Built to Win

Release Date: August 2, 2022 • Episode #227

Building CX programs from scratch is never an easy task. And the endeavor usually starts with the vision of a single person that sees the benefits of CX and agrees – or is appointed – to spearhead the project. And that includes a lot: program planning, gaining support throughout the organization, putting convincing metrics in place, and a whole lot more. It’s a daunting task. Guest host Pat Gibbons welcomes Carol Tesarek from Equipment Depot to highlight how they put all the right pieces together to create an award-winning program.

Carol Tesarek
Equipment Depot
Connect with Carol

Highlights

Don’t do it alone

“When I was appointed this position a couple of years ago, I started to think about what success looks like for Equipment Depot. And, you know, while I was the main person leading this initiative for the company, I don’t have all the answers. And so I started to reach out to our employees. And so I got groups of people together in every department, whether it was parts, service, sales, and started talking about what does the future state look like for us and what do we need externally. What [do our] customers expect and what do you need internally? And so we started to brainstorm with various employees across the country and in various departments, and then we put this list together. Here’s what we need externally, the customer’s expectations. And here’s what we need internally to make that happen.”

Equip your team for success

“…I think people are busy, like the GM’s that manage our branches. They have a lot going on. They have a lot of goals to achieve. And operationally and then when you come in with the CX plan, they’re like, “wow, is this something else I have to do?” And you need to show them how it will benefit them in the long run. And one of the things I found was having the plan and then really putting it together and giving them this, like, activation kit here. All you need to do is deliver it to your team, helps them and that also get you get the buy in from that so they don’t have to go and do it on their own.”

Transcript

The CX Leader Podcast: "Built to Win": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

The CX Leader Podcast: "Built to Win": this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Pat:
How does an 80 year old company with established service programs launch a brand new customer experience program?

Carol:
We were looking at our 2025 vision and what we needed to do to achieve that vision, and we knew that the customer was the biggest part of that. And so we really needed to make it official. And that's when our organization said, We're serious about this and we're going to invest in that department and appoint somebody to actually lead it.

Pat:
Building an award winning CX program from scratch, on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Pat:
Hello, everyone. I'm Pat Gibbons. Guest host today of The CX Leader Podcast, sitting in for Steve Walker. And thank you for listening. If you're a regular listener, you know it's never been a better time to be a CX leader and this podcast explores topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. Building programs from scratch is never an easy task, and the endeavor usually starts with the vision of a single person that sees the benefits of CX and agrees or is appointed to spearhead the project. And that includes a lot: program planning, gaining support throughout the organization, putting convincing metrics in place and a whole lot more. It's a daunting task. Today, we're going to highlight a program that put all the right pieces together in a very thoughtful manner and have already begun to see the fruits that they were labor. Carol Tesarek is the director of customer experience at Equipment Depot, a material handling company. And we're going to discuss how she overcame a number of obstacles to launch an impressive new program. Carol, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.

Carol:
Thanks very much. I'm glad to be here.

Pat:
Well, we're glad to have you. And, you know, kind of a bit of a spoiler alert. I need to tell our our listeners right from the bat, not only do you have a great program, but it's been recognized. You you won multiple awards from the recent US Customer Experience Award sponsored by Awards International. So I will start by saying congratulations. That's quite an achievement.

Carol:
Thanks very much, Pat. It's really exciting opportunity for our company.

Pat:
Yeah, well, let's start there. We want to talk about your program, but we need a little context. Tell us a little bit about your company.

Carol:
We are America's largest independent material handling and rental source. We basically provide a full range of services from parts, service, leasing, rentals, new and used equipment all the way through to integrated warehouse solutions. So basically we provide a full service.

Pat:
Yeah. And yeah, you have branches all throughout the U.S., is that right?

Carol:
Correct. We have about 50 branches from coast to coast.

Pat:
Yeah, great. And how about you? You didn't start out in this role at your company. Tell us a little of your background.

Carol:
I have over 20 years of sales and marketing experience. Customer experience has always been part of it, but we always refer to it as customer service. So the customer is always at the heart of everything I did, but I was primarily in a marketing role throughout my career. So this main focus in CX was just recent in the last two years.

Pat:
Wow. So tell us how it got started, because this is quite an endeavor and I think it seems like your company had quite a reputation already for good service standards and so forth. What was it that brought customer experience to the forefront?

Carol:
We were looking at our 2025 vision and what we needed to do to achieve that vision, and we knew that the customer was the biggest part of that, and so we really needed to make it official. And that's when our organization said, We're serious about this, we're going to invest in that department and assign appoint somebody to actually lead it. So we knew in order to be successful, we needed to work hand in hand with our customers and make them at the heart of everything that we do.

