Experts of Experience - #8 Sam Wegman: The Secret to B2B Customer Experience Success

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Join Lauren in an enlightening conversation with Sam Wegman, the VP of Customer Experience at Univar Solutions, as they explore the intricacies of B2B customer experience in the chemical distribution industry. Sam shares her innovative strategies for building a culture that revolves around the customer-centric culture, where every employee plays a critical role in enhancing customer experience. Learn how Univar Solutions transforms its approach to customer service, the importance of empowering employees, and the use of technology in creating seamless B2B interactions. Dive into this episode for a deeper understanding of how to revolutionize customer experience in your business. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to rate our show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe Now: https://www.youtube.com/@ExpertsofExperience?sub_confirmation=1  Imagine running your business with a trusted advisor who has your success top of mind. That’s what it’s like when you have a Salesforce Success Plan. With the right plan, Salesforce is with you through every stage of your journey — from onboarding, to realizing business outcomes, to driving efficient growth.Learn more about what’s possible on the Salesforce success plan website: http://sfdc.co/SalesforceCustomerSuccess (00:00) Introduction to Sam Wegman and Univar Solutions(01:09) Sam's Journey in Customer Experience(03:41) The 'We Are All CX' Mantra and Its Impact(06:27) The Basics of Successful Customer Experience in B2B(10:11) Servicing Diverse Customer Segments(13:38) Leveraging Technology for Enhanced CX(18:56) Handling Customer Feedback and Detractors(21:01) Cultivating Cross-Functional Collaboration(24:36) Cultivating a Customer-Centric Culture(30:30) Business Impact of CX Initiatives(34:18) Predictive Analytics and AI in CX(37:38) Advice for CX Leaders

Basics of our business really are simple. Do we have the product available when you call in? Are we delivering it to our first commitment? Because things can change. Are we responsive and communicative? And do you feel you can access information through our digital channels 24-7? We keep it really simple and ask those questions.

Every function where we ask a question, we send it not only to the sales manager, we send it to the functional leader in real time. They work collaboratively and we've seen incredible improvement in our MPS. Hello everyone. Welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. And today I'm speaking with Sam Wegman, the VP of Customer Experience at Univar Solutions. Sam has a vast experience in developing B2B customer experience programs, strategic commercial solutions, as well as effective teams in the chemical and ingredient distribution space. This is a space that I'm really interested to get into because I'm sure that we have so much to learn. Sam's a true B2B leader, and I just can't wait

to hear what she has to say. So let's get into it. Sam, how are you today? I'm great, Lauren. Thanks for the nice intro. It's so fun when someone else reads it back to you. It's like, oh, I guess I need to pull this thing. Of course, of course. So the first question I want to ask you, just because when I was reading about you, this stood out to me so prominently. At Univar, you have a mantra, we are all CX. I'd love to understand a little bit about where this came from and how it takes shape in your business today. Thanks for picking up on that. It is really important. We'll flashback about three years ago. My boss who's our HR CHRO and our CEO came to me and said can you build us a customer experience program and I was super excited because if you do like my

background I've done a variety of roles and so I thought this is great I know a lot about the business I'll be able to build a team like I like to do and get some things done and they're like I'm not gonna to let you build a team. It's going to be a strategy, just a strategy and everything's through influence. And I was like, okay, that sounds like a nice challenge. Something I haven't had the opportunity to do. And so I was sitting there thinking about our vision and all the things that we needed to accomplish in building this program. I'm like, well, then I have to engage the entire organization. So there were two people that were working with me at the time. And one was from a change management background.

And we came up with this theme like, well, we're all CX, right? It's not just a department. It's not just a person. It's not just sales. And so we built this little tagline from the beginning, from a change management standpoint, and built everything that we did around it to get it into our culture to help change the culture so that everyone, regardless of role, because one of the roles I had when I started this industry, it was my very first role was in accounting. And I remember going to work every day back in, I don't want to date myself, but back in the early, early 80s, early 90s. And I would do everything I asked me to do, but I had no connection to our customer. I had no idea what we even did as a company. No one made any attempt to tell me

because that wasn't my job. And that stuck with me my entire career. So fast forward, like 30 some years later, they're like, go build a program. I'm like, I never forgot that. I'm like, you know what? Everyone that works for the company has a connection to the customer indirectly or directly. So I wanted to build that mantra around it. So we have it in everything we do. That's amazing. And tell me a little bit more about how that looks like. I mean, for the accountants, for example, somewhere where you sit, like how are you connecting teams that are so embedded in the business with the customer? Because it's a difficult challenge. It's a huge challenge. And I can, again, personal experience. I'm sitting there every day and I'm paying these invoices for our vendors. So

