Offer Exceptional B2B CX & the Rest Just CLiCS

It can feel really daunting to be able to how to set up a program about customer experience. But it's relatively easy when you think about the idea that when everything clicks together and it works, then you know you're going to provide a great experience to every one of your end customers every single time. And if they get a great experience, guess what? Consumers get a great experience and you sell more.

Hello and welcome to the CPG Experience Council Guide to Experience. My name is Adam Durrel, one of the founder members of the CPG Experience Council. I'm also the CEO and founder of CustomerGage, which is this company that measures experience. I've been doing it for about 15 years. I'd like to introduce our host today who's Nigel Tordon, who's the chairman of the CPG Experience Council. Hi, Nigel, how are you doing?

I'm very well, thank you. Adam. Great to be here. Similar to yourself, 30 years of being in customer Experience. It's just wonderful to be able to share some of these things with the audience today.

And your background is somewhat interesting. You've been in this, you were in the CPG business for a long time.

Yeah, quite a bit actually. So mainly within alcohol, which is not a bad category to be in over 30 years. But yeah, I worked in the UK, worked in Europe, worked in Canada, and most latterly worked in the United States. So a fairly good viewpoint of certainly the western world in terms of customer experience and consumer packaged goods.

Yeah. And to date, this particular podcast, I see today that Molson Coors, your former employer, just bought a spirits company.

Yeah, I think it's probably not. It's not the first one. I've lost count to how many we purchased now. But it's just that the consumers change the tastes and therefore you have to go all the way back into the supply chain and change the things that you provide to them. So the portfolios just continue to grow. It's a nice thing to be able to see, actually. Really good news.

So let's outline what we're going to talk about in this podcast series. We're starting with an agenda of really how to get going in the in customer experience in the consumer packaged goods world. Nigel, you've got this acronym on the screen here that you're calling clicks. So for this first episode, perhaps you can just walk us through what these points are.

Yes, I think the starting point, when you think about a customer experience, I'd go one stage further and say all of us are consumers. Every one of us have had a Consumer experience, we instinctively know what good looks like. Well, if you imagine then if you're the consumer, go back one stage in that chain, that customer who the end customer in your supply chain, in that B2B relationship, who provides that consumer experience, that's the customer we're talking about here. And the acronym clicks is quite nice because you want every. When everything clicks together and it works, you provide a really good experience. And having done this for over 30 years, it can feel really daunting to be able to how to set up a program about customer experience. But it's relatively easy when you think about the idea that when everything clicks together and it works, then you know you're going to provide a great experience to every one of your end customers every single time. And if they get a great experience, guess what? Consumers get a great experience and you sell more. It's not complicated, but it is complex. So hopefully the acronym just helps focus the mind on the steps that we can go through to be able to get there.

Yeah, I love the idea. And there's sort of the five steps that we're going to talk about in the, in this introductory one here. So why don't we dive straight in. Let's take the first one off the top here. Now you've called this catalyst. What's the important thing about this? Is there a spark that makes this work?

I think it is. Every bit of change for me starts with somebody or something. So you have to have a catalyst to stoke up a fire. You need a spark. And I think everything starts with a catalyst. And the best way I've ever seen something start in the business world is with a story that people can repeat and share. So as a little aside, we've become a grandparent. Recently I've been telling my little grandson who's just about to turn 12 months old, about the three little pigs and Little Red Riding Hood. I haven't read that book in 30 years, but it's such a good story I can remember it. And I think that every catalyst to a customer experience program needs is a story to be able to tell that they can share with other people. So if I give you an example through the beer world, this goes back a little while, but I was in one of my end customers and one of the colleagues was building a display of my competitors brands. And I just asked a question about why they were building the competitor brands and not mine. And she said, well, they don't have glue on the boxes of beer. And when I pick up the box of beer, I Get glue all over my fingers and all over my uniform, and it's not great. And we put glue on the beer so we could make sure it was really safe in transit, that it never moved on the trucks and it never moved when it went into the store. So everybody was kept safe. And those two things have to be true. But that glue meant my beer wasn't being built in a display. Well, the moment you start to tell that story throughout the whole of the organization, it gets repeated and you find a new solution. We found a better way to be able to stack the packs of beer that didn't need glue, and we got more displays built. So a good story will go all the way through the organization. But it's not just enough. You can't just tell one story and people go, so what? You've got to have a plan. You've got to think about which customers you're going to do this with and actually how much a whole experience program is going to cost. But having a range of stories to tell is a brilliant way to be able to start.

