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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#664: Tying CX outcomes to commercial goals with Markus Engel and Linzi Hindle at DHL
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- [00:00]
Greg Kilstrom
Your brand may be staying on top of current trends, but are you agile enough to stay relevant, resilient and successful as customers, competition and the world continues to change at a breakneck pace? I'm thrilled to share the newly revised version of my first book, the Agile Brand. I'm calling it the Agile Brand Revisited. It's been updated to reflect our continually changing world, and it provides seven principles that form the backbone of an agile brand, offering detailed insights and actionable steps for incorporating them into your business strategy. This is the book that started it all and I'm excited to share it with you. It's now available in print and digital formats and available everywhere. Learn more by going to the Agile Brand guide website at www.agilebrandguide.com.
- [00:46]
Lindsay Hindle
The Agile Brand.
- [00:55]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trend, trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, E commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show.
- [01:53]
Host
We are here at Medallia Experience in Las Vegas and hearing and seeing a lot about creating great customer and employee experiences. Having a great customer experience is critical for many reasons, but some companies have had a hard time tying their success with CX to tangible roi. Today we're going to talk about taking a customer experience further and tying CX outcomes to commercial goals. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Marcus Engel, Global Head of Voice of the Customer and Lindsay Hindle, Director of Customer Experience at DHL Supply Chain. Markus, welcome to the show.
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Marcus Engel
Thank you, thank you Greg.
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Host
Yeah, looking forward to talking with both of you here. We'll start with you Marcus, why don't you before we dive into the topic, why don't you start by giving a little background on yourself and what you're currently doing at DHL Supply chain?
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Marcus Engel
Yeah, sure, I'd love to. So I'm now 20 years with DHL. Started as an internal consultant there and then moved over to DHL supply chain, working always in the commercial area. So sales strategy and always the customer centricity was part of the scope. So now with our increased focus for the future of customer centricity, recognizing how important it is, I now took on for a year the role of the global head of voice of the customer and trying or driving to extend our capture of the voice of the customer.
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Host
Great, great. So yeah, let's dive in here and we're going to talk about a few things but really want to talk about successful CX strategy. And so why don't you just maybe start from the top, you know, from your perspective. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the evolution of your CX strategy?
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Marcus Engel
Yes. So actually we, for even before I joined supply chain we always had a customer survey, how we call it, and that was only every second year very long until we got real feedback and we analyzed, went back to the customer and you name it. And this is what we changed about nine years ago now and we introduce what we call customer experience management. And this is really now a customer engagement program, visual relationship survey at its core, whereby I have to say that certain elements are very transactional as well. So what's really important for us is it's online, it's very easy, it's very fast going out to our customers, we see the results real time and we go back to each and every respondent of the survey and then also do a follow up with them.
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Host
So as you again, you've had great success already, but as you continue thinking about evolving what's maybe next on your radar, what are you thinking about as you continue to improve it?
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Marcus Engel
Yeah. Now with 2025, our previous business strategy is coming to an end and we are just introducing our new strategy 2030 called 2x30. So undermining the growth we're expecting and striving for and best in class customer experience or delighted customers is one of the four pillars of our strategy. And with that we are really aiming to extend the capturing of the voice of the customer, getting even closer and also driving improvements more institutionalized than we did before.
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Host
Yeah. And what's the role of the employee in the customer experience initiative? You know, how do you, how do you see the relationship of employee experience and customer experience?
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Marcus Engel
It's a good one. We actually see, I mean DHL as a group has these four bottom lines as part of their strategy 2030, which is about the investor of choice, the Employer of choice, the provider of choice, and now also being sustainable for the future. So if you think about these four elements, they all impact each other and we really see that and we did some early analysis to really look into how the success comes across all of these dimensions. And for DHL supply chain, I have to say that over the recent years we see a growth in all of these aspects. So we are financially doing quite well. We see that our employee satisfaction is increasing and at the same time our NPS is steadily growing.
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Host
Wow.
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Greg Kilstrom
Wow.
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Host
I mean that's great because again, as important as happy customers are, you also need a sustainable business in a number of not only environmentally but financially sustainable as well. So that's great. And I think a lot of companies may still be kind of struggling to tie all of those aspects together. What would you say has been some of the reasons for your success in doing that?
- [06:52]
Marcus Engel
I think the key reason is probably because we went completely online. So the agile supply chain or the whole group as a strategy, I mean we want to get more data savvy. We're working with Data Lake Data Warehouse and we load all our data, of course, with a given security requirements into, into our data warehouse and combine them to really see the correlations and see how it's all working.
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Host
Yeah, well, and along those lines, what's the role of software and a platform like Medallia in the CX strategy?
