Teledyne Ignites Great Customer Experiences Through NPS

Nick, what's important for you about the customer journey?

I think it's about being humble, being open, and taking people in the business with you on the journey.

Hi, I'm Adam Durrell and I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. Now, if you're a regular at the AX podcast, you'll know that in every episode I like to catch up with inspiring industry leaders or thinkers who like to share their best practices and tips to help you develop your own B2B account experience program. And, you know, I like to think of this podcast as a fire starter for your own efforts. For example, using the, I don't know, the flammable gas of customer experience and ignite it with the burning flame of account management. And that makes the white hot mixture that we call Account experience. And checking this flame today is an expert and it's in the remit of our guest today, Nick Wood, who's the global marketing director at Teledyne Gas and Flame Detection, which is a division of Teledyne Technologies, a really big company. We're going to dive into this today. Nick himself oversees the global marketing operations for Teledyne Gas and Flame Detection and its three primary businesses. And we'll get to hear about that. I've known him since he was our customer at Howden, which I think is about eight years ago, so kind of a long time we've had. And then Nick came back to Customer Gauge as a client later on. So I'm really delighted about talking to Nick today. Nick, how are you doing? Welcome.

Hi, Adam. Very well, thanks. I love that analogy to start with. I think you've worked on that before, so excellent. I like the team up with the gas and flame part of it there. So. Nice one. No, I'm great, thanks. Looking forward to Christmas. So next time of year to do this chat.

Yeah, it's really lovely. I really appreciate you being on today, but we've had a really good few years when we worked together. But I want to focus on the company that you're with now. Of course they use all those terrible puns about being fire starting and that sort of stuff, but Teledyne Flame Detection is really at the heart of many safety systems around the world. Right. I mean, it's keeping us as consumers safe. Can you tell us a little about the organization?

Yeah, sure. No, absolutely. As I like to think about it as a kind of noble cause, to be honest, working within the fire and gas detection space. Our business, Teledyne Gas and Flame Detection, is made up of three core business units offering Fixed and portable gas detection. One based in, in Scotland in the uk, which is where my accent originates from. So hopefully your listeners can stay with me on this journey. Normally you can see people's eyes swaying off but hopefully this time they will be able to listen in and keep with me. We've got a business in France doing fixed gas detection that the business in the UK and Glasgow does portable gas detection solutions and then we've got a business over in Houston in the US doing fixed and wireless gas detection solutions and we joined Teledyne from 3m and 3m sold and the gas and flame detection business back in 2019 to Teledyne and since then we've had the opportunity as part of our core commercial strategy to bring in a customer centric type intimacy type strategy which has been core to our business and it's been really fun to, to launch that, get it started in the business and watch it start to grow over the last few years. So definitely a, a bit more of a noble cause and trying to keep people safe throughout the world, whether that's their person, you know, putting a gas detector on or keeping plants and, and infrastructure safe as well from, from gas leaks and from potential fires.

Now I'm going to nerd out a bit in a second, but I, I think your company's been around for some time, 75 years or something like that.

But yeah, yeah, no, interesting. We're coming up for our 70th birthday for both the GMI business based in Renfrom, Scotland, Teledine gmi and the Teledine Odom Centronics business based in Aras, Northern France. So both those businesses are coming up for 75 years. Our debt coin business next year will be coming up for 40 years. So combined it's just short of 200 years of gas and flame detection experience, which is pretty cool to see your partner with so much.

When I think of gas and flame detection, my first thoughts go to something like a Davey Lamp.

Right.

Which has really been around for something. I mean the technology has moved a little bit since then, I'm guessing. Right.

Hopefully it has. I mean we're actually. It's a good point you made right back to the Canadian, the coal mine kind of thing.

Yeah.

This business has been here and keeping people safe in different guises. Interestingly, in modern times we've actually in the space of now looking to utilize the cloud to bring data and bring information on gas detection right to people's fingertips and that's really important. That's the kind of boot from the Davy Lamp or the Canadian Nicole Mine right up to now. And the whole idea is that we are continually providing information that keeps people safe in whatever guys they use it as people's preferences for accessing information change. So definitely it started there. We've thankfully moved on technology wise innovation has been kind to us and we've got a range of products that are really innovative in terms of what they do.

And I love the. I hadn't thought about that. Canary in the Coal Mine is a sort of a low tech analogy but it's a wonderful way of thinking about it and we use it as a metaphor in business life, you know, for things going wrong. So we'll talk about that in a second with relating to customer experience. But can you give a sense of the type of customers that you have as an organization? Are they big, small, you know, mention a couple of names if you can just to give us a sense of who you sell to?