I think that's really good. And it's often a person, isn't it, that has this idea that comes in, maybe it's a new person in the business and they come in with this idea. But, you know, it doesn't have to be the person at the top. It can be somebody further down the business you've seen.

I think it can come from nearly anywhere. A catalyst is somebody who I think has got a real passion to be able to do something. And quite often, I mean, the catalyst could be a customer, it could be an employee, it could be the sales leader, it could be the finance leader, it could be anybody. I mean, this is the whole point about how your catalyst starts. But it becomes positively infects an organization by telling those stories. Somebody else building the story, somebody else goes out to get a little bit more curious to see what's going on. And before you know it, you've got a group of people who want to be able to make change happen. But it needs to have a bit more of a plan. You can't just have evangelical stories being told around. We're going to change because then nothing will happen. But that's why I think to have a plan and to think ultimately about which customers you're going to do it with first. Do you go for your biggest customer? Do you go for the easiest customer? Do you start with the most complex customer? There's some big questions to ask when you start an experience program, but they're great things to do once you've got that passion built in the organization.

And maybe as we start to work through this, that's what we can look at because it's the spark that does it. You don't quite know in which direction it's going to go. But let's break down the next level. So let's go to the next step in your system. Now you've got leadership here, which of course starts with an L. So let's break this down. What master leader do or, you know, what has to happen in the leadership team for the customer experience program to come alive?

Well, I, I think you just nailed it for me. When you talk about the leadership team, if this is just the customer team or the sales team, I'm not so sure it will work as well as when every member of that leadership team has bought into something. And hence why you talk about creating customer advocates in all of the leadership team members. If I give you a little example from one of the finance leaders in a team I previously worked in, when you've got customer at the heart of a leadership team and consumer's just as important. But if we're focusing on the customer, the finance leader talked about how they could put little thank you notes on the invoices that went out to every end customer about something that had happened or to be able to inform them about something that was about to happen. You fundamentally change the way you think as a leadership team when you've got every single member of that leadership team thinking about customer. And once they've done that, they then facilitate as a group of leaders how you group your teams together. So you end up with multifunctional teams, not just customer teams, but everybody has the voice of customer in their team. They set up the whole capability of the organization. And what's really interesting is the targets and incentives and the things that they praise in an organization changes when you get the whole of the leadership team on board.

Yeah, I think this is really important. I've seen this many times where you've got strong leadership and maybe somebody from marketing also that's championing this. But when it comes down to sales, it almost looks like a tax on the business that they're doing to help sort of an experience program. And if I can just share a story that I've come across. Nigel, this was the head of a huge global logistics company that we worked with and this person would once every quarter make sure that they dipped into the customer feedback and then he would select six to seven items and we'd actually call customers up to say, hi, this is the CEO of this global logistics company. Thanks for your feedback. I'd love to learn more about it. And this was incredible because of course, what it did is it galvanized this particular company, which was very hierarchical and made everybody in the company really sit up to say, hey, if the boss is going to call up the customer, I better be on my A game. And it drove continues actually to drive the program to new heights every quarter. So I love that it does. I think that's really a good idea about leadership there.

You've raised something wonderful for every leader that's out there because it's not what you say, it's what you do. That's what people really recognize. And in that little illustration, if you just move up one layer above that as a leader, when you get into this idea of a customer experience program, what do you praise? Do you praise heroes who fix a problem that's frustrated your customer, or do you praise the people who put a process in place that means they can impress the customer time and time and time again and nothing goes wrong? And it's a really interesting choice because some organizations will praise the heroes because they, they fix something. They made a delivery happen or they solved a problem. What you really want is the leadership team who praise those who make the processes, the operation, the systems work perfectly every time.

