keeps me on my toes and keeps Me lively. And before that, I worked for companies like bp. And for those of you of a certain age, will remember, member a company called ici. When I started my career.

Yeah, that's great. And we spoke a little bit about Rent a Kill does well, getting rid of mice in people's houses. I'm pretty certain there's a wider remit than that. What else does the company do? Perhaps you can give us a, you know, handle on its services.

Yeah, I mean, Rentokil initial is a FTSE 100 company that's present in about well over 80 countries globally. So who would have thought pest control is needed all around the world? But the good news is, as we go through these troubling times, as one of my bosses said, rats don't read newspapers, so there's always a need for pest control. Yeah. So what do we do? Gosh, apart from pest control, which is a big part of our business, a major part of our business, we then have our Initial brand through which we offer washroom services as well as general hygiene services. Looking these days are air purification and air management, as well as making sure the washrooms. We don't do cleaning, but we provide soaps and dispensers and things like that, as well as then a whole host of other services such as in what we call interior landscaping, so indoor plants and looking after those textiles, dental waste management.

It's a fascinating world, but very essential. I mean, you joke about it, but hey, it's really.

It's all the stuff that sits in the background that people don't want to think about, frankly. But that's what we spend our life thinking about.

Well, I think it's a really good segue into it. I mean, people don't want to think about it. I mean, one of the things that you've taken a journey, the company as a journey on has been customer experience. So how does a company that sits in the background really think about customer experience?

Well, that's a really good. Really good question. We started our journey out from a customer experience point of view, really thinking about the Net Promoter score. And we started to measure that probably 14 years ago now. We was first introduced to Rentokil Initial and you know, for years, still is in many parts of the country. We've been doing it through telephone surveys. And now just in the last two years since we've engaged with you guys, we've moved in our region from telephone to. To using digital methodology to capture the NPS score on a quarterly basis. And that's actually really helped us the insights we get from it has really helped us to focus much more and refine much more tightly what we want our customer journey to look like to the extent now where it's providing real value in terms of defining a very big strategic project we've got going on in our, in our region to improve the customer journey and the customer experience.

How's that kind of changed in terms of going from, you know, once or twice a year phone surveys into kind of a lot more often email surveys? What kind of extra insights are you getting? Are people more honest? Are you just getting cleaner, more easier data to understand what's, what's the kind of difference you're seeing there?

So I think not only the change, but also the benefit of what this change, of the change for us is really around the depth of the data, by which I mean we're able to talk to more people, we're able to ask them a few more questions in probably the same amount of time it would have taken to complete the call, if not less. And as a result of all that, we've just got more data, more insights that we can slice and dice and look at from different, different angles to really help us understand what are the drivers of satisfaction and clearly what are the drivers of dissatisfaction of all those detractors from the process. Sure.

Is it faster to get the feedback, Randolph, when you have from between the two systems, from the phone system or the digital system, was there, you know, was that a faster way for you to get the feedback?

Yeah, depending on which level you look at it. Yes. I mean the overall process in terms of.

Right.

You know, here's the list of people we want to call, let's call them and get that feedback. Overall, I think not that different because there are different challenges for us certainly as an organization. Dave will know this because he's been working with us to do it in terms of getting the emails in place, cleaning them up and all the kind of data management piece that has to be done beforehand. But yeah, but in terms of getting the output and speed to insight, if you will, from the point of contact with customers, much quicker. It's a live system, we can see it. I look at it when we're in the middle of a wave, you can see it day to day changing and see how things are emerging. So yeah, in that sense, I'd say it's a much more agile in terms of the output that we get from analysis. Yeah.

So in terms of point there as well, like saying someone in your position and similar people to you you're able log in at any time. Were people in the higher levels of the organization regularly viewing the data or was it a quarterly report that they'd receive when everything had been aggregated and analyzed at the end before?

I think for us, in most, in many of our markets, it was, to be honest with you, a number. At the end of the quarter, we'd get what we call our customer voice counts number, which is essentially the nps. And you know, countries would look at it. Now that's not fair. Some of our countries clearly spent a lot of time looking at it at a senior management level. We did also involve through our branch system. Branch managers were asked to look at it on a regular basis to deal with detractors as they came through. But that happened, you know, it was once a quarter and it just, There we go. But it all came through in that one week period that people would engage with the process in any way, shape or form. And outside of that, it was pretty quiet. It was like, okay, oh look, right now we've got our number again. I'll look at it for the next two or three days.

