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- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
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Sydney Edwards
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Unknown
See full terms@mintmobile.com Port X Logistics is.
- [00:31]
Your easy button for your drayage, transload and trucking needs for all ports and ramps in the United States and Canada. We provide full visibility from the second your container leaves the origin port to the final stage of delivery. Our four pillars of culture, service, tech and trucks are what set us apart from the rest.
- [01:02]
Sydney Edwards
Welcome to Running on Ice, the coolest community in freight. I'm your host Sydney Edwards, bringing you the latest tech updates, warehouse news, Anything happening in the cold chain world now. You know Running on Ice, the show you know Running On Ice, my newsletter, the one that I write out every Wednesday and Friday 7pm on those nights where I hash out some cold chain news and bring you the latest headlines. I'm gonna do that for you now too. So let's get into some of what's happening lately. Now, Wabash announced this week they have plans to expand their Eco Nex technology production with a $20 million investment. In a news release, the company says this expansion will address customer demand and equipment challenges that refrigerated carriers have faced for years, including thermal efficiency, strength, weight and asset life. The EcoNext technology uses environmentally conscious materials aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and dependency on non renewable energy. Wabash says a reefer trailer with Econex could save up to 13.5 metric tons of CO2e per year. This expansion will take place at Wabash's Little Falls, Minnesota facility and will bring 200 new jobs to the area by the end of 2023. And recently the USDA proposed regulations to clarify how livestock and poultry can be treated if products made from them are to be labeled as organic. A food processing article says rules would deal with livestock health care practices, living conditions, slaughter and transport. For example, no castration for birds, no tail docking or face branding for cattle and animals need big enough feeding areas so they don't have to compete for food, the article says. The USDA will hold a virtual listening session on these new regulations on August 19th and you must register by August 15th if you want to comment during the session. Saxham real estate has $60 million plans for a new freezer warehouse. The JAX Daily Record reports the company wants to build a 334,000 square foot facility in north Jacksonville. The site would include 32 loading docks, 62 trailer storage spaces, and 109 parking spaces. The city is reviewing plans and has not pushed construction forward yet. And Publix is starting a new curbside service for pharmacy customers at stores in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Virginia. Progressive Grocer reports that customers will be able to order prescriptions online or through the Publix app, pay in advance and then park in designated spots, call specific number and let employees know they're there to pick up their prescription. The curbside service comes at no additional cost, though a few drugs are not eligible, including controlled substances, purchases through Medicare Part B and age restriction medication. Now to get to some of the good stuff, I am joined today by Michael Niederhauser. He is the vice president of Customer success for Parcel. Michael, how are you doing this Friday?
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Michael Niederhauser
I'm great. How are you?
- [03:53]
Sydney Edwards
I'm good. I haven't had Parcel on the show yet. I haven't had you on the show and so I'd like to start with maybe some background, you know, how did you get started with Parcel and what you're up to?
- [04:02]
Michael Niederhauser
Sure, sure. Well, first, a little bit about me. I've been in Customer Success pretty much my entire career, both in technology, health care, and of course, supply chain. I bumped into Parcel because of what they're doing in the insurance and technology space. Now because we're in technology, we like to combine things to sound more sophisticated. So we're an insuretech company, to put it simply. What that means is that we use data from a number of different sources, including sensor data as well as any other data sources to better understand and price risk for our customers. So we have elements of success that are gauged both in terms of using our devices, but also in terms of how to deliver data and then finally how we interact if and when something goes wrong and a claim is needed.
- [04:49]
Sydney Edwards
And now is it true Parcel started with GH monitoring for temperature sensitive vaccines, Correct?
