NPS—the CX Catalyst at Novozymes

At the end of the day, if we've done our job right, the world will be slightly better at 5 o' clock in the afternoon than it was at 8 o' clock the same morning.

Hi, I'm Adam Durrell and I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. If you're a regular of the AX podcast, you'll know that in every episode, I like to catch up with inspiring industry leaders or thinkers to help share best practices and tips, and that will help you develop your B2B account experience program. So I like to think of this podcast as well, the Catalyst, a yeast like Enzy, if you like, that's able to combine the ingredients of customer experience and account management to make the fine wine that is account experience. And hope to be learning a little bit more about enzymes today from our guest. I'm also the founder of CustomerGage and I'm really curious at everything that furthers the quality of business relationships. I'm here today live in the office of our client Novozymes, just north of Copenhagen in Denmark's Bio belt. Novozymes is a global biotechnology company and the company's main focus is research, development and production of industrial enzymes and microorganisms, along with biopharmaceutical ingredients. I hope I got that right. Guest today is Per Braginski and he's director of Insights and Novozymez. Hello, Per. How you doing?

Fine, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Well, thank you for welcoming me to your office again. Let's just go over some of your previous roles because, I mean, you've had some roles in amazing Danish companies like Saxo bank and Bang and Olsen. So how did you end up here?

I ended up here. Well, Novo Science were kind enough to reach out to me and ask if I was interested in this. But in this role, we have over the past two years been putting a lot of effort into getting closer to our customers and to our customers customers. And one of those is also those efforts is to be sharper on the insights and the understanding of both customers and consumers and the market as a whole. So that was a challenge that I found very, very exciting. Novozymez is a great company. It's sort of one of the pillars of Danish industry. And we're also a company where pretty much everything we do makes the world a slightly better place. And it's kind of nice to know that when you go home at night, if you've done your job right, then hopefully the world will be a little bit better than it was when you Showed off work that morning.

That's really, that's a lovely thing to hear. It's great to work for a company for admission. So let's just dive in a little bit to some of the areas that Novozyme works in. I hope I clarified it okay. In the introduction about the company. But I mean, it's amazing the scope of the organization. It is.

And I'll disclaim a little bit upfront that I'm not a biologist in any way. I haven't had a biology lesson since 1992, which occasionally makes it a little difficult for me to understand the nuance of what we do. So I focus a little more on the outcome and what the effect of it is. But essentially we, as you said, we work in the field of industrial enzymes. As such, we are an ingredient provider to a number of different industries. Household care is one area that we work a lot in, so laundry detergents, dishwashing, that sort of thing, where we can replace chemical ingredients. I have a fairly exciting business supplying into the food and beverage industry. Baking, brewing and so on. Lots of dairy products and so on as well, where we are also an ingredient provider. And then we have a large industrial and agricultural business ranging anywhere from animal health and nutrition to ingredients for biofuels, that sort of thing.

Yeah, I mean, my, my knowledge of biochemistry is also limited to, to the stuff I learned at school. But in doing a bit of research for this, I'm incredibly astonished by the amount of work that enzymes can do in today's business processes. I mean, my understanding is, is that right, not only can enzymes help make food and beverages, but the applications to convert chemical processes, for example, in pulp, paper pulp, and even to make plastics. It seems to be incredible.

Yeah, it, it is. And I've been a little over a year and a half now, and I'm still consistently surprised almost on a daily, or at least a weekly basis at the applications of what our products can do and the positive impact they can have. It really is hugely rewarding to be. To get to be part of that.

And one of the things that I'm interested in, because you've got such a wide spread of customers and industries that you work in, I imagine that a customer experience program must be kind of challenging to stretch across all of the areas.

It is, of course, in that there is a diverse customer base. From the position of my team, it is probably less or definitely less so than it is, of course, from people who are actually customer facing. Because what we primarily do is a lot of the research on speaking to our customers, getting their feedback, getting their input, on their experience of working with us. And you can say, yes, our customer base is diverse across industries, but it is also diverse within the individual customers because we partner quite a lot with our customers. So also on research and development, but of course we also work with the commercial side of our customers business. So there is even there, there's also a little bit of complexity. So yeah, there's quite a bit of reason to dive into the input we get from customers because there is, it's. There's rarely just one right answer to any given question.