I was educating myself like, oh, this is the chemical we buy from this particular vendor, pay my invoice on time. I'm done for the day. What I didn't know until I took my second job, which was in customer service, where we're actually customer-based, we're all talking to customers. And I remember showing up day one and they were like, you've been in the company four years. Do you not understand A, B, and C? And I'm like, no one's ever explained this to me. So it was really then being, okay, so when I got into this role, I'm like, what I didn't realize in accounting was I'm paying invoices for materials that I need to ship to my customers. So there's this whole supply chain impact.

If I'm not timely paying the invoices to the terms, well, then our supplier gets a little fussy and may hold up shipment. If shipment gets held up, it doesn't come into our plant. If it doesn't come into our plant, it's not available to ship back out to our customer. And it's just that little simple ripple. So at the beginning of the program, when we said we're all CX, we built a training around 20 different roles in the organization, customer facing and indirect. And we said the role you play might be seven, eight steps down the way, but it is a ripple effect. So we just built that company-wide training, said we're all CX, and connected. We got everyone in those roles to connect how they had an influence on our customer experience. To be honest, the biggest influence that everyone has, whether they're in a customer-facing or non-customer-facing role, was communication and quick response.

We're a distributor at B2B, so it's all speed. So what we said was, we're all CX, you have an influence, but most importantly, respond timely and quickly to one another throughout the organization. And that's going to enable our customer facing people to be more responsive to our customer. I love that. I think there's so many parallels between our customer experience and our employee experience, right? And internally, I love you highlighting that, that like we have to not only respond to our customers immediately because there are customers, but we also need to respond to our peers. We need to keep the motion going. And

it's just as important that we do it internally as externally. That's right. Yeah, we're certainly 100%. And so just at a high level, like if we pull back and now you've been in this role for three years now, am I right? Yeah, yeah. Right about the beginning of COVID, I should say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. What would you say like really set successful organizations apart in terms of customer experience? Yeah, I think, well, it's about the, for us, it's about getting back to the basics and doing them extremely well. So as a chemical distributor, my friends, I mean, lifelong friends still don't really understand what our company is. And I'm like, cause you don't know you to our solutions, you know, Dow chemical or Shell or Exxon.

They're the ones that produce the materials. But somebody has to be, quote unquote, the Amazon of chemicals. That's us. And so we move product from point A to point B. So lost my train of thought on answering that. That's what I was thinking. What sets companies apart in terms of customer experience? Oh, yeah.

So, again, it gets back to getting back to the basics of what you're really good at. At Univar, we have a ton of value. We have solution centers where we can actually create product for people. We have a corporate account program that can kind of pull, you know, spend together and leverage all of our assets and everything out there. But those things are really important. But if we don't do the basics of our business really, really well and focus in on that first, none of that other stuff, you never get to that other stuff that adds value. So I think what separates at least for us is focus on the basics.

And then it's really that executive sponsorship. So we talked about this program started about three years ago. I wasn't going to be given a vast amount of resources. So when I went back to the executive team, I said, I can do this, but I need one thing from you, one thing only. I got the rest. And it's every time you're in front of a town hall, anytime you're in front of a group of individuals,

use the word customer experience. That's all I need you to do. That's it. I don't need anything else. I got this. And they have, because when you're trying to build through influence, the biggest thing is if it's important to them, it's important to everybody else. It can't just be important to me. So that's where I think people can build successful programs from starting with the basics and making sure you've got that senior adoption. I'm so glad that you bring that up because it's something that I see not, I think a lot of leaders say, of course we care about the customer, but are they living and breathing it the way that they want every single

employee to and talking about it at every opportunity that they have. And I've worked for leaders who do that. For example, I worked at Compass, the real estate tech company, and our founder grew up with a mother who's a real estate agent. So this was his life, right? Like serving real estate agents. And we lived and breathed the customer.

I've worked in other companies where it's more of a concept. And I think it makes such a massive difference when you have that executive leadership who's really like, we need to be living and breathing the customer day in and day out and inspiring everyone to do that. So I'm glad that you bring that up. Yeah, and you're exactly right. Because even as a B2B distributor, we're not making products. We're adding services. So if we don't have customers to sell the product that we're buying from our partners and our suppliers are super critical in the supply chain, we're right in the middle of it all. But it's so important that everybody, like I said, going

back to that first experience I ever had, just went in and did my job. I could have been so much better at it if I understood the ripple and what our customers actually expect from us. For sure. So it all works together. Yeah. You would be prioritizing differently because you know the impacts that it has on the customer. That's right. So you've mentioned your customer base a couple of times, and I'm really curious because you have a very diverse set of customers.