- [04:56]
Michael Niederhauser
It is. Thank you for that. Yeah. The roots of the organization really are very mission driven. If you think about cold chain in general, you think about what really matters and I think about scenarios. We're getting life saving medicines and vaccines to children in remote portions of Africa, West Africa, et cetera. We really developed some products and services to help ministries of health to better manage the administration of those vaccines. So think of a ministry of health kind of like the CDC for us here in the States and giving them the tools to have centralized view of their entire supply chain is incredibly valuable to make sure that those vaccines get to the right location and have maintained the right temperatures so that we know that they work the way that they're supposed to. And if they don't, we know what to do with them, which is discard and make sure to get the next batch in place. So very mission driven. And in fact, that same background in those same principles really have led to what parcel is today still very much a mission driven organization focused on reducing waste, reducing risk, and going further than simply just reducing those things, but trying to be predictive in the way we're helping our customers identify potential problems in the supply chain so we can avoid them altogether.
- [06:09]
Sydney Edwards
I'm glad you bring up, you know, vaccines in other countries. I know that the World Health Organization deals a lot with that. I don't know if that's something that you guys partner with or of course, keeping all that information on hand so that when you're in those countries, you know, working with them, you know exactly what the WHO is looking for.
- [06:26]
Michael Niederhauser
Absolutely. I mean, the WHO puts out a number of guidelines around what safe transportation of vaccines may be like. We're very much aware of that, as are our countries and customers. We actually work with some other really important organizations like UNICEF and Gavi. And Gavi is one of the largest funders to help to ensure that vaccines are funded and get to those families and peoples that are least likely to get them in the first place. So we have great partnerships in an international community that really it's a lot of players that make it all happen and come together. And that's really part of the fun of it.
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Sydney Edwards
I love it. So let's get into our topic for today. We're talking about customer success and how companies can improve that. But I kind of want to start, what exactly is customer success and why is it so important to have to have it be successful?
- [07:17]
Michael Niederhauser
Sure, sure. Well, I think customer success started the very first time someone sold something to someone else. Right. Thousands of years ago, someone had a problem. Right. And we were able to provide a solution to that problem. This really is the basis for customer success. Over the years, obviously, we've seen different versions of this and recently, within the last 10, 20 years, we've really started to codify a little bit more what it means to have customer success in mind. My personal philosophy is that you have to understand what your customer's mission is. You have to understand what success is to your customer and align your mission, your goals, your objectives to those same success measures. It's a very customer centric outlook. You combine that with this notion of customer experience. Right. We've all had wonderful experiences, we've all had poor experiences. But if we design processes to simply exceed expectations of our customers, even when things go wrong, we still have enough in the customer love bank, I like to say, to withdraw from that at times and be able to retain and even grow customers. Ultimately, a good customer success approach creates trust between a customer and a vendor or partner, and it really should help solve a problem and potentially even expand upon opportunities that that customer may not have even known existed.
- [08:45]
Sydney Edwards
What challenges do you think companies face when it comes to improving their customer success? I feel like lately, you know, the way businesses react with their customers has changed a lot. It's not necessarily that the customer is always right anymore, but I don't know what you might say on that.
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Michael Niederhauser
Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I could talk about this for far longer than we have, but I appreciate the question. Give it my best quick shot. You know, I think one of the most important things when we think about our customers is honestly it's. It's meeting their needs and understanding their needs. It's also understanding that so much today feels like a race to the bottom. And by that I mean price, price, price, price. We're feeling it as consumers today more than ever. And there are a very limited number of very large organizations that can truly win at that race to the bottom, the minimum price. And so by developing a platform of engagement with your customers and even understanding who your customers, customers are and designing to that, it gives you some very unique differentiation and allows you to play and win in ways that are not solely based on price.
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Sydney Edwards
So in that case, how might Parcel be working on their customer success and implementing that?
