#17 Rudi Khoury - Empower Your Team, Transform Customer Service: Fisher & Paykel's Revolutionary Approach
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We make the employee experience better, both culturally, but also how they do the work. There's a really much better chance that they're going to deliver a better customer experience as well. We spoke earlier about the centralizing of data, but also for our centralizing of process and the way they do their work into a single pane of glass so that we can at least

take the pain that we can control out of their life so that their jobs are more enjoyable. When it comes to tracking KPIs, what are some of the key metrics that you're really using to track success of your customer experience? Getting as much of the information to our people as possible because despite digitizing a lot of our touch points, like all organizations have done over the last 10 years,

Actually, we have humans who are dealing with humans at the end of the day. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood, and today I'm joined by Rudy Curry, the Chief Digital Officer at Fisher & Paykel Appliances, a highly innovative global home appliance company based out of New Zealand. And if our listeners are not familiar with Fisher & Paykel,

Truly, you are all in for a treat because their home appliances are absolutely to die for. When I look at them, like as the design geek I am, I completely gush over their products. So today we're going to dive into how Fisher & Paykel designs and delivers on these exceptional home appliances. So let's get into it. Rudy, thank you so much for joining us. Sounds good. No worries. Really great to be here with you.

So, you've been at Fisher & Paykel for over 15 years, is that correct? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey? Because I've heard and I've read that you started as a financial controller and now you're the chief digital officer. So, tell us about your journey. Yeah, I mean, finance, yes, I did absolutely started off in finance in Fisher & Paykel.

But, you know, finance was a real interest for me because I was surrounded by a family of entrepreneurs and just watched them really struggle understanding how business works. So I thought, you know what, I'm going to go and learn about this money thing and learn about how great companies manage that business.

You know, really, really fortunate to start with F&P 15 years ago. The culture here is absolutely sensational. It's a fantastic place to work and it really encourages that entrepreneurship inside of a great company like this. And yes, while I started off in finance, you know, 15 years ago, and actually that finance role was part of the customer service business at the time.

really, really had, you know, a number of really great opportunities to try different things. You know, we're really strong around developing people and, you know, if you talk to people inside of F&P, you'll hear a lot of stories about long tenure, but that long tenure comes with variety and my career is no exception to that.

at all and, you know, move from various finance roles into being able to lead customer experience globally and lead a really great program of work and transformation in that part of the business, as well as, you know, things like sales operations and

Marketing, you know, most recently had the opportunity to lead marketing in our organization. And of course, along the way, various different technology portfolios and projects throughout the last 15 years. That's wonderful. It sounds like you've really gotten a full lay of the land of this business.

Absolutely. And so tell me a little bit about your customer experience philosophy, because I know that customer experience is a really important component of your business. So tell me a little bit about your philosophy. Yeah, we're really focused on customer experience end to end from the start of the journey when you might be learning about us, researching about our product all the way through to post-sale

And then, you know, hopefully recommending us to your friends and family. And so we have a philosophy where we focus on, you know, balancing our time and investment across all elements of the customer journey so that the experience is consistent for our customers. And tell me a little bit about how you actually go about doing that. That's a great question. I think we have a really clear purpose and a really clear strategy of where we want to go and really clear goals.

And that's what's guiding us going forward and what work we do and what initiatives we do to continue to lift our experience across our organisation, across the end-to-end journey for our customer.

And really what it's about is getting the sequencing right. So which parts of the journey need to be uplifted more than others so that, again, the customer's getting a balanced journey over time and not one that's weighted maybe more to the front end in marketing or maybe too much or too little in another area like post-sales support.

So we're really clear on the fact that we want to deliver a consistent experience to our customers. And we're really clear on doing that over time. And it's just about for us choosing the right initiatives to do over time in the right sequence. Yeah, I think it's really important what you just highlighted of having a balanced journey, because it can be

very tempting. I work on customer journeys very often in my work and we always look at the beginning, which is such a critical phase of when someone is first using your product. But

Having balanced throughout their experience, because I can imagine, especially when it comes to home appliances, you want someone to buy again in 10 years or however long it is going to be when they actually buy their next appliance. So could you maybe share an example of something that you've implemented at a later phase in the journey? I'm just so curious to understand what you've actually done.

I just actually want to touch on a really good point. You know, in an industry like ours where you're selling durable goods, experience is really important because you get one chance with the customer and that chance could be lost for a decade or maybe generations with a customer. And that's why consistency is so important. Now, you know, back to your original question around what's an example of what we've implemented, right?

Well, here's an insight. Customers who might need service, for example, in-home service, they don't like waiting around for technicians or waiting around for deliveries, for example. So that's clear. Every bit of feedback and survey we've had over time, that comes through really strongly. You know, customer's time is valuable.

So, you know, we thought, well, what could we do to respect that time? And, you know, we put a number of things in, like, for example, being transparent around the actual arrival window at time of booking, but also on day of arrival, as well as, you know, implementing things like Uber style track and trace when somebody's on the way to your house.