How do you go about, I'm assuming you segment them quite extensively, but I'd love to understand, like, how do you go about servicing the different segments of customers? Yeah, a couple different ways. I mean, we have go-to-market approaches in terms of how we really sell those customers. So whether we need technical resources, plus sales reps, plus focus customer service. So there's different types of go-to-market strategies, marketing strategies, depending upon their industry. Because as you can imagine, like if you're selling into pharmaceutical,

it's way more technical. There's lots of regulations. And so we gear our sales force to support that, our regulatory teams. But then when you're on the other side, maybe you're in a commodity, it's really around just-in-time. Look, I know you have these products. I know you keep them in chicago and i need some tomorrow

so we kind of you know change our go-to-market strategies to fit uh the customer base but then yeah from a segmentation we kind of look at we don't there's a base level of service i was mentioning earlier the basics of our business really are simple. Do we have the product available when you call in? Are we delivering it to our first commitment because things can change? Are we responsive and communicative? And do you feel you can access information through our digital channels 24-7? We keep it really simple and ask those questions. So as we have our go-to-market strategy, we took our segmentation and we said, let's just understand because there's different sizes of customers. We have really large companies that you would recognize like PPG, Sherwin-Williams, but then we have a

lot of smaller chemical companies that you'd never know and they may not buy as much. So we want to still service the customers the same, but we want to understand how our performance from a customer experience is in each of those segments. So we built not really complex algorithms, but kind of a gathering of all of our internal data to say, hey, this customer over a period of 24 months buys this amount. We have this in our pipeline. You know, we think that they have a lot more opportunity. And so we'll segment them into a larger segment and see how we're performing across our customer experience journey. Really just for prioritization, nothing else. You can't work on everything at once, but you work your way top to bottom. Yeah, definitely. So you're really approaching

all these different segments quite differently from the sounds of it. You have different operational systems to deliver on that, which I imagine is very complex. Well, the operating systems in terms of the delivery and the warehousing are pretty much the same, but it's really more how we go to market and how we approach the customer in terms of partnering with them. Like, what are you looking for? Are you looking for developmental support? Are you looking for just-in-time support? We have services businesses as well that really help them become more efficient

in their operations. So it just really, it just sort of depends. But in all of those cases, they have a subset of customers that we then segment based on total value they bring to us. And we incorporate potential as well, what we know about the customer.

So they may not buy much from us, but we know they have a lot of potential. So we'll put them up in maybe, you know, our large customer potential bucket. We want to see how we're performing across that journey for those customers, because at the end of the day, if we're not selling them a lot right now,

but they have huge potential in our service levels, that operational stuff is not good. We're never going to be able to close on that business. So we bring the two together. Yeah, yeah, definitely. What kind of technology are you using to connect all those dots? Yeah, that's my favorite part. Is it? Great. Is that great? Well, if you say the word data or technology, I usually light up like a little Christmas tree. But we use some pretty common things. We use, number one, we're on SAP as an enterprise for how we manage our business. We use Salesforce.com for our CRM, like a lot of companies. And then we use Qualtrics for our survey provider.

And then we use Tabletrics for our survey provider. And then we use Tableau for our reporting. So one of the visions I had at the very beginning was, well, this is great. Voice of customer is the most important feedback we can get, right? That's coming through Qualtrics. Our sales force is all the people that we work with and connect with. And we bring that in. But then we have our SAP data, which is all about everything we need to know, how we're operating, how efficient we are, that whole supply chain piece. And so we take all that data from all of our ecosystem and we dump it into what we built through the program. It's called a CX360. So it's really straightforward

and simple. You've got on one screen, you can go to a customer all the way down to a customer level, and you can say, here's how they feel. Here's the feedback they've given us. And corresponding right to the right is our operational metrics that align right to those basic questions. So if we were to ask a customer, rate us on having product available to meet your needs, and let's just say they're satisfied, five-point scale. To the right, we actually have an internal metric specifically for that customer that would say, how are we performing internally and having product available at the time of order? So we want the sentiment of the customer to kind of match our performance. And we can see that all by just bringing those three systems together and bringing all that data together into a Tableau view for CX.