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Michael Niederhauser
Yeah, so, you know, we're taking a very different approach for global health customers, as we talked about a little bit earlier, as well as our cold chain customers. For cold chain, it's very unique. I mean, we understand generally our customer may or may not have direct influence over their suppliers and their receiving agents. They may be third parties altogether, understanding the relationships between the key elements in the supply chain and then helping customers to honestly understand what needs to happen for them to be successful within the parcel infrastructure. So as an example, you know, we do have devices and we need to get certain devices upstream to a supplier we can work with a customer to help to understand what would the benefits be to them and their customers and ideally even to their suppliers. So we're helping to create honestly a change management structure. Because I don't know about you, but change is hard. Like you go first. That's kind of the mantra. And anytime that we can help to reduce any, I guess, concern or unknowns with risk, then we can help to create a path to that change. And so we're trying to introduce more technology and more insights into a process that has been running for a very long time and that change can be difficult. So really what we're trying to do is introduce some new ideas in ways that are bite sized but powerful and allow people to adopt and grow with them.
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Sydney Edwards
The need for change, people not wanting to make those changes, I think is seen everywhere, every sector, every part of the supply chain. Any way you want to cut it. I feel like there's some people in those, in that mindset. And so when you're talking about the difference between parcels, work with cold chain and then the global side of things, what would do you think both sides are finding that hard to grasp or what might each side have the toughest time taking on?
- [11:55]
Michael Niederhauser
Yeah, it's interesting, I think that more universally said in cold chain, cold chain markets, technology has been here and this idea of data loggers have been here to collect information. We're trying to say, hey, every journey truly matters. It's not just the one that goes bad, it's every single one. Because we can learn from every single one of those data elements. Oh, and by the way, you have other data sources too, other inputs that we can use. Give us those, help us take a look at that. We can more efficiently, more effectively, potentially drive insurance if that's something you're in the market for. But even if not, we can still help optimize the supply chain. That idea of doing more with data, it has been met with a certain amount of just uncertainty. Like no, we love data, everybody loves data. That's, that's the right thing. But what do you do with it and how do you actually make it something that I can do something with, has been a little bit more of a challenge with our cold chain customers. The global health scenario, once we have gone through honestly the process to help a country adopt our technology, which can be a much longer process than a cold chain customer for a variety of reasons, once they understand that the value proposition and see all the way down into their supply chain network from a centralized location that replaces a Very manual process. And so the, the path to change and the immediate value is a little bit more clear in that market. But we use some of the same tools regardless. We have a change management structure that we put into place and are constantly adapting based on commodity, based on conveyance, et cetera. But just understanding and realizing that change is hard. No two companies are the exact same. No two approaches are going to be the exact same. But the philosophy has to be similar to help with change. Otherwise we end up reinventing the wheel every single time. And although that would be nice to customize everything 100%, it's just not practical.
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Sydney Edwards
Right, right. So can we see customer success in action? Is that possible?
- [14:01]
Michael Niederhauser
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sure. I'll just give you a quick example of one scenario where we worked with one of our customers. So we were protecting a customer, both in terms of risk management data solutions, our platform for data monitoring, and then insurance as well. And they were shipping a little over $300,000 worth of goods from China into the Chesapeake Bay. This journey typically takes 45 days. We've had delays. We know of them. This is really substantial. It was more than 100 day delay that's going into the Chesapeake Bay. And before we even made it to land, we had received a call, our customer success team had received a call from the customer saying, hey, we're really concerned about this. You know, we know this has been a long time. We're concerned about the claims on this ship. And our customer success team member, you know, did a great job of just being compassionate and handing off directly to our claims team. And it's important to understand that we do have really different business elements at work here. Customer success is really all around how the customer understands our product and what that information can give back to them. In this case, we thought a claim was eminent and so got our claims team involved. When the ship arrived to the bay, we made sure that the information on our loggers were automatically offloaded and the data was transferred into our platform immediately. We could say without a doubt that this product was not only good, but it had had very little, if any, shelf life lost, which meant that they could deliver a quality product onto their customers as well. So the reason why that worked, though, was because of the customer success model that we did up front. Customer success generally comprises of two generalized buckets, in my opinion and