So you've got many dimensions there. You've got different types of businesses, probably different sizes of businesses that you're talking to. You've got different people that you're speaking to. And that's quite a challenge that you personally bring to the table to manage.

It is. But I will say this also, we are blessed with some very, very strong, capable people who interact with our customers. So we have quite good customer relationships and we also see that in the input we get when we run things like our NPS activities and so on.

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because what I love about the transparency of your business is that you are not only saying that you use Net Promoter, you're also publishing a number and I.

Believe the number is last year was 69.

Congratulations, that's really a great score. I know how diligently you measure this, so I'm pretty confident that's a great benchmark that will score on that. But you're putting it in the annual report which means that the board stand behind customer experience as a measurement. So what does customer experience mean in the business?

Well, I think for us in that we are as I said, we are of course a B2B company which means that the customer experience is a little different than at least a lot of the roles that I came from previously, which were mainly B2C where the person purchasing the product was also the one getting the ultimate benefit of the product. Where here it's a little bit different. We are working through someone else in that sense. So a lot of our efforts on the customer experience here is about helping our customers provide the best possible experience for their customers, the end consumer in this case or other industries. And that provides a little bit of a unique challenge in that we need to understand what our customers markets are to a degree that might not seem completely obvious, but that is how we can become the best possible partner in that. So we put a lot of emphasis into our Experience program which is primarily centered around a net promoter in working with the customers to get a sense of how well do they feel that we can support them in helping their customers or providing good experience to their customers. That's really the core of the challenge that we have here.

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I think it's a really interesting point. I mean really at the core of your business is deep listening to your clients. That obviously has to happen outside any customer experience program anyway and it has to work on a day to day basis. But for me, I think the evidence of it is that you measure it with a process and we'll come on to that in a second. But also that that signal is sent from the top of the business that this is an important thing we need to do, we need deep discussions and we will measure it. And I'm guessing, and I may be reaching here so you can correct me, but because everything here is effectively, you're doing biochemical manufacturing with very strong, strict processes, you're also using that in your customer domain as well. And I love that. I love to think of that as a quality measurement program.

Yeah, you can say that. That's certainly how we view it. Right? We utilize our conversations with the customers to make sure that we are providing quality in all dimensions of how we interact with.

So let's dive a little bit deeply into this. Can you talk about the processes that you're using to measure customer experience?

Yeah. So I mean again, this happens elsewhere in the business as well, but from the chair that I sit in, we run a fairly comprehensive net promoter program. We do a quarterly survey where we survey a quarter of our customers every quarter. In other words, over the course of 12 months we survey the whole business. But that way we get a bit of a pulse reading about what's happening in the market, what's affecting our customers, without having to ask our customers too many questions over the course of a year. That is hugely helpful and it gives us a nice sort of fairly rapid input from the market, from the customer. Specifically. We track a number of different parameters. We track things like product quality, we track things like the interaction with novo times, contact people, service, technical support, innovation levels, et cetera, et cetera. So different aspects of our interaction or our touchpoints for the customer are all tracked. And then we spend quite a bit of time working with the open ended comments that our customers are so nice to provide us. That is really where we find a lot of the gold that we can act on because the score is score, but it leaves it up to interpretation. We are super fortunate that our customers are close enough to their respective contacts and normal times that they feel comfortable leaving us fairly detailed comments. We're also fortunate that they are overwhelmingly positive that should be underlined. We're quite proud of that. But that really helps us because that's where we find the nuances. One thing is saying, yes, I'm very satisfied with working with normal times, but if we don't know exactly which part you're satisfied with, it's hard for us to improve on it and replicate it elsewhere. If we don't know which part you may unfortunately in certain cases be slightly less satisfied with, then we don't know where to improve. But fortunately we have customers that are very, very articulate about their interactions with us. And again, we are also very much a relationship business. So we're close to our customers anyways in that.

That's really good to thank you for expressing it like that because it really again shows about the curiosity you have as a business to understand what you want to get from your customers. But also it speaks about the relationship that they are happy to speak about this and you're better to learn when you've collated the information. How does that get moved around the company? Does it get seen at the executive level? Is it used in departments and people follow up on it? Can you characterize A little bit about what happens after that.