It's a lot. Sorry. No, not at all. I'm a nerd as well, so I can talk about this stuff all day. No, but I think it's so important to be validating what the customer is actually saying because we'll do these NPS surveys or these satisfaction surveys and be like, how did you feel about this, essentially, is what we're asking. And you might have someone who had a bad day. You might have someone who just came back from vacation.

And they're feeling great. So you have to validate those feelings with what's actually happening. And I think that's, that's really smart. And I don't see enough companies doing this. How did you go about actually implementing, like pulling all these things together so you could see it so clearly? I think, you know, I'm in a really fortunate space working for Univar for 10 years. And prior to that, I worked for another company that we since acquired. So my entire 30 year career is everyone's back together. It's like the family's back together. The relationships were built.

A lot of the teams that I rely on through influence now were teams that I led or built. So now that I need things, I just kind of bring all the people together. But, yeah, I think it's a reactive way. We do focus on some proactive stuff, which I'll share in a bit. But when it comes back to voice of customers, just like the data exists in our ecosystem. One of the biggest challenges I hear companies say is everybody kind of wants to hold the data to themselves. That's my data. That's, you know, I'm going to hold on to my supply chain data or my HR data or whatever the data may be. But we have an advanced analytics team that has a couple of data scientists in it, which is kind of unique for us. About six, seven years ago, we pulled together and leveraging them

to go out and get that data since it was, again, sponsored at the top. Our CEO talks about customer experience. So when I put a request in, when I'm trying to build, everybody's like, okay, get the data into this team. And then they basically, you know, do their magic and bring it all together. And then I just help with the design. And I think from the beginning, I've always wanted to be able to validate how people feel versus how we're actually performing. Cause you hit it. We ask them a survey. We only send them a survey once a quarter and we're a highly transactional business. So they might've had 20 orders happen last quarter. The 19 out of 20 were perfect.

Number 20 didn't go so well. The survey shows up next week. They're like, detractor. And so this gives our team having this all in one place. It's like, oh, they're really unhappy in the month of October. I look to the right and they'll say they're unhappy with on-time delivery. As an example, we can say our on-time delivery has been performing well at one blip. So now I can get on the offense,

say, hey, thank you for the feedback. You're not wrong. We did have an error and here's why, because we have it all built in. But historically speaking, we've been on track. Would you agree? And you just kind of change the conversation. You're a little more proactive and being able to now build that tool, whether they give us feedback or not, I can walk in and say, I haven't gotten feedback from you, but I can see our performance in these critical areas. I want to align and make sure we try to get ahead of it versus waiting for them to tell us how they're feeling. Yep, exactly. What's your detractor protocol?

What's the team, like when those come in, how do you handle it? Yeah, it's expanded. So day one, year one, I should say, we really wanted to make sure we aligned the feedback. We went to the senior commercial leaders and said, who would you like to own it? It can be me and the two people that work for me, but I don't think that's the best solution. They said, no, we think our sales leaders. You know, we have about 120 or so sales leaders across, just speaking in North America right now, we're global. But in North America, it's about 100, 120 sales leaders.

And we said, hey, when the feedback comes in, your job, we did some workflow through Salesforce. So Qualtrics feeds to Salesforce, Salesforce then shoots out an immediate alert saying this customer just took the survey. It's got all the questions and answers. And we basically say, hey, your job within 48 hours is to respond and call the customer, reach out, check in. And then we ask them to put in some sort of note action plan on what they're going to do with it. That was really year one, year two. And frankly, it was going fine. And our scores were creeping up. It wasn't until this last year, 2023, that this epiphany occurred to me that, wait, we're asking questions. When people are unhappy, they might actually say, I'm disappointed in your on-time delivery. Well, salesperson can't fix that. We have transportation teams. So I started now pulling in the functional teams and saying, hey, I can get you a real-time alert when our customer says our on-time delivery is not to their liking. And you can then work collaboratively with the sales manager in your region to come up with a plan.

So we've done that across every function where we ask a question. We send it not only to the sales manager, we send it to the functional leader in real time. They work collaboratively and we've seen incredible improvement in our MPS. That's amazing to hear. Cross-functional collaboration. It really goes a long way. And I'm hearing quite a bit of that in what you're sharing today is that there's really a lot of connections amongst employees. How have you cultivated those connections? Yeah. Well, just including them, just saying, Hey, it's not Sam Wegman's program. I've been lucky enough to be put in the seat to build it, but we're all CX. So we all have skin in the game