philosophy. One, you have onboarding. What does it take to get a customer to use your product or services and through that process, Understood? Yes. We have some long journeys. We understand that your supplier has pretty unique conditions. We suggest that a certain type of logger, a non real time logger that had a much better battery life to help to accommodate potentially a longer journey. It's interesting a little sidebar. We do hear a lot of customers talk a lot about real time data loggers and we're constantly thinking, well, what good is a real time logger in the middle of the ocean? It's not able to connect and tell anything. So anyway, sidebar, I'll come back now. We decided to go with again the better battery life device and while most of the devices on that ship had failed after about 60 days, ours was still going after 100 days and we advertised it as 100. So we all had our breath kind of held a little bit and we're glad to see that it exceeded what we had as a minimum amount. And what that really led to is a savings of product for our customer. It also meant they didn't have a claim. And as you're probably aware, if you've ever made an insurance claim personally, when you make a claim, what happens to your premium next year? It goes up. So they have a saved premium for the coming year. We had saved product as well and it was because we had this understanding from the start of what the customer environment needed, what solution might help and help to guide them towards that solution. Now I hinted at the first part of customer success being onboarding and having a specific strategy there. It's also really important to have a recurring customer strategy. This might be a renewal strategy as we have in certain businesses, or it could just be a continued repeat customer and having a philosophy on what that experience should be like and is like is really important. And we're constantly working to refine our entire processes end to end. And specifically through this example, we had some great wins on how some things worked. Always opportunities to learn as well. And we're including this into our future claims management process, which I'm sure is everybody's favorite thing already. We're going to try and make it just a little bit better than it already is.
- [18:01]
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- [19:24]
Sydney Edwards
I know you just touched on it and you don't necessarily want to go back to it, but you mentioning the real time data loggers across the ocean, I've never thought of that.
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Michael Niederhauser
Like, you're right, there's no cell out there, right?
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Sydney Edwards
No, there's no way to get that information in real time. I guess it would collect the data and you could see it later. But that's, it's interesting you bring that up.
- [19:48]
Michael Niederhauser
It is, it is. No, and it's honestly, you know, our culture collectively is very data driven. I mean, here I am, you know, technology enabled basically in the middle of the north woods in Wisconsin, and I have enough technology to at least come in fairly blurry, I hope a little bit better than that. But we all have this perceived need, I think, for instant gratification, instant data, instant information. And I think part of what we're trying to do is understand is that the right solution for some customers, is that gonna benefit them, bring value to them, and if not, we may be able to get there through other means. And as long as we can do a good job understanding and sympathizing and empathizing with customers and building solutions that bridge a gap and meet their needs, then we're doing it right. And it's no size, no one size fits all. I mean, we do have some real time loggers available as well and they're pretty unique scenarios, pretty cool stuff, but really it just depends on what the needs are and matching that and being able to articulate and help some people understand that, yeah, you think you do need this, but let's talk about why you think you do and let Me share some reasons why you may not and what the benefits might be. And it's ultimately up to a customer. But we're going to do our very best to guide them in the way that we think will make the most sense for their supply chain, for their risk, so that we can help them ultimately reduce risk. And that really is one of the goals of myself and my team as the customer Success at parcel.
- [21:15]
Sydney Edwards
Now, one of your colleagues, Christine, had mentioned a short story about vaccine storage in Senegal. And can we get into that a little?
- [21:23]
Michael Niederhauser
Well, I mean, I think it does go back to the roots of our organization. You can imagine, you know, having a refrigerator very difficult to get to in a remote location. It might be a storage location very close to the last mile. So if you can imagine the last mile of vaccine delivery in some remote locations, it can be by hand. It can be on the back of a bicycle. You can pretty much just come up with any number of ways you can move things around. And vaccines have typically been on there. Being able to see a fridge and the temperature of that fridge from a remote location and be able to identify, we believe that this is faulty. And actually being at the right location, if you think about it, a centralized location that has the resources to actually send either someone to fix it or even perhaps a new fridge as well out, that could be the end result of saving hundreds, if not thousands of lives, let alone vaccines. Right. I mean, the vaccines are certainly the commodity, but they're a whole lot more than that. And so to hear stories like that, to look at some of the work that our data science team is able to do to identify those locations that have more risky refrigerators based on temperature fluctuations and even cold rooms. Picture a giant room filled with vaccines. It's really a sight to see. It truly can save dollars of very important donations, but it does come back to saving lives.