So I was just going to build on that because I love that. This is the story I tell about firefighters. Everybody loves a firefighter, right? A big sexy, kind of like they're here to rescue people. And yet if you talk to firefighters and I know somebody who's a firefighter for a long time, they'd much prefer to put in smoke alarms in people's house. Yeah, but it's not quite as exciting, but it saves many more more lives. So you prevent it's prevention and getting the process right rather than fixing it. Yeah, that is odd. Absolutely phrased enough in business.

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So we're moving on to the I now, the Interconnect. So this is interesting. Now I've heard you speak about this as wiring before, which I also love, but I can understand why it's Interconnect because we now have an acronym here. This is about connecting all of the parts together. So talk about why this is important. Nigel, let's introduce this.

Well, I think that the interesting part, I mean wiring is a good way to be able to get there, but you can have all the wiring, but that's only part of the story. It's when you connect the wiring up together where it makes the difference because you have functions talking to each other, you end up with this real shared purpose. So if you think about how do you map the story of your customer? So if I'm a brand owner and I sell to a distributor who is a B2B relationship who then sells to the consumer or to the outlets, that there's a huge journey that goes through, how many times does the product get touched? How much inefficiencies in the process? How do you put the customer into everything you do in your operations? When you start your annual operating plan or your long range plan, how do you put your customer needs in there? What problems are you trying to be able to fix? Just being able to capture all the data. I give it a really simple example. We just got to that time where we upgraded the cars in our household again and I bought one for myself and I got one for my wife. The one I bought for myself, they actually spelled my name wrong and I've had much to have 20 emails from them or phone calls where they've got my name wrong. And imagine the experience that provides for me just something so simple as the data being incorrect can change the whole way I feel about that car. And my wife thinks hers is wonderful because the car talks to her and gets her Name, right. Every single time.

What did they call you? Is it Schmeichel, Norgon or something like that?

No, they. They call me Neil instead of Neil instead of Nigel. And Neil's a perfectly lovely name, but it's not my name. It's just. It's amazing how it gets you there. But. But the interesting part is they go back to that single view of the customer. When you connected all the dates together, I must have sent them back 30 notes saying, hey, just get my name right, please. Can you update my name on your file? And everything comes back Neil. Yes, we certainly will need to go. No, no, no, no. But it's everything. So from the way you communicate to the customer, the information you provide to them, the way you can share with customers that other customers similar to you did different things. The Amazon type of model. There's so many different things. But this doesn't work if this ends up being just a sales functional thing. It's the way you interconnect everything across the whole organization. So every single interaction you've had with your end customer, whether you're the marketing manager that's talking to them, you're the finance manager or invoice clerk that's talking to them, whoever you are, you know everything that's gone in that customer world, and everybody's trying to be able to make it better just before we move.

On to the next one. It's interesting because this is probably the technology part of it, isn't it? You need technology to make this work, but it's not the first step. And I think this is a really important thing. You know, you've got to have all of those steps beforehand. And again, this is only one step out of five. So let's move on to the next one if we can. Nigel, now you've called this curiosity. I love this, by the way. I mean, I. I like to think of myself as a curious. In life, this is the way you can actually go out. If you don't start with the spark of curiosity to find out what your customers are thinking or saying, you're not going to make the program work.

No.

Let's hear your take on this.

Well, there's a couple of things here. Is you want to be able to ask why before your customer does, because quite often the customer will say, why do you do that? And you go, oh, there's nothing worse than going, I don't know, we shouldn't be doing that. We should change it. But the curiosity comes absolutely everywhere. When you bring those multifunctional Teams together. So it's not just the customer team that's talking. Say you've got a problem with a service to your end customer that the delivery never quite appears on time. What you need to have within there, the logistics team, the sales team. You might want to have the finance team involved and it might end up be because actually when you get to the end shelf they have to take the packaging down two or three times to be able to rebuild it again. Which then needs your marketing teams involved to understand how the packaging looks in the first place. The curiosity is just amplified when you bring all the teams together and there's nothing worse than having a whole host of data and do nothing with it.

Yeah.