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Marcus Engel
Yeah. So when we started customer experience Management, we moved to a tech provider and it's now four years ago when we moved over to Medallia because we just saw that this, the capabilities they're bringing, it just allows us to do the next S curve. So the built in text analytics, the easy availability of the app, which allows our top management, our executives, to easily track how they're doing, really made a change for us. And as I said before, also linking the data together, having this all in a tech platform makes it far more easy for us to, how you nicely say, democratize access to the data.
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Host
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean to kind of tie into that, I mean it's great to collect the data, it's great to have the data in the data lakes, but having access to that data and having the right people or everyone, to your point, you know, have access to the data that they need, seems critical, would you say?
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Marcus Engel
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And it's also a mindset change where we need to think about how to make it very easy for the audience or for our stakeholders to get the data. There are certain people who need to have access to dashboards I mean we're talking today about rather ask Gen AI or AI which absolutely makes sense. But unless this is fully available, we for example now use push reports. This is quite new. We use Genai to summarize our open comment fields and we send to our executive sponsors of our most relevant accounts summary in their inbox so that they don't have to go to a system they get the most key results served on their plate. Let's say the silver plate.
- [09:32]
Host
Yeah. So you know, as you've said, being able to tie all of you know, the customer experience, the employee experience, the financials, you know, all of that together has been important for those listening that they totally agree with what you're saying. But maybe in their organization they're having a hard time making that case. You know what, what would you say to leaders that are having a hard time getting buy in to tie all of the pieces together?
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Marcus Engel
Don't give up. And I wouldn't say we are not yet fully there. But start small. Start with a case where on a meta level we are seeing these relationships and I think there are so many things which are influencing the elements of be it the NPS score, who are we asking all of that. But if you start combining the data and look for patterns, get the business experts in the room which really help you to understand what are possible, good correlations, dependencies where it kind of just makes sense and then look after these patterns and try to demonstrate them.
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Host
Great, great. Well Markus, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you before I talk with Lindsay here. I ask this to everybody that comes on the show. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Marcus Engel
That's a good one. I think conferences like today, like the recent days like Medallia experience, going to conferences, talking to CX experts, when you talk about the role of voice of the customer, talking to other customers, talking also if you are part of a big corporation, talking to your sister business units and really exchanging and trying to understand what they are saying. I think this is extremely helpful and because people might say this, use the same words but they mean something different by it. So really going deep understanding the program, I think this is always very beneficial and you learn a lot.
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Host
Great, great. Well thank you so much.
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Greg Kilstrom
Want to learn more and join the discussion About Marketing and AI? Attend the premier conference dedicated to marketing and AI. That's Meacon, the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference from October 14 through 16 in Cleveland, Ohio. MEACON brings together the brightest minds and leading voices in AI. Don't miss this opportunity to connect with a dynamic community of experts, visionaries and enthusiasts. The Agile brand is proud to be the lead media sponsor of this important event. Register today@marketingai institute.com that's marketingai institute.com and use the code Agile150 for $150 off your registration fee. I can't wait to see you there.
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Host
So, Lindsay, welcome to the show.
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Lindsay Hindle
Thank you. Great to be here.
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Host
Yeah, looking forward to talking. So why don't we, before we dive in, why don't we start with you giving a little backgr background on yourself and your role at DHL?
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Lindsay Hindle
Yeah, sure. So I've been with DHL for 15 years now, five years in the role of customer experience and leading the agenda for my region, which is the UK and Ireland. Prior to dhl, I was in call centre management for a financial institution in the UK, so which was very much B2C, but we're very much B2B.
- [13:09]
Host
Right, got it. Great. So, yeah, I want to talk a little bit, I know talked with Markus just now about CX strategy and some of the goals, but just to kind of revisit some of that. As we all know, doing CX well is not easy, but DHL operates globally with supply chain logistics. There's a lot of complexity there. Right. And there's a lot of customers that have a lot of expectations. How do you think about what the role of CX is in terms of a business like dhl?
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Lindsay Hindle
For us, I think it's a real differentiator in logistics. I don't think is, you know, you don't necessarily see a lot of logistics firms here. For example, the Medallia. I know there are some. But I think we're probably behind some industries in terms of really embracing CX as an industry and how we can benefit from that. So how do we move ourselves from being a commoditised business into something that's really, you know, powerful for our customers, that understands our customers business needs as well. So, yeah, it's really important.
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Host
Yeah. And you've done well at this, you know, you've tripled your net promoter score since starting to work with Medallia in 2022. So definitely have some success already, but, you know, certainly always, always room for improvement. But how does the partnership with Medallia work?