and what you don't want from me. Yeah. I've been in the business 30 years. I kind of know what I think we can do, but I'm not in those seats anymore. So people have ideas. People want to be accountable. So when we built, in the very beginning I mentioned, you have your sentiment of on-time delivery, and we want to see how we're performing. We didn't have two metrics that were all the way down to the customer. So we immediately went to those teams and said, here's why we think we need a customer-facing metric to match,

and got them on board and really part of the project, and they led the solution. So then when it was built they had ownership and accountability of it so we really just go to them for their ideas and it's it's worked great the other thing that we've done is we've started a rotation so i get again i'm fortunate or not fortunate to be in front of our executive c-suite on a monthly basis it's great but i do get it's kind of boring to hear from Sam all the time. So then it occurred to me in this last year, like, wow, there's so many people doing

great things. We're all CX here and not everybody gets that opportunity to sit in front of the C-suite. So I'm going to bring my friends one at a time. And so we've been doing that. So if we want to focus in on our product availability, I bring someone from the planning group. That's an up and comer that's done really well in some of our trainings and is thought of, well, the company, they come along with me. They take ownership for it. They present their part of it and they take the actions away and go back to their. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation

support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. Teams. So it's really like a win-win. It's like, well, you're helping me present. You get exposure, but then you're taking the work and the accountability. I'm like, this is great. And then also the senior leadership team, they can actually see what's happening under

the hood too, which I think is so important for leaders to do is to really show like, this is, these are the people who are actually doing the work. These are the stories that are actually coming out of that because sometimes the numbers and the reports just don't paint the full picture, right? Lauren, that's such an important part because oftentimes, you know, with a title of vp or senior director or whatever you may be they know who you are and they hear from you but it's different when you start going down to the next level of a director level or senior manager level that are in in the mix and doing the work and you know if you pick the right people and they go in

it's super impressive they're starting to also mean, there were so many benefits to doing this little rotation. It didn't cost the company anything, a little bit of time out of their role, but these are people that are well thought of, that are already being on career development plans anyway to, to, to do more. So everybody, the executive team loved it because they got to know these people better. I loved it because then they're helping me cultivate like the monthly results and the accountability and ownership and the energy of it all. It just kept building. And I was like, wow, it's kind of fun to do. I love it. I love it so much. So kind of going back to We Are All CX, I know that this past year in the U.S. Customer Experience Awards, you won many awards.

Univar has won many awards. But one in particular was winning gold in best B2B customer experience, which is huge. Congratulations. Thank you. That's such a big accomplishment. And I'd love just, you know, if you could kind of underscore everything we're saying here, what would you say that you do differently that really stands out? Yeah. Wow. I hate talking about myself or what we've done differently, but I think it all goes back to, I didn't think we were ready for awards, to be honest. I had a

gentleman that was working for me who has since gone and become a vice president of another company to run his own CX program, given our success. He really was pushing me like, I think we got something here. And I'm like, how can we possibly in a year put something up? But I think we had focus. I didn't have to worry about the day-to-day. So one of the advantages and disappointments I had at the same time was, you're not going to give me a team to go fix and do things. He's like, I know you'll fix everything. So no. So that gave me and my team complete autonomy to read and talk to people and focus and like, what is the things we want to do? And then again, being able, I think the thing that separated us is having focus and no other responsibilities, not having to get drug through the mud on all the other stuff,

having senior leadership adoption, but it was really the innovation, I think, helped us put us over the edge. I mean, everyone, I hope, is doing detractor action planning and real-time information. But I think we've incorporated that we are all CX, so everybody plays a part. So I mentioned the workflow alerts and the collaboration that's happening. But then the innovation to bring it all together so that there's one scorecard that everybody sees globally now on our customer sentiment and actually how we're performing. There's nowhere to really argue. You know, you've got different people doing different things and presenting their own metrics, but this is the customer experience view that we all align to. And I think that's really where it stood out from culture. We did

a lot of things. I hadn't even talked about that, but we did so much in the first year around just getting the culture going. Besides that training we talked about, we built a lot of different programs to just kind of get everybody aligned. I think it's just, we got a lot done in really a year and a half and it stood out because we had focus and support. Yep. Focus. One of the most underrated things I think these days is we need to focus. So much can happen. I want to double click on that culture piece that you just mentioned, because when it comes to customer experiences, the employee experience, like I said earlier, and the culture around delivering the customer

experience is so valuable. And I'd love to understand what are some of those things that you did to really instill a customer-centric culture? Yeah. It's funny you mentioned the awards because we just competed in the international awards and we find out tomorrow. So I've had to deliver the best B2B thing like multiple times since last week. So it's all top of mind. Great. It's six things really. You know, we sat out and said culture and change management, that's number one thing for us. And so the first thing we did is we created a simple 15 minute brain shark, which I don't know if that's still what everyone uses these days, but it's right. Everyone in the company took it like this is what customer experience is. And this is how NPS is scored.