Pat:
Well, and from that point, you know, I was pretty impressed in learning that you put together a really thoughtful plan, because I think even though it sounds like you had the support of executives, you had to put something together that made it real. Right. Tell us how that got started.

Carol:
When I was appointed this position a couple of years ago, I started to think about what is the what is success look like for equipment depot. And, you know, while I was the main person leading this initiative for the company, I don't have all the answers. And so I started to reach out to our employees. And so I got groups of people together in every department, whether it was part service sales, and started talking about what does the future state look like for us and what do we need externally, what are the customers expect and what do you need internally? And so we started to brainstorm with various employees across the country and in various departments, and then we put this list together. Here's what we need externally, the customer's expectation. And here's what we need internally to make that happen. And then I started to come up with a theme. We need some type of mantra, some type of message that we need to share with our employees to kind of bring this all together. And that's when we came up with our trusted to deliver logo slogan, with our mantra to to tell our employees, here's what we need to do to to deliver on this. So they helped me come up with that mantra. They don't know that they did this, but they helped me come up with the logo theme too, trusted to deliver based on all their input.

Pat:
Yeah.

Carol:
So that's how it all started.

Pat:
Oh, that's great. And if I recall correctly, you also had some metrics that you set from the outset. You said these are going to be our goals, the metrics that we're going to try to achieve. That had to be tough and particularly because this was kind of during the pandemic as well. Pretty hard to forecast those things. But what kind of thought went into to that?

Carol:
When you look at delivering an exceptional experience, you have to keep in mind the employee. And so I looked at we looked at our employee surveys and we wanted to make sure we were reaching the goals of the employees as well and taking care of them, especially during this pandemic. Because I can't come I didn't want to come in and say, look, we're going to do all this stuff for the customer and oh, this is so great. But hey, wait, wait. What about me? My family sick. We had our own issues with natural disasters throughout every branch with hurricanes and tornadoes and flooding and fires. And then we had the pandemic. So I had to be really careful about how we approach this. So we surveyed our employees. We asked them what they needed to help them during this time. And then we hoped that based on that feedback and some of the things that we implemented in the company, that we would increase our employee survey scores as well as increasing our NPS score, net promoter score to our customers. So the two went hand in hand. So first I looked internally to see what we needed to do because as we all know, if your if your employees are happy, so will your customers.

Pat:
Mm hmm. No, that's so true. And I think our listeners will recall we've had a few episodes where we really dig into that, that the employee experience becomes a big part of the customer experience as well. It sounds like that was true for you as well. So I want to talk a little bit more about what I would, I guess, refer to as the sort of promotion, internal promotion, or how you really got people on board, because it was pretty impressive. I mean, you mentioned you kind of came up with a logo and a mantra and there was signage and I think you had strong executive support. And then and then that, if I recall, kind of moved into training as well. Maybe you can explain how you came up with such a great plan to get people on board.

Carol:
So all that stuff that you saw, the mantra, the logo, the, the our employee faces, which are in all of that, it's all fun. But if you, you know, and so people are immediately attracted to that. When you look at it, you're like, Wow, that's really cool. So when we pull that all together, we came up with a nice training plan. We held Zoom meetings with all of our staff. We had to show them numbers, research numbers to support why we were doing this. Right. You've seen some of those numbers in our in my presentation. What happens when you deliver a good experience? How many companies think they're delivering a good experience? But customers, only 8% believe that we're actually doing it right. And so sharing some of those numbers up front, putting a training program together to show them, here's why we're doing this, here's what we've done. We've talked to employees throughout the organization. We came up with this theme. This is our mantra. So every day you should be thinking, I need to follow this mantra to deliver this great experience. Here's what we're going to do internally from an employee perspective with training on the plan, what it means, how it benefits Equipment Depot, how it benefits the employee, right? What's in it for me and how it'll benefit the customer. And so we came up with that full training program and met with everybody in the organization. And now as you on board with us, they go through that training to understand what it is and how we're customer centric and what it means to be customer centric. So we put a lot of planning, put that training in place and delivered it to our employees.

Pat:
So I have to ask, did you have some naysayers, some some people that you're just like, you know, here's another initiative and, you know, that you had to push through to say, no, this is we're going to do this.