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Lindsay Hindle
Well, I mean, certainly from my perspective, Medallia has been a, you know, a key differentiator in terms of how I've been able to apply CX within in the region. I think what we have is actually a really simple but effective approach. We work really collaboratively with our other regions and the global team as well. We all have the same survey set up. It's deliberately fast and simple for our customers to complete. We work with incredibly busy people who have very complex operations. So it's about having a regular touch point that allows us to capture that initial sentiment that we can then do something with in terms of following that conversation on. So it's a real initiator to a deeper conversation. So, yeah, prior to Medallia, I think we had a lot of information, we had a lot of data, but we weren't necessarily actioning that as effectively as we could. So having the accessibility as well and the visibility for our business stakeholders to see the feedback as it's coming through, it's not anonymized. Our board are looking at it as well as the surveys coming through. So just that in itself is really sort of change the way that people are integrating and using the insights.
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Host
Yeah, yeah. I mean, just having it kind of back to what I was talking about with Markus, having that kind of through line throughout not only the business, but the different parts of the business. Right. Makes it compelling. Do you think that also helps to motivate the teams that are working on CX to be able to see that they're having a direct, in this case, financial impact on the organization?
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Lindsay Hindle
Yeah, absolutely. You know, being able to join the dots for our, you know, our functions, for example, through strategic and business drivers, through the survey and being able to put together insights that are meaningful for, for them and their teams just really helps connect all the dots with. Across our business. So one of the things that I do is a regular meeting like a matrix management of operational and functional colleagues who are very much advocates. You know, we share best practices, we bring together ideas. And then, you know, what's really rewarding for me personally is to see then those advocates go out and take a load of action into their areas and get their teams excited about it as well. And importantly, seeing how the results then come through the next survey so that they're seeing the benefit of their work as well. So, yeah, I think it's been really, really impactful again.
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Host
Yeah. And that it can happen to a degree without direct access and visibility. But I would imagine it's much more powerful that they can access it directly. They see it and they kind of see. They see the information coming in, they're able to look at it and they're able to take action on it. Right?
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Lindsay Hindle
Yeah. It really drives ownership and Accountability as well. It's not just me as a central CX spokesperson saying, you need to do this, it's important. It's actually me handing it over to say, this is your insight, this is your information. How can we help? How can we collaborate to make a difference for you and your teams? But ultimately our customer.
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Host
Yeah, yeah. And so you're working on an initiative with Medallia and Ipsos as well. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
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Lindsay Hindle
Yeah. Again, really fortunate in the region. We work obviously with Medallia really closely over the last few years. I have a relationship separately with Ipsos, so I've been able to embark on some research projects. We've had a look at customer experience maturity, for example, you know, specifically on our region. But what that has allowed me to do is share that with Marcus and the global team in terms of our insights, which has then, you know, influenced or impacted the thinking around strategy 2030, for example, and, you know, just adding that extra layer of thought, I guess, and insight into.
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Host
Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, because, I mean, it takes. It takes the global view to, you know, drive the strategy, but also takes the local, regional, you know, boots on the ground, so to speak, for lack of a better term. So it's all got to work together. So how does that. How does having that kind of global vision support you and your teams and what they need to do?
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Lindsay Hindle
Oh, enormously, you know, because we know that we are all pointing in the right direction. I think what we really do benefit from is a very open, honest, humble relationship across the regions and with the global team. You know, nobody is. Has a predefined answer. It's let's do this together. You know, let's try, you know, different projects. You know, all of our regions do, you know, their own sort of roadmap and plans, but we do sort of bring all of that information together and what we call steel with pride. And it's a constant place of learning. There isn't a right answer, is there? It's around taking the small things, trialing them and then scaling up. If that works.
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Host
Yeah, love it. Well, Lindsay, thanks so much for joining as well. One last question for you as well. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [20:01]
Lindsay Hindle
I think for me, again, coming to experience like this, for example, I've got so many notes, but also being part of the Medallia user group, so the Mug sessions, which is a great way to connect with, you know, industry peers, learn, you know, even from our you know, our B2C customers, there's so many different things that you can take from their examples that I think, oh actually yeah, I really like that idea and can take it across to B2B and likewise I can share our point of view to help provoke their conversation. But you know, again, working with partners like Ipsos, but importantly, asking my colleagues as well, I think, you know, employee feedback and my team and Matrix teams is a really good way of just sharing ideas. And you know, something might come round that you thought of a couple of years ago, but then a refresh of idea makes you think, oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that. Let's try it now.
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Host
Yeah, love it. Well again I'd like to thank Marcus Engel, Global Head of Voice of the Customer and Lindsay Hindle, Director of Customer Experience at DHL Supply Chain for joining the show. You can learn more about Marcus, Lindsay, DHL and Medallia by following the links in the show Notes thanks again for.
- [21:16]
Greg Kilstrom
Listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well.
- [21:24]
Host
You can access more episodes of the.
- [21:26]
Greg Kilstrom
Show@Theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkillstrom.com.
- [21:41]
Host
That'S G R E G K I.
- [21:44]
Greg Kilstrom
H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [22:08]
Lindsay Hindle
The Agile Brand.
- [22:13]
Greg Kilstrom
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