Paula Courtney with The Verde Group

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Customer experience, revenue protection, strategic blind spots, market research, voice of customer, AI analysis, unstructured data, customer insights, change management, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, survey incentives, customer pain points, market behavior, customer feedback.

00:00

Scott, welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots and let's go

00:22

all right once again. Welcome to industrial talk. Thank you for your continued support of this platform that celebrates industry professionals all around the world, all around the world. Yes, we celebrate you because you're bold, brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you're solving problems each and every day, you are making the world a better place. Thank you very much for joining industrial talk in the hot seat. I love this conversation. It really is a very cool conversation. We're talking to Paula Courtney. She's with the birdie group we're talking about, and I'm looking on her form here, eliminating strategic blind spots, using customer experience insights to grow and protect revenue. You can't argue against that. That's a great thing to do. That's right, Paula and it's just a wonderful conversation. So let's get cracking. Yeah, are you listening to your customers? Are you? Are you just sort of taking them for granted? I don't know. I hope not. You're solving problems. You're You're the hero in this story. So listen to your customers and then be able to analyze it in such a way that makes sense. Verdi group, right there. Yeah, that's a must. Must connect. You'll have all that contact, you know, the routine. It'll all be out on industrial talk. Reach out, you know, all of that good stuff with Paula, because I gotta tell you, man, I was dazzled. I was dazzled by the conversation. All right, a couple of position things of business, what I what I've noticed, and what I share with you, is that industry, all the changes that are taking place, all the excitement that's happening out there. I think it's I think it's just bubbly and just incredible. We need to do a better job at getting that message out. We need to do better job at inspiring the next generation. So as this is sort of me thinking here in in the in the worldwide headquarters for industrial talk, one if, if we're bringing in more manufacturing, if we're reshoring, and we're we're incentivizing manufacturers to grow, Making, putting the demands on manufacturers to do more great. I'm all in. We should. That's great. Where do we find the people are we doing? What is necessary out there? What are you doing? What are we doing to be able to inspire the next generation of leaders? I don't know. We need people. We can only automate so much. We can only, you know, we we've got the innovation to be able to do a lot, but it still is a human equation. This still is a matter of finding individuals that are are competent, passionate, are we speaking the language that they want to listen to, just throwing it out there. I would love to be able to hear what you have to say. I would love to be able to say, yeah, yeah. We're doing that. Yeah, this is what we're doing. So for me, I'm trying to be as nimble as I possibly can, as fast as I possibly can, to get that information delivered as fast as we can, and hopefully, in some slight way make it entertaining, because I think, and I'm guilty as charged, if it's not entertaining, I pretty much check out. And maybe that's good, that's bad, but I want it to be entertaining, so you need to, you need to go out to industrial talk. You need to reach out to me. You need to talk to me. I can help. Let's make that message incredibly Yeah, just this more entertaining. Please make it more entertaining and less less dry and boring. Let's, let's, let's do that. Come on. Let's do that. Paula Courtney the Verde group, right there. Paula Courtney verde group talking about customers. Insight, your customers. You need to mine that information. Are you doing what is necessary to be able to sort of make sure that you're protecting that revenue that you're you're delivering on the. Promises that you are make for your customers. I mean, you just you got to analyze it. Here's Paula. Paula, welcome to industrial talk. Thank you very much. Listeners. We were having some technical sort of challenges to get Paula on the podcast, but we persevered. So that was great. How you doing? Paula,

05:21

I'm awesome. Thank you, Scott, glad to be here, excited that we finally resolve those technical, you know, little glitches.

05:31

Live by technology, die by technology. It is what it is, you know, but it's all good. We're all flexible, we're nimble, we can handle it perfect, all right? Before we get into the conversation, before we start talking about looking into your customer and understanding their pain and being able to protect that revenue, give us a little background on who Paula is. Little bit about the Verde group, right?

05:59

Yeah, sure, the green group, that's right. So verde group is a I'm Paul Courtney. I'm CEO of the Verde Group. We are global market research consultancy. I like to say that we help our clients protect and grow their revenue through voice of customer insights. We like to identify the blind spots that many organizations have in understanding their customer experiences when they do business with them, we work across a broad swath of verticals, from financial services to Agriculture, retail.