Carol:
Well, I think people worry people are busy, like the GM's that manage our branches. They have a lot going on. They have a lot of goals to achieve. And operationally and then when when you come in with the CX plan, they're like, wow, is this something else I have to do? And you and you need to show them how it will benefit them in the long run. And one of the things I found was having the plan and then really putting it together and giving them this like activation kit here. All you need to do is deliver it to your team, helps them and that also get you get the buy in from that so they don't have to go and do it on their own. They don't have the time to do that. So anything we develop, we try to give them a kit and say, here, go run with it. And I think that's been pretty helpful. And once they recognize that, they started to be a little bit more open about it.

Pat:
Yeah, you know, just a side comment on that. I think it's a really good point because I think too often and we know because we work with a lot of different companies that often a company may come to us and say, hey, we want to launch a CX program. And a lot of times their first thing is we want to get a survey going, we want to get this happening and everything. And I think the amount of planning and work you did to engage people, get their input, get them on board, train them, is something that sometimes gets gets missed. And it just sounds like from from you that that was a real key part of making this a successful program.

Carol:
Absolutely.

Pat:
So, you know, this obviously didn't happen overnight. Give me an idea of kind of the time frame from kind of start to where you are today. When did you kick this off?

Carol:
Early 2021. And prior to that was all the the planning meeting with employees, having different committees to get input on what we were doing. Setting up the customer survey in the background. We have a survey for every book of business and I met with employees throughout our company to help us create the questions we were going to ask our customer, asking them what matters most? What do they what are customers complain about? So that we can ask in the survey, are we meeting their needs for those specific areas that are important to them? And so that that was probably 6 to 9 months of meetings, committees, workshops, then meeting with our survey partner to develop the survey and do some testing. And then when we launched it in early 2021 and then we did some teaser in the meantime to help us in the planning stages coming soon. And we would have all these key messages that were pulled out of our mantra to get people curious, what is this? And then when we then we launched it with a video from me and the CEO of the company introducing it. And that was really important to show our employees that the CEO is on board with with this program. And then we started the survey process and started getting the feedback, and we wanted to keep engaged with our employees. So any time we got some really positive, inspiring message from a customer, we reached out and asked if we can use their quote and then we recognize the employee. It's all about recognizing your employee. So for that whole first we are still doing it. It's an ongoing program to recognize people individually and employees that work as a team with each other to deliver a good experience.

Pat:
And you've already started to see some important success metrics not to want to ask you to share anything confidential, but can you share a few tidbits of kind of what you've seen based on some of the goals that you set up in the at the beginning?

Carol:
Aside from having corporate company goals, we all want to increase our revenue. We want to increase the NPS score and the employee survey score. I have personal goals for the program itself in terms of following up on the surveys, quickly responding to our our customers in a quick manner. We have seen our customer facing employees, our managers responding a lot faster, giving us thoughtful feedback in our survey program, not just, Oh, I called the customer, it's all taken care of, but what they did to to rectify anything that was still outstanding. So I see a lot of a lot more engagement in that. And in the beginning it was slow. They weren't replying as quick as we would like them to, and now they're on it. The minute the survey result comes in, they pick up the phone, they talk to the customer and the interesting thing is now I like the feedback after the feedback. So customers will send us notes. We call customers to follow up, did we take care of you? And the feedback we got after the feedback is really great because a lot of them are saying, well, it pays to have a true customer care program and you definitely have it. And I'm very pleased with the follow up and I will recommend you and I will continue to do business with you. And so that's kind of nice to see that change. So it's a huge culture shift for us internally and we share those results with our employees and that makes them feel good, too.

Pat:
Yes. So once the program got started, it sounds like it just took a little while for people to get the hang of it. But because of all the training and such, I guess you must feel like the time you put in upfront was essential to how has unfolded from here. And I love the stories of, you know, customers responding. Any other stories you can share?

Carol:
Well, our employees started complimenting each other. One of the reasons why we spotlight our employees and put them on social media. I didn't come up with that idea. A sales rep came up with that and said, hey, I'd like to I would like to compliment this, my technician, for helping me with this customer. Can you help me with a post? And I was like, That's a great idea. So we started doing that officially for our company and it's really great to see the ways employees are complimenting each other and that's really huge for us. Know, it's one thing when a customer compliments you, but now you've got employees giving high fives to each other or saying, hey, can we can we do a post or a spotlight on this team here? These two technicians and a sales rep work together to deliver this customer, and the customer is really happy. Here's what they said. And so it's really nice to see that internal engagement and giving compliments to each other. And that's I think that's really nice success.