What was the story you've told a couple of times about fish? If you get some feedback from a customer and you don't do anything with the fish, it's like fish that I can't remember the exact story but it's with me.

Yeah. Feedback is like fish because if you don't act on it immediately it starts to rot. You know, there you go. Fresh fish is delicious.

Right.

But so fresh feedback. The acts of actually getting on somebody to say, hey, we just heard this from you a few hours ago. What can I do to help? Or if I can fix it now, but tell me more. That shows curiosity and passion actually. So yeah.

But we take that example. If you get one customer who gives you that piece of feedback, you want the curiosity to be in the organization. I wonder how many other customers have had that same experience? How many more could we go out and do something with? And the last little illustration here about build to create insights. Our world is made up of amazing people. And in a B2B relationship you've got some really bright people.

Yeah.

And every single part of the organization all the way. The the most things I ever learned in the beer business was when I was out with the people who actually did the delivery, the Drake crews. Because they saw our customers on a daily basis. They could tell you whether a piece of packaging or promotional kit was good or bad that they knew so much. So it's really hard to be able to find a piece of insight that makes the biggest difference. One of my old bosses used to say to me is the last 10% of insight that nobody else has found. Because if you can find that, then you can really start to impress customers. Which is nicely leading to the last part of the clicks process when it all works together.

Yeah. Now you call this surpass. I love this. So I'm guessing this is about taking actions on the stuff. But to me, surpass says going beyond to talk through this.

Yeah, well, if you just do the action, you're keeping things stable for where they are today. Every business relationship, there's lots of different measures of success. But the real measure of success is are you growing the business? Have you got growth and even able to do that profitably? One thing I know about business that I learned a long time ago, when you get something wrong, it costs time, money, effort, resource, emotional energy into your organization and the customers. You get it right every single time. You free up all the energy in your business and your customer's business to do many, many different things. So when you're closing the loop, when somebody's giving you some feedback and they've got it wrong or the organization's got it wrong, how can you go back in that closed loop process and not just correct, but make it better for the future? How can you go about addressing issues so you find an issue, well, that could. It's like a little bit like old. I'm showing my age now about dominoes. When you used to line the dominoes up as a child and you knock the first one over and then they all fall over, but when you address one issue, you probably unlocked another issue somewhere else. Just following that chain all the way down to be able to unlock different things. And one of the most interesting moments when you surpass as an organization is when you tell all of your customer base something that's changed or something that you got wrong, that you've improved, even though they may not have faced it themselves because you're going beyond every single time. And I was a chief customer officer in an organization and there's nothing better than seeing you put something in place that's not only worked for the one customer that identified in the first place, but when you put it in place for 10,000 customers, the impact it has on your organization and the growth that it unlocks becomes amazing. And it then brings you full circle again, all the way back to a new catalyst story, to a new group of leaders that can influence it. You interconnect the whole organization in a different way. It becomes such a wonderful circle of just improving things every single time.

Yeah, I love to hear your passion on this. So just as we sum up again, Nigel, to really state where we come from on this, I mean your passion is about bringing a better experience to the CPG trade. So the millions of people that work in there, and I think that's such a great enthusiasm and a great mission to be on. So let's just summarize where we are with the CLICKS acronym. Just let me emotionally.

Yeah, I think the starting point is the emotion. When everything clicks, you know it's working well. So that's how the acronym came about. And you just know when everything clicks, because the organization is just wonderful. But it only clicks when you've got a catalyst who wants to be able to make something happen. You've got a whole leadership team on every single function brought into it. You interconnect customer through the whole of your organization with the processes and the data and the capabilities, then create a culture that people are curious. They're always searching for more. Because when you search for more, you can surpass what your customer expected. And when you surpass what your customer expected, guess what? Those customers keep coming back and buying more. And we'll talk about this in our next webinar. But the more you impress a customer, the more they buy from you, the more you grow the business. But that just doesn't happen unless everything clicks together in an organization.

That's a great way of finishing this up. We'll dive into each of the acronyms in each of the letters as we go through this. But, Nigel, thank you so much today for introducing us to the process.

You're welcome.

It.