And this is why it's so important in terms of retention and growth and that sort of thing. So we aligned everybody on that. Then we did that customer journey mapping where we took 10 high level touch points, not and there's like a thousand things in each one of those touch points. We kept it simple and said, no, these are the high level. It almost looked like for anyone that's my age, like a twister game where the red dots and the blue dots. And so we had a linear 10 journey touch point. And that's where we went to those 20 different roles across the company and said, where do you come in to these touch points?

So we built that all inclusive training. We then said, you know what? We should start acknowledging people. So we took a coin and we called it customer experience. It's like a challenge coin. So people that are displaying customer experience behaviors that are above and beyond, it's peer recognition. We would give those coins and a certificate out and post it on our hub and actually hold a call with not only them, but their boss, their boss's boss. Those detractors and NPS responses that come back through workflow. We then, people get named in NPS. We have a standard thing that's right from our customer experience. And it goes all the way to the top that if you get called out, Sam Wegman,

your customers love you. Here's what they had to say about you. So everybody sees it in real time. We do things like that. The other thing we do is we have safety is hugely important to Universal Solutions. We're a chemical company. We have to have safety first. Every meeting starts with a safety share. Every meeting, I'm like, how can I get customer into that meeting? Every meeting, I'm like, oh, why don't we take the safety share? And our customers all make something. So let's make it a combo. Hey, here's PPG as an example. They make paint and here's who we, you know, how products we sell left side of the screen, PowerPoint, right side, here's safety share around paint. So it was like, okay, we're accomplishing both. Now we're talking about a customer at every meeting and we're doing our safety share. So it was really around recognition of our employees, training around our employees.

Oh, and then the last one we did, which was like gamification, we did what we called CX bingo, where we just built a bingo board. This was Jessica. She was doing our change management. I love this idea. We had a lot of transition going on in our business that I haven't even talked about, but we're standing up our customer service centers. And I love this idea. We had a lot of transition going on in our business that I haven't even talked about, but we're standing up our customer service centers.

And so lots of new people and customer facing roles that didn't know our business. So we created a little game board that did things like you could check off the square if you take the CX 101 training, check the square off if you call someone instead of emailing them, check this box off if you call a customer and learn more about them. And so as they completed a line, then they would get a prize. And then if they completed all of the boxes, they got a grand prize. So just doing things like that to keep it front and center. It's a lot. Sorry. Those are it. No, but I think these are such great ideas. And for anyone listening, these are so many different ways that we can really instill the customer in everything we do. And I love what you're sharing from

everything from employee onboarding to the way we start our meetings. You have that customer centric moment there just to remind people of why they're here. And I think it can do so much also for employees around purpose too, to remember like, oh, I'm here doing all these things every day for other people. Right. And there's like there's more beyond just like our company. It goes beyond that. I think you're right. I think in and of themselves, one thing at a time is still great. But they all started to layer in and they, number one, didn't cost us a thing. The only thing that cost us anything was the coin. And those aren't really that expensive. And I will say, I underestimated how important people like to be recognized. I

know people like to be recognized, but in the format we did it and tying it back to customer experience, like the behaviors you just exhibited of going above and beyond and making sure the customer had everything they need, that's driving a good customer experience. So we send you a little coin in the mail and a certificate and it lights up the world. And I was like, I want to say it's just a coin and a piece of paper, but congratulate, no money value, no stock, just thank you. And it really made a huge, huge difference. Yeah, it really does. I, um, in my last role, I was working

at a company called too good to go, um, which is a surplus food marketplace. And our team had a mascot. We were called the dumplings. We were like, what are we called? Obviously we're the dumplings. So it was like, anytime we get together, we were all over the country. Um, so a fully remote team, but when we would come together, we would, of course, eat dumplings. But then we started giving dumpling awards where every week we would have shout outs. So people could just like put in slack. Oh, so and so did something for me. So and so did something for me.