And it's something small like that, you know, it seems table stakes today. But when we put that in place, it was really game changing. And it was only game changing because of lifting transparency to our customers and removing service anxiety, removing the anxiety of not knowing when somebody's coming and not knowing how long you need to be at home for, for example. Yeah. Yeah.

It's such a important point that you're making. And I think so many businesses can learn from this, that transparency piece of what it really comes down to, or at least my interpretation of it, is that you're respecting the customer's time.

Right. Like this is when you can expect to have to engage with us and otherwise go and live your life. We respect your time. We want you to be able to not be beholden to whenever we are going to be able to show up in service or deliver what it is that we've promised to. Absolutely.

So you mentioned personalization, which I'm so curious to understand more about, because when it comes to the product you're actually selling, you're not necessarily personalizing the stove or the appliance that you're selling. But how do you build personalization into the experience? Well, let's use a service example around personalization, because that's one that's front of mind for me through this conversation so far.

But, you know, one of the things that we've been doing is getting as much of the information to our people as possible because despite, you know, digitising a lot of our touch points, like all organisations have done over the last 10 years, actually we have humans who are

dealing with humans at the end of the day. And actually, what I really like is the fact that, you know, we focus so hard on pulling together as much about the customer that the customer is willing to share so that we can, you know, when we interact with them, we can, you know,

be aware of the context and personalize at a human level rather than a machine level. Now, I'm not saying we don't use, you know, technology to personalize, of course, you know, in places like our websites, for example, of course, we're personalizing. But in the context of service, you can also personalize using technology through the people that are interacting with your customers, which I think is really powerful because, again, you want to have a, you know, strong connection with your customers. Yeah.

So let's talk a little bit about how you actually do that. What tools do you use? What does that look like on the back end to make sure that the humans who are interacting with humans have the information they need?

Yeah. Well, look, in the front end of our business, we've really invested heavily with Salesforce. We've partnered with them over the last decade and implemented their stack across what I call the front end of our business. So our customer facing touch points from sales, from B2B sales through to customer service, field service, contact center, things like our website with Commerce Cloud and of course in the marketing space as well.

That's awesome. It sounds like, I mean, so I've been a Salesforce customer in previous roles and obviously Salesforce sponsors this podcast. So I'm becoming more and more well-versed in the products that they have. And I wish that I had known about all the different products when I was using Salesforce that I could help my organization adopt some more of those things that we have more integration. And I'd love to hear a bit more about your experience of

using so many different Salesforce products to deliver on your customer experience and how that has benefited you. Yeah, I think, you know, when we first started the journey with Salesforce, you know, a decade ago,

We knew that we were making a platform play for the long term. And we were really conscious that we wanted a partner that could facilitate our growth. And as we were growing and transforming our own business, we could bring on the tools along the way to deliver what we were trying to achieve for our customer. And

And there's real synergies in platform plays because it allows you to consolidate things like your skill, the skill of your team, which means then you can deliver more faster because you have expert knowledge around a platform.

And then we were really selective around, you know, what other best of breed tools we bring in alongside of that, you know, to make sure that we maximize the return on investment from that big platform investment that we're making. And also it really helped us do things like centralize our customer data and also keep the data safe. That's another really important point, keep it private and safe, right?

And then, you know, working with SaaS partners has been really great because they're innovating, they're investing in their products much faster than we could custom develop them. And it means that, you know, we can take that innovation as we need it over time and it frees up our business to invest on actually what we need to do, which is build great products, deliver great experiences and things like that. So...

You know, that's been I think transformational for us having a really great partner and having a really great platform to launch off. Mm-hmm.

Completely. That total integration, it sounds like is extremely beneficial. And also when it comes to the customer data, as you mentioned, because I think that's something that is, it can really add so much to a customer experience when you have, when everybody is able to access the information that they need in order to deliver on the vision. Do you have some examples maybe of how you've done that?

Yeah, I mean, examples, look, we've just been relentless around, well, the CRM is the source of truth for our customer. And we've done that together as an organization, not just me. We've gone, we've made this investment in CRM. Now we have to bring it to life. And to bring it to life, we have to be disciplined and not let the customer data go anywhere else. And actually, that's been a really good principle for us to have. And

Because we've done that, we've been able to do, and this is the interesting thing, it's all the accumulation of all the little things over time that you do that you don't realize that add up to a great experience for a customer. It's that notification for this. It's the transparency on that. It's the giving your agents access to what they need to see. And it's all of those things in aggregate that is valuable rather than a single thing.

But it's been our discipline and I have, you know, my team and the support of the organisation to thank that we've been really relentless in that focus. And it's paying back now. It's paying back now. We're not, you know, in the process of having to centralise databases like a lot of other organisations are, you know, and they're putting things like CDPs in to try and solve that problem.

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I always use this analogy of trust, which is what I think I hear you're saying, is building trust with the customer and also maybe building trust with the employee of those little things of making sure that there's information that the employee has so that they can do their job correctly. And then on the customer side, they're receiving that information and they're like, oh, wow, they really get me. I trust them more. And I always use this analogy of the piggy bank that you're putting...

coins in in all of those interactions when you're showing up in a way that's really supportive of the person whether they're internal or external so I really love what you're what you're sharing there aligns with my beliefs completely yeah yeah trust is trust is everything in business I agree with you you know trust with your customer trust with your employees you know trusting your partners to help you deliver um that's why that's why making sure all of those things are

right is so important. And on that point, I saw on your website that your brand vision is to be the most human centered appliance brand in the world. I'd love to understand. I mean, you've shared a lot in terms of how that comes to life. But what else is there that you haven't shared around really bringing that vision to life?

