It’s time to announce the final winner in Deep-Insight’s “Excellence in CX” Awards this year.
Doing the right thing for customers means doing the right thing for your employees.
We award the “Best Focus on ERQ” prize to the company that shows the greatest interest in Employee Relationship Quality (ERQ), the sister methodology to CRQ.
Pelican Self Storage has been a client of ours almost as long as I have been with Deep-Insight, and it has been a privilege watching the Pelican management team take the views of its employees so seriously over that time.
Over the years, I’ve seen effective leadership and organisational success in Pelican. This is all due to the crucial aspect of managing relationships with employees who are able to provide valuable feedback through a safe platform. That has allowed the leadership team to evolve and grow the company while always thinking about their people.
Burkhart Franz is CEO of Pelican and has always been a huge advocate for his management team and all of his employees across Denmark, Sweden and Finland.
“Our twice-a-year employee satisfaction surveys, alternating the eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) question and the more in-depth Employee Relationship Quality (ERQ) assessment are now in their 7th year.
They have clearly made Pelican a more employee-focused organization. Over the years we have addressed many issues that had previously wiped the smiles off the faces of our collaborators, from slow internet connections and faulty printer set-ups to significant changes in management style, workplace scheduling and internal communication. As a result, we have very low employee churn in what are otherwise red hot labor markets; a premium service proposition; and the happiest customers in our industry.”
Huge congratulations to everyone in Pelican for winning this award.
Alexandra Calugarici
About Pelican Self Storage
Pelican Self Storage is leading Nordic brand within private and business self storage. We have locations in Denmark, Sweden and Finland which are all centrally located and easily accessible.
Self storage is for everyone We strive to be the preferred service partner for people moving to and from the big city – for people moving abroad to work – for people moving in together or back home – for people getting married or having children – for people who don’t have a cellar or attic space at home. In short, we are there when life demands more space.
We take pride in good old-fashioned service Our job is to provide outstanding service so our customers experience the extraordinary when choosing Pelican Self Storage. Every day, we work hard to provide a service level beyond the ordinary, and our staff is dedicated to make customers experience that something extra at our stores.
We distinguish ourselves, among other things, by always having service-oriented staff on site 6 days a week, as well as providing warm and extra secure storage units. Our goal is to ensure that as a customer, you will experience good old-fashioned personal service and a high level of quality in our storage services. Find out more at pelicanselfstorage.dk.
About Deep-Insight
Deep-Insight is a leading European B2B Customer Experience (CX) company founded in 2000 by a small team of ‘magicians’ with one goal: researching a way to read customers’ minds. Today, Deep-Insight supports customers all over the world with the skills, tools and methodologies to establish and operate world-class Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) programmes.
I was invited by Rob Baldock, the MD of Clustre to give a short webinar a couple of weeks ago on Love in the Time of Corona.
Actually, it was really about how some of our clients are maintaining business relationships while they are locked down at home but still have access to a telephone or the internet.
So here’s a summary of the 5 actions for maintaining long-lasting business relationships in the “time of corona”.
John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight
********************
My Role as a Relationship Counsellor
Good morning. I’m John O’Connor, CEO of Deep-Insight. I sometimes refer to myself as a relationship counsellor. We set up and run Customer Experience programmes for large international B2B companies. Our clients are the likes of Atos, BT, Serco, Santander and so on. We also run Employee Engagement programmes and I’ll talk about one client in the course of the next 10 minutes but primarily it’s the MDs and Sales Directors of B2B companies that we deal with.
I call myself a relationship counsellor because our job is to help senior executives understand and enhance the relationships they have with major accounts. We do this by telling them:
Which of their accounts are in good shape and which are like to defect to the competition;
Which account managers are doing a good job at building long-term relationships within those accounts;
What is the one thing that they as senior executives need to address in 2020 because it’s an issue across all of the client base.
The theory is quite simple: people only buy from people that they trust. Long term commitment between two business partners is based on exactly that – a relationship built on Trust. Although B2B stands for business to business, I often say it’s really P2P (Person to Person). Organisations don’t buy from organisations. It’s people who buy from each other, even when they work in large organisations.
5 Actions You Need to Take
So keeping that in mind, how should we deal with our clients in the current environment? I’ve been reflecting on what some of our clients are doing with their customers and it seems to boil down to five things. These five actions are all based on building an emotional connection with clients and enhancing that client relationship:
1. Tell Customers how you are Contributing to Safety
2. Treat Customers with Care and Empathy
3. Communicate Constantly and Consistently
4. Treat Employees with Respect
5. There is no fifth action: Just make sure you do Actions 1 – 4
1. Contributing to Safety
This first point may not apply to every company but it probably does apply to most. Tell your customers what you are doing to contribute to their safety. After all, this whole COVID19 pandemic is primarily an issue of human safety. People out there are naturally concerned both from a personal and from a professional point of view.
Some of our clients deal with safety for a living. For example, one of our clients is a company called Survitec. It has over 3,000 employees manufacturing safety equipment for Defence and Marine clients. We’re working with the Marine division which manufactures everything from life jackets to the largest lifeboats you’ve ever seen. Their clients include cruise companies, oil & gas organisations, ship manufacturers, ship managers and so on.
Let’s take something like a lifeboat inspection. In the last few weeks, Survitec has literally re-written the manual for doing a lifeboat inspection. It had to, to make sure that it complied with WHO guidelines on things like workers practicing social distancing, the wearing of gloves and face masks, the basics of handwashing and use of hand sanitisers; on carrying out deep cleans after work has been completed. All shipments that are sent from Survitec’s warehouses are cleaned and wiped down before being dispatched.