That's what I'm interested about, Brandoff, is that, you know, we see this in many organizations. They go through a culture change, you know, as they, as the information is more, I don't know, democratized throughout the business. How did you handle that in your organization? Was it, was it difficult or was it very easy to do that.

In terms of making the information more available? It takes time. It's a definite cultural change. It's a shift in mental attitude. And we've worked through, we have customer experience leaders in each country, in each market. And we've worked very closely with them to ensure that they understand the full process. They're fully engaged in it, they own it from their country point of view, but also working with them to train them on, you know, here's the data. This is what it means, this is how you can use it. You know, shifting away from. Can you give us a report, please, in PowerPoint to I could, but it's much better if you just go into the system and, you know, you can add your filters and slice and dice and, you know, start digging so you start to find the impact that you need. So there's been a fair amount of, I would say, guidance and support for the countries to get them away from, okay, I've got my number through to. How do I get the insights myself that I can use in my business?

Does that also go into how you're Rewarding the countries or even comparing them to each other. I think you said at the start that you do a very wide array of things from catching mice to replacing soap dispensers or with different amounts of contact with the customer.

Right.

How do you kind of take the data or the insights from one particular country in one particular industry and then compare them to the others and use them all to improve at the same time?

That's a good question. I've got a view that says, and I don't know if I'm right. You'll tell me at some point if I'm right, Dave. I'm sure as we go through this. But notice I've got a view that says NPS in Germany for pest control. Really we shouldn't try to compare to NPS in the Netherlands because the cultures are different, the starting points are different, the organizations are different. And so clearly what we do do, then we say, right, let's look at them as standalone results. Let's look at them as standalone insights for that country. Because at the end of the day, what really matters for me is how do you use the information from cvc, nps, this process, to improve the customer experience for that business in that country? And that's where the rubber hits the road, if you will. And so I'm not. We do compare. We can see, we clearly have visibility of results across all the different countries. But funny story, I remember this. When we first introduced NPS into the organization, my Dutch colleague stood up after three months and said, because their results weren't great, they were, they're quite a low. And it was like, why are your results? So they said, well, you have to understand the Dutch that, you know, the Dutch culture is very different, you know, because you have to understand that 10 is for God, 9 is for teachers, and 8 is as good as you're ever going to get. So we're never going to have the promoters and we're only going to get passive and detractors. And that's a deep, you know, you need to understand the Dutch in order to understand the score. You can't compare that to an American score where they'll go, yeah, everything's great, man. You know, we're not. Or the British who aren't going to be rude or, you know, so different cultures make, make a big difference. So I, You're. The fundamental premise of your question is how do you compare across countries? I don't think we do. We shouldn't. Having said that, what the data now does allow us to do Is. Is take all of the information and put it and go right. Pest control across Europe looks like this. Pest control across Europe. Pest control hygiene looks like this. What are the core drivers generally? What are the key themes? And they do. They do match up.

Yeah, we call that the Dutch effect. And if you. But if you speak to any culture in Europe, they all have the same thing. And there's always some reason why there's no possibility of ever giving the high score or the scale in Germany is on five points. So we're quite well aware of that. But you're absolutely right. You've got to do each country and look at the differences. The delta and improvement seems to really work. But actually, on that note, again, I just want to talk about the fantastic service we got from Rentokil and just use that as a very small example, because the guy that came in knew all about the Net Promoter program, but he did not try to push it down our throats. He said, at the end, you get a survey. Please ask honestly. And sure enough, after a couple of months, we actually got a survey through one of ours and we were able to answer that. So he was very warm. And of course, we gave him a 10.

So well done. I hope you named him as well. That's what they get incentivized on. If you get a 10 with your name in it, that's. That's a jackpot.

So there you go. He'd got a 10. It tends to exist in Holland, although this one came from.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you're not Dutch.

It's only from us immigrants. Adam.