Yeah, no, we've got a range of different customers depending on the solutions that we have. In the UK we do a lot of business with a lot of the big gas utility companies that serve the distribution of natural gas to your home. And in your home, companies like sgn, ngn, Caden are some of our big customers there. And interestingly we have some pretty innovative products that have recently launched in that space, in the hydrogen space. We're helping those businesses transition towards hydrogen and cleaner energies. We also have array of customers in France, GRDF Gas, on the gas side, Veolia Water we do a lot of business with. We have strong customers over in Saudi and in the Middle east as well and in the us. So we're very much a global company with strong presence throughout the world. And that obviously brings some challenges when you're trying to understand customers, feedback and really what makes them tick because that changes depending on the market that you're in. The most important thing is you have a method to gather those. But yeah, that's some of the big boys that we work with.

That's really cool. Let me dive in a bit and you know, help me understand what a good customer experience is for, for one of your clients, you know, is it just shipping stuff and it's turning up unbroken on time? I don't know. But you know, talk me through a little bit about the services and solutions that that really gets the heart of a good experience.

Yeah, so I think that's the thing. I mean it's like your own daily life. If you're ordering something you expect, there's an expectation that comes that if you place an order, it's going to come fairly soon and also it's going to work, it's not going to break. Now in reality, that doesn't always happen. There are some flaws in the system, but we like to think that most of the time we have products and solutions that are strong from a quality perspective and will work for the customer when installed or they're utilizing the product. So, yeah, no, our customer journey is pretty probably three ways that we look at this. We look at it from a transactional perspective. So we have a survey, we have a net promoter methodology for gathering feedback from transactional customers. We look at that on a kind of monthly basis and we look at where the numbers are and what the feedback is. We try and process that through our business. We've also got importantly an anonymous survey that helps our service business that goes out with their service reports. So not just selling a product, but actually maintaining and helping a customer with any issues that come up with that. We try and gather feedback on that as well to help improve. And then really importantly, we have a relationship survey that we utilize with some of our top customers. Again, a business like we talked about there, Adam, that has been operating for so long like our businesses only gets there by having some strong customers that come on the journey with us. And the old adage is it costs two or three times more to acquire a new customer. So keeping those customers understanding what they're seeing across the account is absolutely vital towards what we do. I like to think in the past we've always had our finger on the pulse. We wouldn't have got to where we are as a business that we had. And nowadays it's about trying to push that and make it very visible to the business so it can make better, better decisions moving forward about the service or the products we provide. And I think that's it. That's kind of how we look at it within our business.

I like the whole thing about having your customers for 75 years. That's not nothing. That really is really an incredible journey that you've had as an organization. But I love the fact that you're not taking them for granted that you've got these multiple ways of. I suppose I'm going to use this analogy here of detecting what's going on. It's, in a way, it's a little bit like the canary and the coal miner or the flame detection that you've got as a business. So you're looking for signs of, I suppose, stinking customer service, you know, or or signs that something is going wrong. And I wonder if you know, how much do you think about that as an organization, about having that in your quality control procedures. Is there something, you know, how deeply is it embedded in. In the Teledyne journey?

No, it totally is. I mean, what you were seeing there just made me think of one of our brand pillars as a business and it's detention as an error DNA basically. So detecting is obviously the most important thing. But then what do you do with that is the key point as well. And helping our customers utilize that detection data to help support their businesses. Funny, in terms of our quality processes, this is one of the reasons why the opportunity came up to basically I would kind of say group round a strategy upon customer intimacy or one of the things that was coming out in our ISO audits was, or what was becoming difficult in an ISO 9001 audits was really trying to showcase the way that we were gathering data and really regarding customer opinion. And that kind of took us a step back in terms of. Right. Actually, as a business we've been operating for 75 years. We obviously know a great deal of what our customers want. But are we able to qualify that? Are we able to show that we able to use that data productively within our own business? And that was one of the reasons why critical to our commercial strategy as a customer intimacy plan that we have within the business. That really kicked off because of trying to make sure that we had a process in place for showing that in an ISO perspective. So it's funny, when you mentioned quality, that's what it really. That gave the business the need. Obviously I had a bit of experience in this field as well and we were able to get the business really focused on this being a core part of our strategy moving forward because it had been so, and has been so successful over the previous 75 years as well. Although we maybe didn't show it, you know, graphically or talk about it in that aspect.

I love that. I mean, it's important to remember, isn't it, Nick, that if you have an ISO 9000 quality assurance policy in your business, you need to have that customer satisfaction service part of that auditing process. Many people take it for granted, but I'd rather turn it on its head. And I see businesses like yours have a really strong commitment to quality manufacturing and product is extending that into the customer domain. And you know, to say we're going to look after you as a customer and this is how we would treat you. We have procedures and I think that Is, you know, to me, that is also the similar part of the quality process and having the experience is part of that. So I'm really glad that you're echoing that and then in saying that.

Yeah, no, totally. Again, it's back to the whole thing of the age of the business. We wouldn't be here had we not had or have had quality products. And funny, some of our products in the past have maybe been too good from a quality perspective. One of our products that is kind of has a bit of a colocalism in terms of locally is our gas or beer range, which is known as the BRICs because there is solid is a brick, which is great from a customer perspective, but you know, and from a business perspective, sometimes a challenge. So quality is absolutely at the heart of what we offer and it has to be. Ultimately, we are in the business of keeping people safe in this environment. So quality is absolutely paramount when it comes to the products and solutions that we offer.

I love that. I mean, you see your passion for that really comes through and I'm wondering if you can contrast that because, you know, you and I have known each other now in two separate businesses and you had the experience at Howden without going into any confidential details, you know, how did you take your learnings from that organization and transform them? I'd love to know more about your personal journey through customer experience.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's really an interesting one. And there's been a few light bulb moments along the way where things have actually made sense and that's interesting. So I got involved back in, I think it was probably back in about 2013, 2014. So it's probably coming up for 10 years being part of a customer intimacy program or leading it or driving it forward. Certainly when I got the opportunity to do it in Howden, I didn't know what NPS stood for when the first time it was put on my table and I thought, what is this? So it took me a while to really understand what we were trying to do. But that light bulb moment really flickered when, you know, we were able to pull that together and look at our top accounts within, within that business and actually understand the different levels of engagement that we had with those accounts. And that's where it started to make sense. I got a passion for it. We, we obviously work quite closely together in the past as well. I think talking to other industry leaders as well in this space has always been a real eye opener, light bulb moment as well. Ultimately, everybody has customers and everybody is trying to keep those Customers happy and people do it well, people do it less so. And really in the middle there is where the detail is and that's where the fun really is. When we had the opportunity to bring this into a commercial strategy within teledine gas and flame protection back in 2019 or 2020, at that point, coming out of COVID that was a real important step to do that. And I was really excited to bring that in and replicate some of the learnings. I mean, we made so many mistakes back and I think everyone has been through that. And you learn from those mistakes, which works well. What doesn't? What to drive in terms of KPIs, how do you get people to respond in the first place? And by hook or by crook, you find ways to do that depending on the business and the customer base. And everything in there is excitement. It really is important to understand the customers of the lakeplit of your business. Ultimately, and without understanding what they're saying and really understanding what they want you to do, it really jeopardizes any future business and any future P Ls that you need to achieve as a business as well. And I think that penny dropping is probably one of the most important things that we have to get right at the start. Whenever we launch an intimacy program right to the top of an organization, we need to make sure that people really understand that. I got lost at the start because of an acronym. And in our business we have acronyms all the time. And I think that's also a key point, Adam, that there's a lot of acronyms around this area. Nps, cx, so many more acronyms. And if people don't really understand what we're trying to do at the start and they don't see a path forward, it can be very difficult for them to invest their time, their money and their efforts in it. So simplifying was one of the key elements when we kicked this off at Teledyne was really to try and simplify what we're trying to do. Be pragmatic about the journey that we're taking, take a small number of customers, try and understand if the customers were willing to respond to us. But more importantly, did we have the processes internally to actually deal with the responses coming in? And that's critical at the start. You don't want to lose momentum. So we took a pragmatic approach. We took on or we did the survey in three countries and to a limited number of customers. And that allowed us to really prove it out within the business before obviously expanding it I think that pragmatism at the start is really important. You can get so excited with this, particularly when the penny drops. You can get really excited, but you've got to also understand other people in the organization haven't had that excitement yet, and bringing them on the journey is so critical.

So, yeah, I recognize that you can get dazzled by the results and responses, but I think one of the commitments that you've always had in your time has been this commitment to closing the loop. That's a valuable part of any program, and I really respect you for doing that.

Absolutely. I have done so many customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, customer intimacy, service in my time, just even my personal life. It kills me when no one gets back to me. It kills me when I give my time and no one responds back. So closing the loop for me is absolutely vital. There's no point in starting a process or a program if you can get the business to close the loop. And it's not just one person. It's a business that involves here. So one of the. One of the ways that we do that with intellidyne is we have a very focused steering group. We have an absolutely phenomenal champion and leader of nps, which is Stephanie, one of the team. She's fantastic and drives it forward really well. She runs our steering groups, and it really gives the executive team a chance to dive in, understand what we're trying to do, change it if we need to, but ultimately then get on board with the process and understand the importance of making sure that we get the guys to close the loop with customers. And that's vital to the success.