06:38

Anchor culture, agriculture, yeah, culture, I'm thinking anchor culture, sorry you bump on that one.

06:47

Is that my Canadian accent or something? No,

06:49

I don't know. It says, No, it's called deaf ears. I got to continue. I interrupted

06:58

you. No, that's fine, yeah? So broad swath of industry sectors and both B to B, B to C, I'd like to say that we do the tough stuff, very complex customer, supplier, value chains. You know, customers are a cast of characters, and they are definitely a heterogeneous group of characters for many organizations, yeah. How do

07:23

you deal with the jargon? I mean, you pop out some, you know, you're in the industry, you're looking at that. You jargon the heck out of it. How do you deal with somebody that's in the manufacturing world? And then you come to them, and you pop in those jar the jargon words, and how

07:38

do they go

07:39

lining? I

07:41

guess I'd have to right size. My, my, most of our clients, we have a huge manufacturing sector in our client base, and they get it, they understand when we say, Listen, there's B to B customers, there's consumer customers. And they're all different and unique, even within every sector. So even in traditional manufacturing, you've got high value, low value customers you like. You have customers that like to work with you in person. They want to talk to someone when they do business. And then you've got customers who want digital tools. So that's how they're all different. So

08:19

you go into it, let's just use manufacturing as we started down that road. And you go into a manufacturing and we'll talk about these, you know, eliminating the strategic blind spots, we will. I got it. It's in your form, so I'm not going to forget about it, but it's me dovetailing, going off on tangents. Did customers contact you and say, Hey, I have, I What's that Genesis look like? It's like, do you? I know you probably have outreaches. They have vice versa. But what pain am I dealing with? What I mean? I don't even know how to verbalize it.

08:56

So most organizations, when they contact us, they're not saying, Hey, I think I have, you know, customer friction. Instead, they are. They basically say, Listen, I, you know, I'm not the number one in my market. I want to be. I'm seeing some erosion in my share and or I'd like to be more competitive. Or, Hey, I am introducing new products into market, and I really want to understand whether or not, you know, they're going to be received well by my customers. So the range of business problems that we get presented with are quite, you know, it's quite wide, but essentially, we use voice of customer insights to help solve many of those business challenges, because at the end of the day, if your customers are the primary source of how you make money, then understanding their needs, their expectations, how they experience your product. Services are important inputs into continuing to make more money or protect your revenue. So I think that that's, you know. So, so we don't, we don't get customers calling us and saying, Can you go survey my customers and tell me how much they love us? In fact, we hate that kind of research. We think applause meter research is completely useless, a waste of time. So we like

10:29

to use the applause meter because I always, I, I didn't use it that way, but I always, I always call it vanity. Stuff like, want vanity,

10:38

okay, cool. Or, how much do you love us surveys? Yeah,

10:42

absolutely. That's that's pretty wild. I like that. So let's talk a little bit about eliminating those strategic blind spots. Tell us a little bit about what that looks like.

10:51

So for many organizations, they assume they know what their customers want. They assume they know what their customers are experiencing. And you know what? I'm not going to lie, most executives do know what their customers want, otherwise they wouldn't be in business, right? You're not completely blind, but there are some critical blind spots that do exist, because when customers make choices about whether they want to do business with you, sometimes they do those they make those choices silently. They just stop doing business with you, or they they stop doing as much business with you. So you see that erosion. And often we think we know why, but there's some secret, you know, there's some surprises that are always in the data that we find that's because customers don't want to tell you what their problems are, because maybe they have in the past and you kind of ignored them, or they don't believe you're going to do anything with that information, because they're one customer, and you have many So there's lots of reasons that motivate or demotivate people from telling the truth to companies about what's really going on. There's a good motivation.

12:11

Well, then that's interesting. So I'm a manufacturer. I've got this list of customers. They've been to my customers for some time. I've seen an I've seen in my revenue. Then it's sort of eroding. Things are just not tracking the way I need to. I see that I can do that, tell us how the verti group takes my my list, my customer base, and then be able to mine and start to bring out insights so that I'm a better company and I can retain and and, and, you know, and I would imagine, expand my revenue because I have a greater understanding of what the needs are of the marketplace.