I think my missus gave him a 10, actually. So there you go.

Fair enough. Fair enough. I mean, that point about talking to customers is critical in this process, you know, because it's engagement with human beings that really makes the difference in a service. You know, our brand is our people. At the end of the day, it's not. We don't have a bottle of Coke that we're selling or a pen or anything physical. What we're selling is a human being turning up and going into a business's premises primarily, but also residential premises, and going and doing something and doing hopefully something that people appreciate, but he needs to do it properly. And so getting our people to talk to customers is really important. And just as one of the things that's made a difference to us just recently is we had one country which was really suffering, had really bad scores, and we're not getting any better. And they decided to really put a focus on getting their sales Their service people, to talk to customers, to explain to them, look, this is what we do for you because it's so in the background, not everybody knew. And exactly as you've just said, Adam, we are going to, you know, you're going to get a survey at some point and it's for these services and what I'm doing today, just tell the truth. And as a result of spending two or three months just getting them to talk about it every time they see a customer, when the survey came through, it really helped push the scores. I mean, you know, night and day, night and day.

I think that's always a delicate balance, isn't it? When we, whenever we speak to customers and say, make sure you're throughout the organization, you're making your customers aware that a survey is coming. But also resist the temptation to say, make sure it's a nice score, or give us a 10, it's my birthday tomorrow, or something like that. So it's a really good balance to try and strike. Then when the scores do come back, is the person that went to visit getting a notification about that? Is that the account manager's response who's kind of in control of actually closing the loop with that customer?

We leave then at the branch level at this point. So the branch manager historically is the person who within 24 hours, 48 hours is responsible for making the first contact for any detractors to follow up and understand, you know, in more depth what it is that they're concerned about and see what we can do to put it right. And then, you know, to work with their local branch team to explain the branch results and how they're doing, etc. My goal, my absolute ambition is to be able to get, if I can do to an NPS CVC score by technician. So, you know, to get enough feedback for an individual to go, this is your individual score and this is how you're doing. And yeah, I'd love to get to that point.

Randolph, you've got a fantastic marketing background and as you say about sales excellence, when you think about the information that you're getting on customer experience, do you think about how you can use that to give Rent a Kill a competitive edge? I'm wondering about how what your thoughts on that are.

Good question, Adam. And yes, you know, we are using this data very clearly. And let me give an example in one particular area and that is around customer retention. So as you point out at the beginning, we're a portfolio business, We're a contract business. At the heart of what we do in B2B. And so keeping customers happy with the service they're getting is incredibly important to us. And customer retention is one of our key measures of success as a business. And what the insight that we've got now through our CVC processes allowing us to identify is where we're weak. And it's interesting because where we're weak is in specifically and pretty generally across many of our countries, account management. So, you know, account management, is it easy to get hold of us? Do they see enough of our salespeople? These are things that are coming out of the feedback that we're going, okay, that's very actionable. We need to sit down and work out how do we drive better account management, how do we maybe put in place more inside salespeople to do account management over the phone rather than trying to ask our sales guys to visit all of these customers. Because we have tens of thousands of customers and we just can't get around them all in a year overall. So, you know, what we're getting is really actionable insight that helps in different points of the customer journey. And that's just one example.

Yeah, I see quite often companies are now publishing net promoter scores in their quarterly results, certainly to Wall street, maybe not so much on the London Stock Exchange, but I also see this coming in and again I wondered if that was some of the direction that you were going in to start publishing the results or just very much internally at the moment.

Absolutely not. As a group. Rentokil Initial globally are starting, I think certainly for the last year, if not the last two years, has been publishing this as part of their annual report. So it is data that we put out there now, I think every quarter globally by business sector, if I'm not mistaken. And it's more than that, it's starting to form part of the long term bonus program for senior executives as well. So it's becoming more and more embedded into the way we do our business, the way we report our business for our shareholders and stakeholders as well as we run as how we run the business.

Yeah, congratulations on that. I think that really shows a commitment to quality of customer service and I think that also shows the maturity of the organization. So I really love to see that when we see the companies publishing this.

