The challenge...
Stepping into the role of managing director 18 months ago, after having been with the company for 25 years, Kevin Rogers says that the first task he wanted to undertake was to identify what the business should stand for. To do this he asked employees from all areas of the company for their input.
"We unanimously agreed that we wanted to be the market leader in customer service," he says. Elanders already runs a number of forums, workshops and sector-specific work groups, but Rogers says that although these are vital to gain a broader view of industry needs, it didn’t give any answers to the individual needs of customers. For this, the obvious place to start, explains Rogers, was to become better listeners and to do that they needed to create a more personal environment to give customers the chance to air their views in an open forum.
"As far as we were aware, nothing was going wrong from our customers’ perspective, but that is sometimes a dangerous place to be – one should never assume," he says. And so the concept for an ongoing customer interview initiative was born.
The method...
Rogers started the process, in autumn last year, by developing a team of "customer-facing" employees from different areas of the company who would be responsible for carrying out the interviews. Together they set about developing a list of questions and tested each other in mock-interviews. Pilot tests were then carried out on a number of customers in December and the results enabled Rogers and his team to refine their list of questions and develop a clear strategy for the interviews going forwards.
"This is something that we approached very carefully with our customers," Rogers says. "We wanted them to understand exactly what we were doing and why we were doing it, and we now have a damned good list of questions. Essentially we want to get to the essence of what our customers’ challenges are and what we can do to alleviate them and improve our service."
The list of questions is comprehensive. It starts by asking about broader issues relating to Elanders’ service and moves on to very specific questions relating to a customer’s experience. This is intended to open the way for some potentially difficult answers, Rogers says.
"The first question we ask is what can Elanders do to improve the service. Then we ask why they choose to work with Elanders, what challenges the company solves for them, what was the situation before us and how the business looks now after using Elanders and what results we achieve together. Obviously we also want to know what their business goals are, the challenges that can stop them from achieving those and what would be the ideal outcome," he explains.
The interviews are carried out on a one-to-one basis either on the phone or preferably face-to-face, Rogers says. "It is never an email blast or an online survey because doing the interviews in person promotes a conversation with the customer, not simply one-sentence answers, and that enables us to probe further and learn more."
Every month, the business contacts 10 customers to arrange interviews and up to three people from different areas of each company may be selected. The Elanders team will then arrange to interview one person a month from these companies. "This is so that as we implement changes in response to their feedback, we can see if it’s working," explains Rogers. "We make sure to never engage with the same person more than once a year. The same customer yes, but not the same person. We felt that if we spoke to them too often it would devalue the project."
The interviews, which take around 30 to 45 minutes each, are never carried out by the dedicated account manager for the customer. Rogers says this was a decision the team made early on in the development stage to try to help the customer feel more comfortable opening up and being very honest about the service they feel they’re receiving. "We wanted to encourage them to be absolutely honest, even if it was brutal," he explains. And he says it is proving a very effective strategy. "We are getting some really honest and sometimes uncomfortable feedback, but it presents us with an opportunity to improve."
The result...
"Pleasingly, the majority of customers have given us positive feedback but there have been to date three or four points that have helped Elanders improve its service and the result for the client," says Rogers.
One client even said it had been "blown away" by the improved service following the interviews, according to Rogers. He explains that the interviews have revealed one or two "blind spots" in Elanders’ service, such as the common assumption that if nothing is being said then the customer must be satisfied.
"Our conversations have brought these kinds of points into the open and enabled our staff to take their relationships to another level," Rogers says. "They are very complimentary about what we do right, but the more the conversations go on the more comfortable they are in saying what’s not so good and that’s what we want to hear so we can improve."
And it’s not just the customers reaping the benefits says Rogers. "The Elanders team has said that they really appreciate the positive feedback and identifying the areas to improve has improved their relationships, which in turn is giving us all a lot of satisfaction. So it’s been a real win-win situation," he explains.
The true measure of the scheme’s success will be revealed in the results of Elanders’ annual online customer satisfaction survey, Rogers believes. "A couple of points raised in our 2012 survey, before we started the interviews, were around engagement," he says. "One of the key questions is about how well we listen to and meet our customers’ demands, so I would expect to see an improvement in that area this time and that they feel we are helping them achieve their goals and care about their business."
Overall Rogers feels that the interviews have given the team a better understanding of Elanders’ customers and a deeper understanding of their challenges and goals and Elanders’ ability to address these.
ELANDERS UK
Vital statistics
Location North Tyneside
Inspection host Kevin Rogers, managing director
Size Turnover is around £20m, 185 employees
Established 1870 as a small litho printer, Hindson Print. Acquired in 1999 by Swedish-owned Elanders. By then it had evolved to produce technical, financial and educational publications as well as marketing literature and electronic printing and publishing services
Products Books, textbooks, manuals, marketing brochures, folders, leaflets, prospectuses, stationery, direct marketing, cross-media, W2P, labels and packaging, among others
Kit The business runs four B1 Heidelberg offset presses, two B2 Heidelberg offset presses, three SRA3 HP Indigo presses, two high-speed mono laser printers and in-house finishing for both offset and digital
Key dates 1870: Hindson Print founded; 1989: Elanders acquires Hindson Print; 2013: Elanders acquires McNaughtans the Printers in Scotland and expands into packaging in the UK
Inspection focus
Customer interviews Introducing regular interviews across its customer-base to improve relationships and help the company better understand their needs
DO IT YOURSELF
Following suit
Elanders managing director Kevin Rogers says there is no need to reinvent the wheel but instead research what other companies are doing to improve customer engagement. "Look at what they have done well and not so well and then look inside your own company in the same way," he explains. Developing the right interview questions should be a collaboration and, says Rogers, it is vital to explain well in advance to customers what you are going to embark on and what format it will take. "They need to understand why you are doing it and that it will reap real benefits for them," says Rogers.
Potential pitfalls
Never think you know all the answers, warns Rogers. "This is exactly why you are asking those questions and you will quickly find that your assumptions are not right," he says. The customer must feel that there is a genuine interest in their thoughts and that they have been taken seriously and acted on. "The first mistake is to not give any feedback and the worst is to do nothing about it," says Rogers.
Top tips for success
Really listen to what your customers are saying – never dismiss a comment as just being down to someone’s personality. Listen to what they say and be prepared for anything
Go back with feedback and if you change anything off the back of their comments, then make sure you tell them
Make sure you pick the right team They need to be able to engage properly and respond to the answers with more questions and conversation. They need to be comfortable doing the interviews both on the phone and in person so that they are engaging
Rogers’ top tip
"You need to be really serious about doing it. Don’t play at it - you have to commit. You must make it an ongoing project so that your customers know that you mean business about wanting to improve for them."