And it was just like Monday morning feel good, like everyone like thanking each other for things. And then at the end of the month, we would also have people submit like you could submit oh sorry how did it go okay everyone got three dumplings that they could give so then you could give a dumpling to a friend and then you would submit it and at the end of the month we would say okay who has the most dumplings and then they would get a prize of dumplings obviously because we wanted to eat more dumplings but it was just such a fun way that we were just congratulating and acknowledging each other consistently

in the great work that we're doing. And the team was so engaged and so happy to be working with one another and helping one another and delivering on our customer promise. It was really, again, it's like you underestimate how important these little things are. They're little things. It reminded me, again, it's like you underestimate how important these little things

are. They're little things. And it reminded me, and I skipped over when I was talking about the gamification and the bingo. Not only do we say, fill out this fund, like these aren't hard things to do, right? Go to lunch with someone, introduce yourself to someone you've never met. It's all the interest of that, what you just shared. But the best part was when you finished your card, you had to go to your supervisor, direct supervisor and share the stories. And so they got to know all the things you were working on. And then the prize box, the dumping box was in the VP's office. And when you've got a call center, I don't like to call it a call center. Sorry, mistake. When you have a customer service center, because it's way more than a call center for us. There's two, 300 people on the floor. The VP may not know

everyone intimately. So as they fill these cards out, they go into her office and she looks at it and says, tell me about who you met. Oh, tell me what you did over here. And then we open up the prize box and it's just like, it's so feel good and so easy and so minimal, but yet so impactful. Totally. And let's add some fun into our lives too. You know, also an important thing. Yeah. A couple more questions for you. I think the big thing that is on my mind, and I think probably a lot of listeners are wondering is what was the business impact in investing in the customer experience? Even if it wasn't a big investment, how did it, how did it impact the business? If you, if you have any results to share?

I do. I mean, I think coming from a commercial background, it made me a little nervous up front because you, everyone knows the better the customer experience, the better we're going to do as a company. That's true. But tying it back to numbers is not easy to do. So my commitment to the leadership team was, look, I need time. I'm not going to be able to give you a return on investment in three months, six months, maybe not even the first year. It depends on how many responses I get back. But after we had a significant amount of responses, and I think it was probably over 5,000 in the U.S. We then went to my advanced analytics team and I said, let's look at this because we send the survey out. We send it out monthly, but we kind of do a third, a third, a third so that they only get it once a quarter. We don't want to overwhelm them. You get four times a year to give us feedback.

And it hit me. I'm like, well, we have 25 percent of our population take the survey more than once. So they might take it in January and they're a promoter. Then they can take it again in April because they're on that cycle and they're a detractor. So they've gone from happy to sad or sad to happy. I'm like, there's something here. So what we did is we looked at all those repeat takers. So I think at the time it was about 1,200, 1,500 people who've given us their opinion more than once.

And we tracked them. And we said, okay, when they go from promoter to detractor, what does that look like in our service levels? Which isn't so ROI, but what's it look like in our financials? And wouldn't you know, after 2022, because we're not done with 2023 yet, right? Have that data. But in 2022 data, we saw anyone that we're able to convert going back to that detractor process from a detractor to a promoter, we saw an uplift of margin, contribution margin, significantly more in promoters. When we convert it into a

passive or a promoter, it's three to four cents a pound more that we're making by converting them. And they're like, people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, no, the opposite's true. When they were a promoter and went to a detractor, we actually lost a penny and a half a pound. They went away or they bought less from us. So we were able then to take those pennies and extrapolate it out over the overall business. So one of the things we're doing, that's all reactive. That's like people that are telling us how we're feeling.

And hopefully we'll get to a point where I can tell you a little bit about what we're doing in advanced analytics and AI to be predictive. Because you can take that same math, if it's consistently working when they tell us, well, then even if they don't tell us how they're feeling, if we can see their service levels, their suffering, we should just assume they're a detractor and let's convert them because we know that there's a positive ROI improvement. We saw it also in our service levels that when people move from a promoter to a detractor, we saw a deterioration in their service levels and then the reverse.

We saw it go the other way when we converted them. So that's how we're trying to measure the success right now. Great. I'd love to double click on that predictive analytics in AI because it's so fascinating what is possible now and what is becoming more and more possible. How are you using AI to predict those scores? We use it in a couple of different ways. The first way we used it was our response rate, probably like everybody listening in the B2B, it's not going to be great. We get like a 10% response rate.

And it's still, we're a huge company with thousands and thousands of customers. So we still get a lot of feedback, but it's still only 10% of our population. So working through our data scientists and advanced analytics, we have all of that data sitting on our enterprise. And I'm like, what if we built something? You guys can do it.

