CUSTOMER PROFILE
01 THE CHALLENGE
Understanding the Voice of the Customer
Bobst, a company with more than 125 years of history, pursued a business strategy focused on producing innovative, high-quality equipment, and growing its market share. However, the company had not focused on the voice of the customer (VoC) for strategic marketing and operational decisions.
Modern capabilities of collecting and integrating the voice of the customer meant that Bobst was at risk of being at a disadvantage in the industry. New products, although innovative and well- made, had trouble finding a market and strategic decisions intended to improve the customer experience, but made without customer input, ended up having the reverse effect.
With the traditional market-based strategies losing their effectiveness, company management, led by CEO Jean-Pascal Bobst, decided to make a change. The company was intent on adopting a complete customer experience (CX) program to meet this goal. What was needed was a systematic approach to collecting and integrating customer experience (CX) data into strategic planning and new performance indicators that provided accurate, customer-centric feedback to all levels of the company hierarchy.
02 THE SOLUTION
Measuring customer loyalty
For Bobst, customer loyalty is a key measure of success, inextricably linked to, and placed on par with, traditional performance indicators like profitability and revenues. With this in mind, company leadership decided to adopt a voice of the customer solution that would help shape its CX program to positively impact three areas: operational processes; employee engagement for all roles; and enterprise-wide mindset and behaviors that increase customer centricity.
Bobst determined that NICE Satmetrix met its requirements, as it brought to the table the insights of the co- creator of the Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) and the experience of the global leader in cloud-based customer data management.
Defined Feedback To Better Serve The Customer
NICE Satmetrix gathers structured and unstructured real-time, enterprise-wide and omnichannel feedback. The solution’s configurability also played a role in the Bobst decision, as the company sought to create tailored transactional and relationship surveys, and feedback-to- action processes.
Bobst uses the NICE Satmetrix software to measure transactional NPS® and performance across its seven key interaction points – phone support, on-site service, preventive maintenance, equipment installation, product training, machine demonstration, and spare part delivery. It also distributes a relationship survey twice a year, to strategically selected contacts, chosen in many instances in consultation with the customers’ leadership team.
A well-defined closed-loop feedback process ensures that detractors are identified, relevant personnel are alerted, and the issues are addressed within 72 hours. The root causes for the dissatisfaction are logged into the NICE Satmetrix system, along with all feedback and follow-up, and then translated into targeted process improvements. With Bobst’s global customer base, regional leaders are given wide latitude to address CX issues in alignment with local preferences while more issues impacting the global organization are addressed by management through monthly meetings and ongoing assessments.
Bobst has put in place a highly organized management infrastructure to clearly define the CX program’s leadership and roles. The NICE solution is easily configured to provide various levels of user access to the system, from setting annual objectives to tracking and driving improvements to ensuring processes are being followed. With this flexibility, Bobst has created more than 280 monthly reports (each with 10 data visualizations) on the CX program data and results, providing actionable insight to employees across the organization and reinforcing the importance of customer experience. The reports, KPIs, action plans, best practices, and success stories are displayed prominently, reviewed by each business group monthly, and become the subject of four annual web conferences with the head of customer loyalty.
Operations, Management And Mindset
The CX program Bobst has implemented is comprehensive, in that it focuses on operations, management, and employee mindset. The result has been multiple quantitative and qualitative improvements in customer loyalty, profitability, and revenue, including:
- CX program implementation went from none to 95% of the business.
- 18 specific process improvements in 15 locations.
- Reduced response times for customer questions and price quotations.
- Increased sales by 5.7%.
- Increased EBIT by 14.5%.
- Increased net revenues by 26.8%.
- Increased orders by 17% and backlog more than 20%
- Increased overall group NPS® over a five-year period from 10 to 35.
Prepared To Continue Winning
At Bobst, the customer loyalty teams recognize that implementing a CX program from scratch took extraordinary effort and would not have been possible without the strong, vocal support of company leadership. This has completely transformed the company, thanks to the NICE Satmetrix platform’s capability to collect and analyze customer feedback. As Thierry Robert, Head of Customer Loyalty for Bobst, put it:
“With NICE Satmetrix as a partner, Bobst is better prepared to meet the challenges of the market and continue its run of dominance well into the future.”
Net Promoter Score, Net Promoter, and NPS are trademarks of NICE Systems, Inc., Bain and Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld
