Tell us about why you engaged The Customer Experience Company

We engaged CEC as we really wanted to dig deeper. We’d been hearing for a long time from our customers through VOC and verbatim that there were some issues with our logistics processes. But although we knew and understood that and had theories on what was contributing to the cause, we lacked a deep understanding about what that meant for the customer.

We wanted to start with the customer to understand what their experience was with logistics and what it meant for them. We wanted to know what their pain points were and why, so we could understand what was causing those issues and where we needed to change.

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When we worked together, you were setting out to change your logistics experience. How is it now and what’s changed in the last three years?

It’s a significant activity to shift a function, processes and systems that have been designed to maximise manufacturing to be more customer focussed. We have made a great start and I hope we continue to take this further. We had lots of successes in improving our logistics experience - our priority process has improved and our customers can now get same day delivery. Our logistics are now more customer centric, and are clear on what they need to achieve. We also achieved a huge shift in culture. Our senior team are much more focussed on the customer, and are more willing to engage and respond to customer issues. We haven’t dropped the ball on customer centricity, our commitment has remained unwavered ever since.

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Out of everything, what did you find most valuable?

We found the customer insights most valuable. They, along with the methodology really worked for us. We appreciated that the customer insights were unfiltered - we heard what the customer really wanted. Customers are often thought of as a single person or entity but CEC really went out of their way to speak to everyone in the supply chain. Getting those different perspectives and understanding what those pain points were was so valuable. Being independent allowed customers to open up to CEC more than if we had tried to do it ourselves.

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If you were to embark on this again, what would you do differently?

If we were to do it again I’d increase the subset of customers. We had limited time and budget, and that meant we could only talk to so many customers. Support during implementation would also have been a benefit, and may have allowed us to achieve more.

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Have the expectations changed over the past few years and where are you now?

We are working on introducing an ERP system to streamline our process across the organisation, and this can only make things better for the customers. This system will be one of our biggest enablers for being able to support changes to the customer experience. Improving customer experience is more important for us now than it has been before. Our next challenge will be once we have our system in place, how we can use this to realise benefits, and identify opportunities to improve.