I just got an idea that we looked across all those people taking the survey that are either in, take an industry, pharmaceutical, paint, coatings, chemical manufacturing. Those people, those industries that have taken the survey, how are they performing? If they're a detractor, what does it look like across all these variables? Then take that same track of customer that hasn't taken the survey and say, well, we should be able to predict other pharma customers that look like this one would also be a detractor. So every month they build what we call synthetic NPS where they take all, so the more surveys they get taken, the better this algorithm gets. Every month they update it. And then we push out into our 360 I was mentioning earlier. I go to a customer page and I'm going to go call them. They've never given us feedback, but now I give them a synthetic. Hey, it's not guaranteed,

but it looks like they might be a passive. And here's why, you know, we've got a new customer service rep on the team. Maybe our service levels, we give them enough that they can proactively go into the customer and say, hey, you know, I want to show you our scorecard and I feel like we're having some slippage here. I'm on it. I'm working on it. I don't want you to think that I haven't seen this. Then maybe when the survey comes back around, they're like, oh yeah. And our customer service team and our leaders are using the synthetic to proactively, they weren't asked to, but again, it goes back to that functional collaboration. They're like, we can get ahead of it by contacting those customers, introducing ourselves as a customer service leader. Not saying we think you're unhappy, just like I'm Sam, I'm

your customer service leader here in the Chicago market. If you ever need anything and customers are writing back like, thanks so much. Everything's great. Sometimes we get an order. Sometimes they tell us something that's going on, but we're getting ahead of it before the survey comes in. So that's how we're using AI there. The other way we're using it is we partner with a company called Echo and Echo's got some chat GPT built in. So all, when we ask them questions on our NPS survey, one of them is tell us how you feel, anything else you want to add. So we dump all of those free text comments into this tool. And with the chat GPT, I can just go up there and be like,

tell me what the theme is in the U S in the month of October around pricing. And it just tells me everything I need to know. And it used to take me days to read through these comments. Word cloud, I'm like, great, this word to mention a thousand, doesn't help me. But this tool, this echo tool that we just recently introduced has been able to like take all of that validation and really help us drill into how the feeling that people are sharing versus just score scores and data is easy, but text is not always easy. So we're using AI there too. For sure. And there's so much valuable insight in the free text. Also, I can fully completely

relate with you. It takes so long to sift through all of it, but it's like you want to because you get so many interesting insights, but you can just ask a GPT what the themes are. That's absolutely like, yeah, because we have all the workflows. Yeah. All the workflows go out around the NPS feedback, as I mentioned, and I'll get calls from functional leaders that were like, Hey, I'm seeing a lot of people talk about pricing, or I see a lot of people talking about communication and they're right. Cause they're reading them one by one in their area. Well, I'm looking at it globally. So dumping that in and being like,

how's communication overall in global, you know, Univar and it would quickly summarize that for me in like less than a minute. Beautiful. It's amazing. Yeah. I love it. For me, she looks smarter than you really are, to be honest. Well, that's what it's here for, right? It's to help us be better. All right. Well, Sam, this has been such an insightful conversation. I have one last question for you. And that is, what is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should hear?

That's a really good question. Well, number one, don't be afraid to just, especially if you got the experience, and even if you don't have experience in customer experience, if you have experience in your company, don't be afraid to rest on that and leverage that. I think when I came into the role, we've had some great leaders that have taken a stab at customer experience and that's fine. And I actually went back because I had time to look at the work that they had done. It was largely internal focused around our SAP system, rightfully so at the time. But my gut and my experience told me

we need to be outside in first and we need to get back to our basics. This seemed really complex over here and we were doing these journeys. So I think just trusting your gut and trusting your experience is really critical, but more importantly, get an alignment from your senior leadership. Look, they trust you or they want to put you in the role.

What they need to know from you is what can they do to help you? And I think to me, again, it's something as simple as saying, I got it. And I'm going to work cross collaborative, be collaborative and work with everybody. But more importantly, when you have this town hall global audience, and you're the CEO, talk about what our NPS score is, and use the word customer experience. That's all really made the people made huge differences for me. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, thank you so much, Sam, for sharing all of your knowledge about

customer experience, how to implement a customer centric culture, the tools that you're using in order to really understand what's happening with your customers. This has been so insightful to me. And for those of you who are listening, if you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and we'll continue bringing you great customer experience knowledge. Thank you so much, Sam. We'll speak to you soon. Thank you, Lauren. It's been a pleasure.

Really appreciate the time. And as I mentioned, it's not just me. It's the entire company because we're all CX. So thank you. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce AI and data, and it is bright. Getting there? It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work side by side with your team and turn your AI and data vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best. To learn more, visit sfdc.co slash professional services.