But there’s not much point in rewriting the manual if you don’t also tell clients that you have done so. That’s what Survitec has been doing.
2. Treating Customers with Care and Empathy
Quite a few of our clients have customers that operate in industries that have been hard hit by COVID-19. I’ve already mentioned Survitec and the fact that it works with cruise companies. Now that’s a tough industry to be in at the moment.
We have another client called Timico which provides a range of IT services to UK clients. Many of these are operating in the restaurant and retail industry. These companies are hurting – both at a corporate level and at a personal level. A lot of what Timico has been doing in recent weeks is talking to their clients, understanding what their particular circumstances are and, in many cases, renegotiating deals and contracts based on the reality of what’s happening in their industry at the moment. For Timico it’s all about “providing confidence that they are doing everything they can to support their customers”.
I’m sure you have clients in a similar position. Be like Timico. Be empathetic. Go into listening mode.
3. Communicating Constantly and Consistently
Remember that communication is two-way. It’s about listening as much as it is telling. In fact, it should be a lot more listening that telling, in the current environment.
We have another client called Invenio that has about 1,000 staff deployed on large technical projects all across the globe – Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Africa. Last Friday, we completed a customer feedback programme for them and while there was some debate at the start of April about whether we should go ahead, the CEO Arun Bala decided – correctly – that now was absolutely the right time to find out what his clients were thinking. As of this morning, we’re going through all the feedback with the various Invenio account owners. The next step is for those account owners to go back to their clients, share and discuss the feedback, and come up with action plans to address any issues.
4. Treating Employees with Respect
You might say this is not related to customers but remember that your staff are the daily interface your company has with clients. Treat them in exactly the same way that you treat your customers. Put it another way: “How can you expect your staff to provide a great customer experience when they are not having a great employee experience?”
Now, more than ever, your customers will judge how you deal with them currently when they consider who they do business with in the future. You probably know there are lists circulating in the UK naming companies who have provided bad customer and/or employee experience!
We have a Danish client called Pelican that operates a series of self-storage facilities for small businesses and for consumers all across the Nordic region. Most of their sites only have two staff so good communication with employees is again a key requirement for Pelican’s management team. Two weeks ago, we completed an employee assessment for Burkhart Franz, the CEO of Pelican, and I’m going to read you two comments that came back from staff in that assessment:
“Since Pelican has taken quick actions during this corona crisis, my trust in our company has grown. My score is higher than before due to this fact.”
“It’s really nice in this hard Corona situation that I can trust my employer. At the moment I have no worries about losing my job or salary, like many of my friends and family. Thank you for that!”
Now even if Burkhart wasn’t in a position to make any financial commitment to his employees, he’s the sort of guy who will let employees know exactly where they stand and what is likely to happen. And they really appreciate it. Be like Burkhart. List to your employees. Do it now.
Summary
So here are my key messages again:
1. Tell Customers how you are Contributing to Safety
2. Treat Customers with Care and Empathy
3. Communicate Constantly and Consistently
4. Treat Employees with Respect
If you need a fifth message, it to spend a lot of time thinking about the other four, because these are actions that companies need to take now, not just because they’re the right thing to do, but because they make sense commercially as well.
I’ll finish off with a message from a recent conversation I had recently with Ed Stainton, who manages the major government accounts for BT including the relationships with various police forces across the country. Based on their most recent customer assessment, we know that Ed already has a fantastic set of relationships with his clients but he’s convinced that in the next Deep-Insight assessment, the scores will be even better. Ed is convinced that this is the case because his teams have been working 24 x 7 throughout March and April on a whole range of activities directly or indirectly related to COVID-19. Ed believes that enhanced contact is going to lead to better and deeper client relationships. I think he’s right.
Thank you for listening and remember: be like Survitec and Invenio! Be like Arun, Burkhart and Ed!
We have some new faces in Deep-Insight. They bring an exciting mix of talents and interests and are already adding value to the company and what we can do for our customers.
Here in Deep-Insight, we take our time with recruitment. We understand that getting the right fit for our company and for the roles is so much more important than filling a position quickly. This approach has paid off more than we hoped for and we are delighted and privileged to have these individuals join our team.
Fabienne Falvay – Project Coordinator
Fabienne is originally from the Netherlands but has been studying and working abroad for the past number of years. After spending time in New Zealand and Denmark she moved to Ireland in 2016. She has been working at Deep-Insight since March 2019 as one of our Project Coordinators.
Fabienne comes from an analytical background and has a passion for working with people and large sets of data. In her spare time, she likes to cook and work on design projects with her sewing machine.
Meghan Clune – Project Coordinator
Meghan Clune originates from Cork, enjoys travelling and exploring new and different cultures. Meghan has completed a BA in Business Studies in Cork Institute of Technology and has worked for companies in varying different industries with a background in fraud analytics, crisis management and onboarding.
Meghan gets excited about innovative thinking and creative problem solving, she has previously managed strategic projects that focus on improving employee engagement within organisations.
Shane O’Regan – Project Coordinator
Shane O’Regan is a project management professional who is driven to understand, enable and enhance the human aspect of organisational transformation. Shane hails from Cork, Ireland and has lived in Chicago and Seattle while working in radio and completing a BA in Communication and an MA in Digital Anthropology.
Shane is interested in design, urbanism, psychology, digital ethics and the relationship between people and technology.
Craig Johnson – CRQ Advisor
Craig Johnson was born in New Zealand and has been living in Ireland for the last five years with his Irish wife and two children.
Craig’s professional background is in key client relationship management, having worked in the financial and outsourcing sectors internationally for the last fifteen years.
I was invited by Rob Baldock, the MD of 
