The CPG CX Initiative & Strategy w/ Nigel Tordoff

People are the things that makes the difference in any business. And certainly in terms of customer experience, that's when you can just amplify it beyond belief.

We're on episode five of the CPG Experience Council Walkthrough, a look at experience. This is our background as to how you can integrate it into your organization. I'm here today with Nigel Tordoff. How are you doing, Nigel?

Very well, thank you. Glad to be here again.

Nigel's the chair of the CPG Experience Council and he's here to share some of his knowledge and we'll discuss it in this, in these short bullets as we go through these. And we've covered many of these points, Nigel. Today we're talking about making the difference in it, how you can really put CX into your business and make it as a strategy. So why don't you give us a bit of background about your thinking on this?

Well, absolutely. It's such a nice way to be able to finish these five because people are the things that makes the difference in any business. And certainly in terms of customer experience, that's when you can just amplify it beyond belief. And I guess the easiest way to be able to describe this is with sharing my hypothesis, and I've used this over the last 30 years of my career, that when you get into a CPG organization, two things need to be true. Probably three or four things need to be true. But in fairness, you've got to have a strategy and you can actually have a customer experience initiative that sits at the side of it. But the customer experienced initiative or touched far more people than a strategy. Can I propose this as a hypothesis? Because everybody has a point of view about how to run their business. This is just my point of view. It's what we do at the CPG Experience Council. We get a chance to debate these things and just understand from each other. But the hypothesis is that CX can touch far more people than a strategy ever can. And I guess the best way to do that is to be able to test the hypothesis. And I thought the airline industry might be a good one for us to bounce this around and see if this holds true when you play it against them both.

Yeah, this is a good idea because the airlines that you picked here, like from Ryanair, which is a very basic, no frills airline, you know, EasyJet or Southwest Airlines from the US and right, you're going right up to Emirates and British Airways, which are considered, you know, sort of luxury carriers with lots of business carriers. So talk me through A little bit about what you're thinking about the experience differences between these.

Well, let's start with. I think most people. I know this is a consumer example, but if you were to get an Orion Air airline, would you be disappointed if you had an allocated seat? No. You. You expect to be able to sit wherever you can?

Yeah.

If you. Would you be disappointed on. You got onto an Emirates flight flying for eight hours and you didn't have an allocated seat, you absolutely will be disappointed.

Yeah.

It'd be hard not to be able to hold things back. Let's talk about meals. Which one of those airlines would you expect to get a meal on? Which one of those airlines would you expect not to get a meal on? It's almost instant. You don't have to relay the strategy to any of the passengers on each of those airlines. You know instantly what you're going to get. And it's not a question whether one is a good experience or a bad experience, it's knowing what that experience is. So if I think about. Let's start off at Ryan Jet or Ryanair. Sorry. Or easyjet or westjet or all those in that budget airline, I actually think the strategy is to provide the same airlines with the same spanners, with the same equipment, so you can do it at the lowest cost and make. Maximize the profit. And it's about getting to one place to another on time every time, and anything else above that you pay for.

I really agree. It's about setting expectations. I think EasyJet, who I've flown with many times, actually, I quite like the way they're just very focused on being prompt and on time, and all of their procedures are getting you on the plane quick and then taking off. They want to sweat their assets and they're very clear about what they want to do. So it's, it's, you know, they, they, it does what it says on the tin, so to speak.

The things, for example, that, that's an interesting illustration there, because sweating the assets is a strategy.

Yeah.

As a consumer, I don't need to know that. What I do need to know is what experience am I going to get every time?

And.

And is that experience going to be consistent? And if it fails, does every single employee know what the experience should have been? So let's say something goes wrong, whatever that might have been, and I go to the customer experience desk or customer complaints desk, they're going to satisfy the basic experience. Can they get me onto another flight and it arrives on time?

Yeah.

It's a very different thing when you go to Emirates and some things failed, or you go to British Airways and something's failed. It could be a whole host of things. Everything from the seat I was sat in to the experience I got actually on the plane. The expectations are so different and everybody knows what those expectations are.

Start.

And it's not actually published.

Yeah, it's absolutely true because the business model for the, for the other the transatlantic carriers is very much to pay for the flight using business class passengers. And so that's what it's tailored for. And if you know you're at the back, you're just steerage, basically. But if you're at the front of the airline, you're going to get a great service because that's how they make their money. So I agree. It's really about the strategy informs the CX approach and vice versa, doesn't it? It's really linked.

It is. And the critical thing in all of this is how many people it touches. So the strategy may be known by a few, but the CX experience is known by, it's hard to say everyone because there'll always be a flaw to everything or all. But it's known by significantly more people that experience. And even though it's not written down, it's the thing that actually defines to a certain extent the brand, the service, the product it comes across in terms of customer experience.

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So why don't we now relate this to the business that you've had most experience in the CPG business because you've really been in at the. At the sharp end about communicating customer experience and what it means with the commercial message. So how was it for you, Nigel?