- [22:50]
Sydney Edwards
And so what have you heard specifically from customers when it comes to them working on their customer success and in ways that you're helping them do that?
- [23:00]
Michael Niederhauser
Yeah. So it's interesting because we are still very much in an adoption type of phase. This concept of insurance technology, insurtech, is new. What we're really focused on is helping customers understand the risk of their products and their product profiles, really working with them to build out different data sets so that we can really, really well understand a variety of different commodities. We've done a great bunch of work doing some studies on fresh and frozen seafood in terms of shelf life. We're trying to do some very similar things with some Fruits and vegetables as well. And so basically it's really a fascinating environment where you have a flywheel that starts with data. And as we get more and more data, we can provide better and better guidance to our customers on what might actually help them to sell their product or their services down the line. So it really is a matter of continuing to request for information and share back the impact that we had. One unique scenario that we recently heard, we did some analysis on a number of very short trips that a distributor was doing to some local stores and we had presented some risk of overall trip saying this trip is far more risky than this one, this one is. And the person we were talking, talking to you said, you know, that's interesting, but I'd really love to know a little bit more. Can you segment this based on beginning of trip versus end of trip versus middle? And because of the unique environment that that person was in, it allowed us to actually say, yeah, we can. What does that, that mean to you? Well, to those of you in the cold chain world, obviously you know that there's different factors at the beginning and end of the trip and typically that's where you're going to see the most variability in temperature, humidity and light. And so that's a good example. We're just having a dialogue with our customers and being inquisitive, which as a customer success principle, being inquisitive, asking open ended questions, really listening is incredibly important and has proved us to do quite well. Build trust with partners, but we're also building our knowledge base and that flywheel of data that we're generating is continuing to grow, which is super exciting.
- [25:22]
Sydney Edwards
Now Michael, I have you for just a few more moments but can you tell me anything new that Parcel is waiting on that's coming up next and maybe where folks can find out more from you and Parcel.
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Michael Niederhauser
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, we're super excited. Things have been going extremely well. We are moving to a new office that's about three or four times the size of our current one located in Denver, Colorado. We're also opening a London office, if you can believe that. That very much is correlated to our expansion in global markets, but also our increased footprint in the insurance space. We're developing more insurance offerings and daily we're getting new world. So we're currently best reachable by hitting us up@parcel.com you can certainly search for me on LinkedIn Michael Niederhauser Parcel and take a look out there because we do have a lot of exciting opportunities and we're always interested to connect other customers as well where there might be a really, really good fit. So check us out. And I've really just enjoyed the time here today and wonder if there's anything else you could, you could ask me before we wrap.
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Sydney Edwards
Parcel is hiring, correct?
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Michael Niederhauser
Oh, my goodness. It sure is.
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Sydney Edwards
What kind of positions I've got? We've got. We've got like a minute left.
- [26:43]
Michael Niederhauser
Okay. Well, I have a couple of folks that I'll need for the customer success team. I'm going to be a little biased on this one. We're also searching for some insurance team members as, as potentially some sales team members. We have needs, very unique needs for many different languages. So if you know anyone that parlez francais or habla ingles, please send them my way. Spanish and French speakers are very valuable, but really we're looking to diverse workforce. So if you have any interest, you have any experience in the areas with customer success, etc. We'd love to at least have a chat. And virtual cup of coffee is never wasted in my opinion.
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Sydney Edwards
Perfect. Michael, thank you so much again for joining the show. I can't wait to check back in with you on how things are going at Parcel.
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Michael Niederhauser
Really, I really do appreciate it. Sydney. Great job and appreciate all you're doing.
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Sydney Edwards
Thanks. Now we'll have more running on ice next week when we talk with Cold Chain Technologies on the show. Stay tuned.