So, Randolph, I think we've been working together for two and a half years now, maybe one and a half years in terms of what we've, you know, working on, you know, the overall CVC program and stuff. Is there any, you know, great strides you've made or things that you would do differently, you know, going in now that you've been, you know, running with it for such a long time.

Yeah, listen, I think. I think the great strides of your. What's really worked for us, I think I've mentioned them already, is two things I probably highlight. One is, you know, this program has given us tremendous insights that is allowing us to drive a really big strategic CX improvement program because we're now confident that what we're doing is based on true customer feedback and it's not just us making things up. So that's one of them. And I think the second one that's allied to that is that the shift from a score, a number, once a quarter at the end of the year, whatever it might be, to being something that's much more becoming. Not there yet, but becoming more embedded and a true driver of improvement overall. So I think. I think those are things that have. That have, you know, really made an impact in our business. I think in terms of just quickly, maybe other learnings. I think you touched on that as well. You know, it's not. You've got to make sure your data is good, you've got to make sure you're collecting accurate emails. That's really fundamental to what we're doing. That's been a bit of a journey for us. We send out 85,000 surveys a quarter across 13 countries and 20 or so businesses. So the scale of this is really large. And that has an impact operationally on our businesses in terms of closing the loop with the detractors. And we have found that our branch managers will become just overwhelmed with the number of calls they had to make. So what we've learned through that is it's a good idea to stagger your surveys over an extended period so that people can manage that process much, much better. And in terms of terms of, I think you asked what. What could be improved, perhaps. I think there are again, two areas here in terms of things that we can do better. One is drive higher response rates. And we're learning all the time about how to do that in the attention to detail that is required to really drive those numbers up. Because clearly that gives us even more data to work with, but it also means we've got a more efficient program overall. And then secondly, I think as part of this change in culture, we need to keep going and circulate the results more widely, make them more available deeper down into the organization, so that it's not just branch managers and management who see it. Ultimately, we Want to get to the point where any colleague can see their own results.

Yeah. Great. So I think that full transparency across the entire organization really, really helps you get that buy in throughout, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

All good learnings there. Finally, Randolph, any tips you would pass on to somebody who wants to go into a more digital type of feedback.

Like you have one. I just do it. If you're not doing digital feedback. I do it for lots and lots of the reasons I think I've talked about. I think otherwise these are very personal tips is don't give up. This isn't necessarily easy, but it is absolutely worth doing. So, you know, whatever the hurdles are, expect the hurdles and work through them. So persistence is important. And I think the other piece is, and this is true for any kind of major change in these kind of programs, make sure you've got senior management on board. Make sure they understand the true value of what you're doing and that they can see the results. They can understand how they can change their business to improve hard metrics like customer retention or gross sales or whatever it might be. Try and make sure what this does, this program does, or your program does, links to, you know, what your operators are thinking about because then it becomes relevant to them.

Fantastic. Randolph Carter, thank you so much for joining us on the Account Experience podcast today. We wish you all the success in the continuation of your program. Thanks very much from Dave and myself.

Thanks, guys. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Adam. Good to be with you.

It was great to hear from Randolph.

Really fascinating. I think having worked with them pretty closely for the past 18 months, you know, you see the, the kind of journey that they've been going through and how that's affecting the wider organization and how much use they get out of it. It's really great for us to see.

Such a nice organization to work with. I think there's. That there's something about the, the commitment that they have to service really goes through the whole organization. I was really surprised to hear that they were doing nearly 400,000 surveys a year. I didn't realize they got to say bigger. And that's just in the European region. That's really gives you a scale of how large they are. Anything from Randolph's talk that particularly lit up for you?

I think there's a couple of things at the end which, as I said, we see of quite a lot when people think that getting a high response rate and getting all the insights from your accounts is going to be an easy job that you can do in a small bubble in your organization. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, and you're going to need support throughout the entire organization to do it. So I think making sure people are ready for that is really going to be key to the success of any program.

Yeah, but really that culture change is the key thing. Once that's embedded and it works throughout the organization, that's when you start doing it. And I think Randolph has really made a great big impact on that. As I said, from my personal experience, my pest control guy, my mouse killer.

You're still mouse free.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's. That says something. And that's them. Okay, Dave, until the next one. Thanks very much for being on the account podcast with me today.