Pat:
Well, it's it's got to be a signal. I mean, I think when it all doesn't have to come from you if if you feel like you have to do everything and prod everybody all the time, that's one thing. When others start coming to you saying, hey, I have something to share or I want to recognize this person. I think that's when you know that it's really working.

Carol:
And internally it's really nice. When we highlight an employee, they get emails from our leadership team, from our CEO, you'll see them comment on their social posts. They'll send an internal note saying Thank you and congratulations. So that's really nice too, to get that additional support from the leadership team.

Pat:
So that's when you know that it's working. I'm curious because I bet at the early stages, sometimes it feels like you're doing everything, but I bet now people are coming to you with more and more requests. Is that kind of how it has unfolded?

Carol:
Yes, it's it's really fun. I'm starting to get phone calls from our GM's asking us if we can come to their branch and do a CX talk with their employees and share our story, because we have a really good story. And when I look at all of our results coming in, it's a really nice message to deliver to the employees and they get to hear it from the person, me and my team that are constantly sending those CX messages out via email. Now they want us to come in person and kind of create some more excitement. So it's been really nice to get the phone call up. Can you come visit us instead of me? Let's meet.

Pat:
Yeah. That's. That's a big win. That's a big win. Well, it is a great story and great to see the engagement and how it has really panned out. It's not surprising to me that you receive such nice recognition. I mentioned that before, but I actually want to give a little more detail because the Awards International, which sponsors the the US CX Awards, there were a number of awards extended and five of them were ones that that went to your company: customer experience strategy, customer centric culture, measurement, and customer experience, employee experience in a crisis, and CX leader of the Year. So it's a really impressive list. Any… I'm just curious what prompted you to to seek the recognition and how did your organization react?

Carol:
When I saw the CX Awards, I started to think, wow, I would really like to submit some of our work, but it does require some time and thought and and I needed to understand what value I would get out of it. And when I started to jot down what I wanted to get out of it, I thought this was definitely something that I wanted to participate in. And so the main reason for submitting these awards was to show our customers that we have a true customer care program and that we were recognized by global CX leaders. There were a lot of judges that were from all over the world and that have years and years of experience in CX. And so I wanted to show our customers that we do have a true program. We do have leadership. Our leadership team looking at this and measuring customer feedback. And I also wanted to show our employees that all the work that we've been doing and the work that we're asking them to do and and that culture shift is for a good reason. And, and that our programs, everything that we implemented was recognized and we received an award for the good work. And so I think it also helps them to, with their jobs. And and so my whole goal was to show everybody, yes, everything we've been working for, it matters. And these leading industry, global experts stamped their approval. And and now all we can do is just look at what's going ahead, forward. Right. What what do we have ahead? So when I start coming up with new stuff, everybody will be excited like we won those awards. I wonder what we're going to do next, right? So yeah, I think we got that. And the organization, our leadership, they're thrilled. If you look at our any of our social posts, our CEO, VP of Sales, they all are totally on board and support the program and are excited about delivering this experience, this great experience to our customers.

Pat:
Yeah, well, it it certainly doesn't do it justice. But to say this but you've built an excellent foundation, and I do think you've got exciting things to come. So, Carol, it's come to that time in the show where we ask what we call our take home value question. And that is one tip. You can think of all those leaders out there that may be launching their program or trying to rejuvenate their program. What would be one tip that you would share with them to help them get started?

Carol:
The one tip that I would give a CX leader or any CX person that's charged with the CX initiative would be managers compliment themselves. Leaders compliment their employees. Right? They compliment others. And that's that's hard to do. It's you know, you do all this work and you want everybody to say, great job, you know, CX leader, but it's not about you. It's about your your employees, because all these programs sound great. But if our employees didn't support me on it and helped me execute it, the program really doesn't mean anything. So I would say from day one, you should be asking your employees for feedback. And when you have an accomplishment, it's not about you, it's about them. You've got to compliment your people because you can't do it alone.

Pat:
That's a wonderful perspective that we should all keep in mind. Carol Tesarek is the director of customer experience at Equipment Depot. Carol, thanks for being on The CX Leader Podcast.

Carol:
Thank you, Pat.

Pat:
And if anybody wanted to keep in touch with you, I believe you're on LinkedIn would be okay if they reach out to you?

Carol:
Absolutely. Love to talk to them.

Pat:
And if you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or how Walker can help you with your business customer experience programs, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. If you have a minute. Be sure to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating on your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. And of course, check out our website. We have over 200 episodes on cxleaderpodcast.com. Subscribe to the show. We have series and you can also leave us a note there. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. And you can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader. We'll see you next time.