12:48

So the first thing that we do is we like to interrogate customers in a very unique way. We talked a little bit in the beginning of applause meter surveys. Or how much do you love us surveys? And I could tell you that today, there is a multi billion dollar industry that is focused exclusively on executing How much do you love us surveys. And the reason why that is such a successful industry doing research that tells you how much your customers love you is because we in North America in particular, have an obsession with success, and as a result of that obsession, we seek out success metrics. We count how many sales we got, we count our inventory. We count how many customers bought from us. We count positive things, and then we like to put them on the walls and post them on dashboards or scorecards. We like to ask people, you know, how much how satisfied they are, how much they love us. And then we report, look how much our customers like us, look how much they are satisfied with us. But yet, at the end of the day, that's not what drives market behavior. Customer satisfaction is not a predictor of customer loyalty. It's a precondition, but it's insufficient in order to get you true advocacy and in order to get you more money. Sorry about that. I've dogs.

14:23

I got a dog someplace. She's right here. Yeah, she She protects me from bad people.

14:31

80% of the reasons why people stop doing business with the companies because they've had a problem. And it takes an incredible amount of courage to go to market with a purposeful and deliberate interrogation of problems. But yet we do, and the way we ask customers about problems they may have experienced is that way, as we ask them, might you have experienced this problem. So we're very deliberate, and we ask about customer problems in the way that they would. Experience them. So we don't do corporate speak, boardroom talk. We don't do, you know, question design in a boardroom or an ivory tower. We ask customer questions in the way that they speak, the way they understand your business, because before we ask them questions or ask them a survey or send them a survey, we speak to customers, we speak their lingo, and we design a survey using their language to ask about their experiences in the way that they would recognize and then we look at how they've answered those questions, and then we look at their behavior, who's buying from you, who's not, and we match up that purchase behavior or whatever market behavior you're looking to change your influence. At the end of the day, you're looking at money

15:56

experience. I have to interrupt. How do you get people, how do you get customers to just participate? The last thing I want to see is an email coming in and saying, Hey, we got a survey going on. It'll only take X amount of time. I you know, there's no question that charge. I'm not going to go. I'm not going to

16:18

do it. Yeah, there's no question that customer surveys. Response rates to surveys are globally declining because everybody wants to talk to customers, everybody wants a piece of your feedback, and that data is gold, and it's worth something so incentivizing customers to participate, making it really easy for them to answer questions, are just some of the ways that we deploy in order to to maximize participation rates. So so there's lots of techniques, but you're right. If you do a survey, you don't want to set your customers. It's a clumsy link, it's difficult. It's long, and and then when I answer the question, you do nothing with the data. Time you asked me, maybe I'm not going to answer,

17:12

yeah. And it adds to the frustration I already have with you. It doesn't, it doesn't go well, okay, so real quick, I have to, I have to say it again. How do you incentivize? What are these? Some of the incentives, what's going to motivate me to do your do a survey?

17:32

Depends on the industry, so we have some clients that are not allowed to financially incentivize clients to participate in service, sure, and that's instead, we offer donations to a charity of their choice. We say, for your time, we will donate each amount of dollars and tell us your favorite charity, and we'll do that that's more and more common. You know, incentive technique that we've used. And sometimes the incentives aren't money, but they're like, Hey, we're going to buy you a coffee for your time. And so they could download, you know, a gift card to purchase coffee somewhere. And I'm not going to name names, but wherever that coffee place is, because we've done studies like this in Indonesia, Malaysia, and we really have to be respectful of the culture and what kinds of incentives work in certain countries. So yeah, we have to really know, know that customer, to know what might work to incentivize them.

18:41

Okay, so now you've incentivized. You're getting some good response. Now you take that information, you bring it on in, you start to then get the data. Take us through that whole process. I'm still the manufacturer. I said. I want verti group to go into and look at this information. And I would imagine you want a pretty broad swath of response. You the more the barrier, of course. So you succeed at that, take us through that step.