So the team puts together a fairly comprehensive number of different reports depending on what parameters we're slicing on. Are we slicing on geography? Are we slicing on business unit? What are we looking at? So on a quarterly basis we provide a group wide report and then we provide reports for our sort of main business areas. We also do the same for geographies. They're available, those are sent and published to key stakeholders within the organization. And then we also, as a fairly new thing, we have a internal knowledge base of all sorts of insights that also covers our consumer insights and general market insights and longer term trends and whatever else it could be. And we publish them in there as well. So the figures are in essence available to anyone within normalsems.

What about closing the loop? Is that something that you're encouraging your staff members to? Do they go back to clients?

Yes, absolutely. So our closed loop process is one of our key KPIs. I won't go into the details of numbers here, but the process is essentially that there is a measurement for when is the immediate reporting or touchback with the customer that has responded to a survey. And then there's another second measurement for if there was an issue raised, how long it takes to raise those. And we're quite pleased with the performance on those though again, the goal is of course, of course that those are always tracking at 100% of the target. But no, all in all things are quite positive on that front. And then we have an annual process where we then look at what were the comments that came in broadly across different areas of the business. We worked closely with business unit leadership teams on saying this is what the customers told us and then they define actions based on that that are then implemented going forward. So it's a fairly rigorous process.

Now, I don't want you to give away any secrets at all on this one, but is there anything that you learned that surprised you in the process? So you get something back from clients. You were to speak in general terms about an insight that came through that was like, ah, that was an aha moment.

Well, I will say, I don't mean to be dull here, but no, there actually weren't that many surprises.

Which that's a good thing.

Exactly. That's what I'm saying. That is an insight in and of itself. And I think it's a testament to our customer facing teams and the closeness of the relationships they have with the customers in that there were very few things that were surprising, so to speak. Which also means that it certainly doesn't diminish the importance of the program because what the program does, it reaffirms that we're on the right track and we know where to fall, which means we can make the smaller nuance adjustments that need to be done. And we're not revolutionizing anything, you know, everything once a year because we've learned something we didn't know. And that really is a testament to the people who deal with the customers every day. I would say. So. So no, I wish I could tell you that there was a huge aha moment and the light bulbs went off and everything else. But no, I'm actually quite, quite okay with that. With that not being the case.

Well, maybe that's a really, that's a great sign of being a very well run company that actually there should be no surprises and you're just continually learning maybe a few tweaks and you're, you're doing course corrections. But that's a really good place to be.

Yeah, yeah. Again, it's like I said, we, our team is primarily the measuring unit so we can't really take credit for that. But it is certainly nice to be a part of that.

But I just want to dive into something a bit from a personal basis because you had some really interesting companies that you work for. As we said, Bang and Olufsen. That's a shared love that we have B and O headphones we were commenting on about earlier. Around my neck, in fact. You know, that was a different circumstance for you because that was much more in consumer based research. How did you take the learnings that you'd had from talking with consumers and bringing them into the industrial environment?

Well, I think from where I'm sitting, of course there's a bit of a difference, but it's primarily the differences are not so much in how you pull in the insights and how you pull in the findings, it's more what you do with them afterwards. Because at the end of the day when we look if I again basis on our Net Promoter program, when we gather insights and do insight generation through Net Promoter scores as a vehicle for that, we're basically asking human beings to express an opinion or share an experience or whatever it is. Yes, they're doing it in the context of their work and it's a B2B setting. But they're still human beings.

Yes.

With all the emotional impact that could have or all the irrationalities meant in a positive sense that we are not machines. It's not like people forget who they are and their personality necessarily changes because they step through their office doors. So from an inside generation perspective, we approach things fairly similarly in that sense. But of course, how the insights are then applied to internal processes and so on will be different because the processes are different in that sense.

I guess I'll say from my experience is that the. If you think about the value of the feedback that comes back, that's probably the biggest change is that if you talk to an individual consumer, there might be a huge bang. And Olufsen found, for example, and have thousands invested in. But your clients. I've got millions invested in the relationship and that's the.

Yeah, I think again, and if I take this a little more broadly than just the normal times context and look at it from at least my B2B versus B2C experience in general, I think the difference is more that on a B2C level, again, this very broad generalization, but people are talking about something they buy maybe once or twice, or at least with longer intervals. When we look at B2B, you're typically talking about recurring purchases or something that's more of a partner. And you're asking people in a B2B setting about something that affects their job and their career. So there might be a slightly higher engagement there. On the other hand, as you say, if it's like you said, you're banging Oluzen headphones that you have around your neck right now, you might care quite a bit about those and therefore be more emotionally. So, yes, of course there is a bit of a difference, but at the end of the day, we try to approach things fairly similarly because I generally just don't subscribe to the view that Once you're in B2B, you're in the complete, rational, pragmatic mode. And when you're in B2C, you're in the emotional, subjective mode. I think it's a sliding scale, of course. And I think in general, people are human beings, whether they're at work and whether they're at home.

I agree. And actually there's a lot of research that shows that the B2B decisions can be even more emotional in some ways because it's very much based on that personal relationship. And you mentioned that as your drivers. It's not just product quality or the processes that you have, it's that relationship that you have with the account manager that I think is really important. And that's. That really shines through in that relationship. So thanks for foregrounding that.

Yeah.

So if you think about your program, what are some of the challenges that you've come up against and how do you overcome them?

Well, I think our challenges are probably similar to the challenges that most other other companies who run Net promoter programs are. They will most often be around response rates because of course you get slightly greedy. We want to hear from as many customers as possible because the more we hear from customers, the more we can act on it and hence the, you know, in at least the better foundation for providing an improved experiences.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's something we put a lot of effort into and we are, you know, I've been, been working a little bit with sort of dedicated Net promoter champions in different business units and so on to help to help that along. And that's working quite well in the areas where we have that implemented. I think that's, that's the primary challenge in that sense. Other than that, we are quite fortunate that we do have a fairly high response rate. Yes, we'll stay here. But we would of course like it to be higher because that's how we learn. The more input we get, the more likely it is that we can take the right actions from our customers perspective.

Do you have like chronic non responders, people you just cannot get to get response from?

No, not, not really. It's tough to find a pattern in the ones that aren't responding. And again, this is kind of where we come back to the point I was making before saying that just because we're B2B, we can't expect people to act pragmatically or rationally. Sometimes you just end up sending the survey email at a time when they're super busy with something else or came out of a budget meeting that perhaps wasn't pleasant and therefore don't feel like answering that survey at that given time. There can be many different reasons for that.

Right, I agree. And it's not a dictatorship. We're not asking for people to do that. But I can tell you from personal experience that once you show value for that feedback loop, that's often what encourages future feedback. Have you found that in the page?

We have seen certain customers highlight in their comments that they appreciate the fact that once they have answered something, we actually come back and say, yes, we've heard what they're saying. But again, I think we also have to remember, as with anything from our side, the Net promoter survey will always mean more to us than it does to the respondent.

Yeah, that's a really good point. But again, by stating it publicly in your report and talking about that, I think that reinforces the importance it has to the business and that's partly why they buy into you. So as we think about the future for the Insights program here, how do you see it evolving?

Well, again, we will continue with our Net Promoter program as it is now. I think the key thing for us is to continue the steps that we're taking internally about how we actually then listen to the customers and how we then take those steps. I think again, just in the short time I've been here and I know this was going on even well before I came, there's a very strong trajectory of listening to that. We can see that in the amount of requests that the customer Insights team within my organization gets from the business to get more knowledge. That's fantastic. That's one of the things that I look for. How many questions do we get from the business? Because that's a nice proxy for how much the business wants to hear about the customers. Now we're super fortunate. We have people who are extremely customer focused here and that certainly helps. So I think the futurism continues, continuing on the path that we are now and keep expanding we have within the company as well. And just. Yeah. Being the voice of the customer within, no signs in that. We get those survey results once a quarter. And it's our job to make sure that people know what was in those survey results. We don't do that specifically for the individual account manager because they will most likely hear that from the customer before we hear it in the survey again. Hence, not that many big surprises in the surveys. Yeah, but we have a role to play in aggregating that so that the entire business. Here's what that one customer set to the one account managing that. So I think that's where we see that's sort of our next expansion area is how do we then aggregate and get the data out a little more broadly. Right.

Yeah. It's a really good way of thinking about it. Per, I'd like to thank you for welcoming here today. It's been wonderful to understand a little bit about the Novozymes business and about the program. It's also great to hear somebody that can run a program with no surprises. Congratulations on that.

No major surprises. But yeah, there's always a little surprise here and there. But thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. I appreciate it.