A primary belief of Nigel Tordoff's, Chairman of the CPG Experience Council, is "happy people do a better job."
If you have happy employees, it won't be long before your consumers are happily purchasing more leading to a year of growth for the business.
That's why Nigel and CustomerGauge Co-founder and CEO, Adam Dorrell, sat down together again to discuss all things trust.
From venturing into how feedback creates relationships to a company's belief system, both pull back the curtain on building long-term revenue growth.
Don't Have the Answer? Rely on Your Belief System
Adam has recently done research on how many times companies use the word 'customer' in their public pronouncements. This has uncovered the number of businesses that steer their overall decision-making based on what their customers are looking for — or in this case, lack thereof.
However, one business continues to reveal just how customer-centric it really is.
Adam discovered that Apple, specifically CEO Tim Cook, mentioned customers 33 times in a single 20-minute speech.
Other businesses when compared to Apple are not so much customer-focused as they are business- and staff-focused.
"I have been asked hundreds of thousands of questions over my career, and you can't know the answer to everything as a leader. What you can rely on is your belief system to guide you through, a consistent response every time. And I think that's what happens with Apple.
Whenever they get asked a question, you watch their responses not only in a speech but from the CEO all the way down, "It's what our customers want." There's a fine line between customers and consumers with Apple but you go into an Apple store, it's set up for the experience." said Nigel.
Whether it's Tim Cook or the store employees, every Apple representative behaves the same and you can see that it's a direct result of a deeply rooted belief system.
*Note: remember what we said above about happy employees = happy customers? It starts here.
It's Customer Feedback That Builds Trust
For Adam, the idea that feedback builds trust is deeply rooted in his belief system.
Whether it's a relationship with a consumer, a business (or even a significant other!) opening the lines of communication and providing feedback is what initiates a strong foundation.
"To me, that's having regular check-ins. And that has the ability to do a couple of things. First of all, it's curiosity which we spoke about in Episode 1: "How's it going for you?" And then soliciting that. When you hear that feedback you might be a bit unhappy about it but you've got to play it back.
"Did I hear that right? What I heard you say was..." That's really closing the loop on something. You're not solving the problem right there but you're making sure you have a shared understanding." said Adam.
To him, that is the most essential element to building a customer experience (CX) program: playing customer's feedback back to them and asking if you heard them correctly.
You may not be able to solve a customer's problem right away, but responding shows customers you're listening.
Trust at Every Level for Heineken
As a bar owner, would you give your store keys to a delivery driver bringing goods each day? That's exactly what this Heineken customer does and it all comes down to trust.
Nigel went on,
"All across the world the amount of trust; if you think about a landlord and a delivery partner that gets to that level, how many things do you think they'll buy from that person?
They'll buy kegs, bottles, cans, they'll buy everything. And there's the proof point for me that the moment you get to trust is the moment people are prepared to buy more and then guess what? Your revenue starts to grow."
When you have trust, you can ask for more in a relationship, and when you can ask for more, business begins to grow.
The Proof Point
The Proof Point when building trust comes back to the L in 'CLiCS' or Leadership.
For Nigel, he has learned it's hard to get all three working parts to work together (employee, customer, and consumer experience). However, when you do, it's no longer just a customer function; it's brand, finance, supply chain, invoice, etc.
Everyone must work towards creating promoters across the entire company. But what holds it all together? The customer experience you provide in B2B relationships.
A great example of this is Coca-Cola HBC, where their belief system matches the employee experience to the customer experience.
To do that, they have an incredibly strong education track on what it means to do all of the above.
Imagine you have promoters in your employee base that are going beyond what a detractor would do, and then imagine you have promoters in B2B customer relationships going beyond what a detractor would do, and then add in consumers to that.
If you have promoters doing 3X more in every category, the growth potential that is unlocked is amplified.
Join Us in Supplying a Foundation For Independent Outlets
All roads to revenue begin with gaining the trust of your customers. Once trust is established, the opportunities for growth are virtually endless.
Nigel wrapped up the discussion with,
"The Proof Point can be hard and one thing I've learned is: don't look for the obvious connections. It's lots of bricks that make a wall. You might need to find three or four of them to start to find a pattern and ten to twenty to get to the proof point.
But this doesn't change in one day, it changes as a trend over time. And the trend is the most important part. Once you see the trends, the results start to come through."
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