19:12

20:47

Yeah. See, I like that. I like that. So I like the fact that you also pointed out change management. Here's the reason why. So I get a survey, the survey then reveals, you know, I'm okay here, not so good over here. Let's figure out why and and be able to affect that, that change within my organization, to recapture whatever that that that passion was, or vision, or that that customer solution. So you go through that change management process, is there a loop back to the customer?

21:27

Absolutely so effective change management requires many things, and the ongoing monitoring is absolutely critical. So once you've implemented some sort of governance around those initiatives, because you need governance. You need you know who's going to manage, who's going to be the lead. So you definitely need a governance structure around your initiatives. In addition, you want lots of communication internally so that all levels of the organization understand where the North Star is and what it is and what you're all aiming for. So we strongly believe in ensuring that not only management knows what customers are saying, but every single employee that they that they understand what really matters to customers and where there's friction and pain and what's putting revenue at risk for the organization. And once those initiatives are in place, you have governance, you have solid communications, then you want to monitor your your progress. You want to make sure that the friction is going down and that you are able to monetize some of those initiatives. So we have a large retail client that has absolutely realized $350 million in revenue gains as a result of fixing the things that we identified for them. In fact, our study is pivotal in their capex, you know, for the following, cool thing, yeah, it's, it's, it's transformational. So we're focused on identifying signal, and a lot of customer sat surveys are identifying noise.

23:08

See, that's a that's a good example. What are, what are some bad examples? I, I get the verdict group, and I, you go on out and you do your stuff, and it's all fantastic. What's and, and I'm just, I'm stubborn. What is, are there any examples of that?

23:32

Most of the time we get the executives who don't want to engage in a study that uncovers or problems, they feel very confident that they know what the problems are that the customers are experiencing, and in those organizations, we just don't end up working with that company. They don't want to hire us. They believe they they already know and they have a good handle on where there's friction and what they need to do about it, and, you know, so that that happens. And you know, they continue on and have whatever success they'll have.

24:16

I don't want to see it in black and white. My problems in black and white. I don't want to, I don't want to see it in the report. Yeah, want to see it in the report. The other thing was, be the the trust of the the team that you're working with. How many you know, are they going to follow through? It's in black and white. We've got these challenges. It's all up to the leadership team to be able to say, Yeah, we're going through with this, no matter how painful it might be. We need to go through with it and make those changes that are necessary. I would imagine that there are sometimes when, you know, people say, Nope, not going to do that. Nope.

24:47

It's so true. I'll give you an example that just happened a few weeks ago. We were talking to an agriculture company, and they hadn't done any research with their customer. Dollars in, I don't know, five, six years. And so they bring in a new head of marketing, and he's brand new to this organization. He's like, okay, tells the CEO, we really need to do some market research. We want to understand was our role, to set our plans, to tweak our strategic plan. And the CEO said, we don't need any research. We already know what we want to do, and it doesn't matter what our customers say, it's not going to change our plan. We're staying focused, because, guess what, we're making money head over fit, you know, head over fifth. So we don't, we don't need to change course. So that does happen. We see that. And sometimes success breeds complacency in leaders. And I always say to those leaders, in this opportunity, I didn't get the chance to speak to the CEO, but I always say, if you are that successful without any market insight, then to me, you're sub optimized,

26:01

yeah? Oh, absolutely. That's a That's a horrible attitude. Quite frankly,

26:06

you're not growing as fast as you could be, and you're not as successful as you could be, because you believe that what you've achieved is good enough, yeah, and that happens, and, you know, we didn't end up working with this company, and it was just, it was almost scary to know that there are leaders that and you know what, I always say, an organization cannot rise above the quality of its leadership team. Yeah,

26:34

I agree with that 100% I do, I do, I do. And that's sort of a surly type of culture, I wouldn't want to be a part of that. And I would imagine that there are a lot of nothing worse than a customer that feels like, well, I have no other place to go. I don't really like the service or solution or whatever, but I have no other place to go, so I'm sort of, you know, captive to whatever I