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Hey, so what's exciting you about the next stage of your program, Nick? You know, if you look out over 2024, it's a new year coming out. What are you going to do to keep that flame burning and keep it alive?

Yeah, no, it's a really good question. So we, we're just coming to the stage of we've got an anonymous survey, we've got a, we've got a transactional survey, we've got a relationship survey, we've got the next stage of a relationship survey that's due to go out. So that will be looking to cast our mind back to what the previous scores were. So going back to the close the loop ideas, that'll be really interesting to see the results coming for those. We're actually in the process of really focusing on how we take the intern internalization of our customer intimacy program to the next level. So we've actually come up with a new visual identity that we've put on the, the survey and we will do at the start of next year in English. It's going to be called Reach for the Stars. Stars being the, you know, the five star review that you see on TripAdvisor. So we're going to go for Reach for the Stars. Hopefully there are stars left to reach by that, by that point. And that's going to help internalize what we're trying to do within the business, within the gas and flame business. I think that's a nice way to kind of showcase it. So we're looking to do that. We're looking to also start to survey our closed lost opportunities that have said, nope, we do not want to buy your product. So I'm expecting that to be that'll drive down our NPS score naturally, but moreover, that'll give us some real strong qualitative information coming back in that we can utilize to change our business around what those comments are and try and look at them holistically as bundles together. So yeah, that's going to be really exciting. Not nervous about that at all. I think that's the next stage of our development. There's no point in keep asking the customers that have bought from you what you're doing well, what you're not doing so well. I think we need to take it to the next level and find out with the customers who didn't make that purchase, why didn't you make that purchase? And ultimately position yourself for future opportunities, which is really important in a progressive business.

Can I give you some color on that? Because we do our own closed loss survey as well. So we've been doing it for years actually. We get about 40% response which is. So we know that works well. But we take that net promoter and we put it separately so it doesn't bring down our overall score because it's not about the relationship with customers and if that helps. But it's really good and you learn a lot from it and it really helps us learn about the sales process. So yeah, everybody should do that. It's a simple thing and we should get on it.

I think for us it's more. Are we at the maturity stage to manage that internally? Because again, I'm not going to ask a customer their opinion if we can seriously look at it. It's just not right thing to do. I think we are at that maturity stage now and we've also got some other regions that we will open up the survey to that we've maybe not done in the past. That's again from the business development regions that we're looking to grow. I think this could be hand in glove with that in terms of a support metrics to help us do that.

Well, I hope you have all the success with that. It can be difficult for organizations to start accepting feedback and you've been around for a long time so there's probably a kind of voice in the company. It's like what do we need to do this for? We got this good. It is important to accept it because that is how you can continue to improve and stay ahead of your competition. So yeah, well done for doing that. That's a nice initiative. If you could think about going back to your career earlier on and when you started the whole customer experience journey, what piece of feedback or what would you pass on to somebody who's in the middle of their program, maybe getting a bit stuck. Well, have you got a good tip?

I think it's be humble to everyone's opinion at the start because ultimately a business is made up of so many different dynamic people and functions and processes. And back to that idea of the penny dropping. If you get it and you're in a position to understand what this is trying to do and you can see it in front of you, you can get excited, you can get really ahead of yourself. And you can become fairly dominant in terms of trying to explain that to the business. I'm a pragmatist by heart. I like to bring people on the journey with me. I like to get opinions, I like to shape things. And I think that's important. And it's certainly something that I maybe didn't do well enough at the start and when I embarked on this journey in my first business, in the first company. And I think that's important because ultimately no one owns the customer journey. Everybody owns the customer journey. They may have a large employee in that, they may have a softer play in that, but ultimately everyone in the business owns that journey. And bringing people on that with you is so important. So listening, understanding, you know, being dogged as well is something that's really important. Not taking the criticism to heart if people don't get it, first of all, trying to explain again and again what the mission is, what we're trying to do. So have that try and align with the strategy of the business and ultimately enjoy it. Don't go into this if, if you don't want to know and, and you're that kind of person that's close minded and closed eared. If you're, if you're open for the challenge and you're up for it, then it can be a really fulfilling way to advance your own career. So listen, learn, feel free to make mistakes as well. Do smaller trials at the start just to get your teeth kind of cut into the process. But when you start to get the momentum, put the foot down, go for it because the business will really thank you for that in the long run.

Nick, I really appreciate you coming with us today on this journey and I really wish you all the success for 2024 year program. Thanks so much and hope to speak to you soon.

Thanks Adam. Appreciate it.