Well, let's take, I think most CPG businesses and certainly in the world that I lived in, in terms of beer and alcohol, this is true. You've got generally four groups of people. You've got your leadership team, they've got your employees, you've got your customers. And within this area, there's so many different customers. We just pause for a moment. Most of the descriptions used across the world are about modern trade or independent or traditional trade. So modern and traditional and they're just different. They're not saying one's better than the other. But a modern trade customer would be a big infrastructure customer. Think about a Walmart, think of about a Tesco. They have a head office, they have an infrastructure, be able to communicate through their business. A more independent business or a traditional business is a owner, operator, business owner that are not affiliated with somebody else. So there might be hundreds of thousands of those or tens of thousands of them. Yes, but every CPG company goes through a group of customers and then you've got the consumer who actually takes the final transaction, who provides the funding for all of that to be able to work. Now take that strategy and customer experience hypothesis. When you talk about customers. So when you talk about strategy, I'd expect everyone in that leadership team to understand what the strategy is. There's a whole different webinar about how well can they articulate it and how consistent it is. But generally they all know what the strategy is. Most of your employees will know what your strategy is. Some of the customers will be able to articulate it, but few of the consumers will be able to really explain what your strategy is. But it's incredibly important to have one to be able to guide the organization. But then I think it changes quite dramatically when you apply that customer experience initiative over the top of it. When you look at just the numbers of people, if you just look at numbers, there's probably less than 10 people in your leadership team. Every CPG business is going to have employees. I don't know how many the average would be, but let's say it's just. Let's use an illustration of 100 for this example. If you've got 100 employees, then you're going to have more than 100 customers. And then you get, I don't know, a thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand, a million consumers. And they all know what your customer experience is. And it's transformational. When you apply a customer experience initiative over and above your company strategy, it just amplifies everything you're trying to do.

Yeah, let's be specific about this because what we're really talking about is how you're treating the end customer as a business. Because most B2B company, sorry, most CPG companies are effectively B2B organizations. They're selling to the end customer. Then it's up to the end customer to set the stage in the store to. To provide the theater of retail, as one of my friends puts it, you know, but it's this key relation between the employees and the end customer. They've got to know what the best practices of treating with a customer is. If there's a complaint or if there's an issue that comes up or some just being proactive and saying, we can help you through this. I don't know, difficult time of supply shortages or ingredients inflation. You know, it's really the sort of thing you can do. And that's crucial that the leadership team communicate the message to the employees and give them the confidence and empower them to deliver that. That's where I've really seen this succeed or fail.

It is. I mean, it's. It's so important, and it almost becomes cultural. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if you haven't got the right customer experience culture in your organization, it can all fail. Yeah, I mean, I saw it within Beer. I use an illustration that some of my competitors and everybody has a different strategy, but the culture and it appears in different ways. So if you've got a promotional led strategy where everything's about the product being on promotion versus everything about the brand experience, just using that as a descriptor, you can imagine how the experience will be very different when it gets to the end customer. They will keep running promotions. Something fails, you get another promotion to be able to run versus something fails, you get a better experience to be able to bring it to life. And consumers know this. Consumers are the brightest people in the world. You can't hoodwink them and try and confuse them. They know what they expect in that customer experience. They might not completely understand the strategy, but there's thousands of those customers out there that deliver to millions of the consumers. And the critical part is to get that customer experience to connect all the way up. And that's why the title of this last podcast was when we all Care, it makes a Difference.

I, I agree. Yeah. And I'm just going to try to link this back, in fact to your previous slides about the airlines. The airline that I, I respect is Delta. Their CEO, Ed Bastian is always on the front foot about this. He makes videos, he talks about Net Promoter. He talks about that, you know, they actually stating the Net Promoter. It's always in their shareholder meetings. He's got people with him. He's very much a people person and I, I think it's transformed the airline. We. You mentioned Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, mentioned. He talks about mentioning the word customer every minute when he talks. It's hard to find. I can't think off the top of my head any inspirational leaders in the CPG business who are talking about this yet. But I do predict it will happen. We will see people talking about the customer publicly and we know that they started to do it internally as they publish Net Promoter. So that's one of the ways I think of galvanizing the workforce to focus on this.

It's a lovely connection. In terms of Net Promoter, if you take the benefit, the principle of Net Promoter that you're promoting the business to somebody else, that's how cultures start. I'm prepared to recommend this airline to you because I had a great experience. I'm a Net promoter. It's the amount of people you touch. When customer experience really connects together and works, it just amplifies everything you do in terms of a strategy. So you can't have one without the other. But you get the customer experience. Correct. It will take your strategy to a whole new different level of people.

I agree, Nigel. I think this is the most important thing. And we're still at the sort of starting place of many CPG companies journey with this B2B customer experience. So I'm really excited to see what happens next and I really appreciate all of the work that you've put on this talk series to help people through this.

Well, the nicest part out of all of it, to be honest, Adam, is that this is just one point of view. I mean, part of the biggest fundamental part of the CPG Experience Council is to be able to talk about our beliefs, our behaviors and our insights. Because every single leader will have a different perspective and there should always be different perspectives in this world because that's what makes it exciting. But being able to hear from other people who share this same type of core belief that customer experience and CX culture makes a huge difference to an organization. That's probably the single biggest benefit of joining the Experience Council. Before we get onto the data and the analytics and the insights and the learnings and the education that come out of it, just being able to hear some of those beliefs and insights from different leaders makes such a difference. And hopefully people have enjoyed those five topics that we've talked about so far. And if you want to know more, join the CPG Experience Council and have a look at the website and come and join the conversation.

Thank you so much for your time today Nigel. I really appreciate it and will many of the members of the Council and hope to speak to you soon.

Thank you. Cheers. Adam.