27:02

know we do work within businesses like that, where their audience, their customer base, is a captive audience. There's sort of no other choices, no other places to go, you see, the energy sector utility. But here's the problem with that, you still have financial risk, even if customers have nowhere else to go, and this is where there's risk. A, there's reputational risk. There's no question, yeah. B, you are not optimized on your cost structure, because you're probably expensive to do business with, because customers don't like you, and since you're not investing in them, because they have a lot of friction, chances are your systems are archaic. There are not enough digital tools, so you're not optimized for efficiency. You've got reputational risk. And then the third area of financial risk, real risk is even though you have a captive audience, if you want to introduce new products, new services, marketing campaigns, you're going to get a very low opt in rate for those because you have friction and risk in your customer base. So no matter what, friction is bad for business. Whether your customers are captive and you believe they have nowhere else to go, they always they can hurt you nonetheless.

28:20

Yeah, I agree with that. I agree I have to put your future hat on. How is AI affecting your ability to analyze data?

28:31

Oh, my God, it's it's incredible. It's fantastic. We love it. So at the verdict group, we invest heavily in AI, and we just launched our new AI product called px IQ, which is really a way to analyze unstructured data. So what is unstructured data? That's a fancy word for customer conversations that occur naturally. Maybe a customer calls you into a call center, or, you know, you have a transcript of a conversation. So that's unstructured. It's not, you know, a survey. It's not whatever. So we have a way we use AI to analyze unstructured data in seconds when it used to take weeks and days. So AI is, it's profoundly changing the market research industry now, flip side with our customers, a lot of our large global clients, they're still trying to figure out best use cases for AI, and often they are handcuffed by security firewalls. And, you know, don't want their data, you know, in the right or no unknown so. So I think a lot of our clients, everyone is intrigued, everyone's interested. They see the value, but I'd say they're still in the nascent stage of development. In some sectors, not all

29:59

see ask a. Stuff. It writes a great email for me. Yeah.

30:04

Well, they say that copywriting is completely a profession that's gone. It's dead. Who needs?

30:12

Oh, the other thing that's dead is, is, well, no, I don't want to offend anybody, but the reality is, is, I can, I can generate a really great logo. And I don't have a graphics designer to do it. It's a great logo. It's an interesting time. And, yeah, I can imagine AI impacting your business in a big way, especially as you, you know, grind through data. That's where it's really shines, and it does it fast, and there's a high confidence level to

30:45

it. And we do, I mean, obviously we have checks and we've sampled, so, yeah, so connected.

30:55

We gotta wrap this up. How do people get a hold of you? Paula, what's the best way you say LinkedIn, that's a good way of getting a hold of you. What else, Dan, we do?

31:03

Our website, I think, is the best we have. All our newsletters, we publish blogs. We do have a monthly newsletter, and we'd love for people to subscribe to it. There's a lot of cool things we don't just write about us. And what we do, we're always tapping into best practices globally and republishing really great content. So you know, verdegroup.com is, is, I'd say, a great source. And, of course, LinkedIn, for me personally, and hopefully I'll hear from some of your listeners.

31:34

Yes, that's very cool, because they're fantastic. The listeners fantastic. They are, all right. Thank you, Paula for being on industrial talk. This was a great conversation. Very cool.

31:46

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

31:50

Thank you for grinding on through technical things. All right, listeners, we're going to wrap it up on the other side. We're going to have all the contact information for Paula out on industrial talk. So fear not. This is a must connect individual, yes, make it a part of your plan. All right, stay tuned. We will be right back.

32:10

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network,

32:20

Paula Courtney, verde group, the Verdi group, talking about customer insights, that's an important conversation to have. You need. You need to do that. And why would you hang out with somebody that you can trust to be able to make take you on that journey? The verde group, right there. Paula, reach out LinkedIn, you know, you know the routine. All right again. Industrial talk is here to help you succeed. We are we want you to succeed. It's important that you succeed. To do that, you need to tell your story. You need to amplify your message. It needs to be delivered in a way that people listen to you. It's that important. We're here to help go out to industrial talk, connect with me. Let's have a conversation. All right. Be bold, be brave. Dare greatly. Hang out with Paula. Change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned. You.