Look, at the core of what that means is we've really put the user at the center of everything. And look, if we think about our product, it's really about understanding how end users live their life around our product and how does it fit into their life? How does it improve their outcomes? For example, acknowledging that

um during the week life is really fast paced and you need your appliances to to help you get through the week you know that midweek convenience and then on the weekend you need to transform the kitchen it's the heart of the home it's where you're entertaining it's where you're bringing family and friends together and and you know i hear a lot in our organizations about people putting themselves

in the shoes of the end user, of the customer all the time. They're always transporting themselves into our customer's shoes and just thinking about, you know, what it's like to be one of our own customers. And, you know, that is a philosophy that not only is in product but I see it everywhere in our business. That's really awesome. Yeah.

Do you have any company practices around putting yourself in the customer's shoes? Like, how do you actually do that? Look, I think it's just ingrained in our culture. And it's, it's, there's no specific practice other than we speak about it a lot. And, and it's really deeply ingrained in, in who we are and what we do.

And I guess... No, no, no, strange. I've seen companies like Amazon, for example, where they leave the empty chair to represent the customer. Nothing exciting like that. But I will say, in the type of product that you're selling, everybody uses a stove, right? Probably. Some people may not be cooks, but these home appliances are things that

all of your employees, I imagine, do use at some point in their day so they can put themselves in their shoes. And we do it together. And we do it together in our offices. You know, if you come to any of our, most of our offices around the world, you will see a central kitchen where people come together and they share moments together around our product, but together as people. So, you know, maybe that is a practice, but again, it's just part of who we are and what we do. Yeah, completely. Yeah.

And what about, you know, as you're understanding your customer, how do you bring that into the innovation process? You've developed absolutely stunning products that are top of the line. How do you consistently, you know, take customer insights and then apply them into the actual products that you're building? Yeah.

You know, we collect so many sources of feedback and information from our customers and some of them are, you know, non-structured where we're, you know, we're doing focus groups and workshops with customers and understanding, you know, how they use products. But also through all of our touch points with the consumer, we get so much feedback and data and we also, of course, get product usage data which influences, you know, how we design and build products in the future.

But, you know, from things like, you know, feedback from a customer review or feedback from a service experience or from an NPS survey or a review on our website, you know, there is so many touch points that we're collecting those insights and using that to influence how and what we do. Mm-hmm.

How are you processing that data? Because it sounds like you've got a lot of feedback, which is awesome. But then how do you actually make use of it?

Yeah, Ken, I think the way we use it is it's embedded in our processes. Now, let me use a service example, actually. You know, our service team who are designing, you know, service experiences have multiple touch points with the customers from SMS surveys through to an NPS survey through to product reviews. And, you know, they've got dashboards and some, you know,

great tools to give them that insight in a more distilled way so they can use that to decide where they need to focus on, where to improve their experience with the customer or their journey with the customer. And that's, you know, for them, that is a weekly, daily, weekly, monthly ritual for them where they're scouring through that rich feedback through the tools and dashboards that we built for them. There is a little bit of machine learning involved

juice in there to help them along. But trying to get those insights and then they're using that to really connect with their customers and then change what they're doing. And that's really the power of gathering feedback. You need to understand what it is that is paining or what are the pain points of your customer and then have a relentless focus on fixing it.

Absolutely. So congratulations. That's an awesome, awesome improvement. Yeah, Mark and the team have done a fantastic job. I have to give him a shout out. He's the, him and the team are doing great work. I mean, customer service is probably, yeah, I'm biased because, you know, I've spent a lot of time in that part of the business, but it's, it's, it's really difficult. And, um,

And they are often the window into a lot of organizations and they deserve more credit, I think, than what they get from everywhere. For sure. It is something that is so common in businesses where the customer service team is...

not necessarily the, they're not like the sales team that's bringing in the revenue and no, no, no. But the customer service team is really the team that is keeping the relationship with the customer alive. And I totally agree with you. And I say this to every single person who's listening. If you have a customer service team, which I'm sure you do, and I give them credit for the work that they are doing and the work

relationship that they're building with your customer. They are critical. They're critical to that company and customer connection. And I think it's, it's all too often that we don't give them enough credit for the work that they're doing. So I'm really glad to hear you, you calling out the team. I agree with you a hundred percent. So when it comes to team culture, like you just said, this team, especially the team that is servicing the customer post-sale, um,

They deal with a lot of tricky things. Look, I think there's a lot of different things that we do to support that. You know, in my time when I was in service, giving the frontline autonomy to be able to serve the customer is really important. And trying to remove as many kind of – checkpoints is not the right term there –

Giving them as much decision, decisioning power as practical is really important because then you can get one and done. And I think that's important in service in general is empowerment of the service team to be able to do that.

Now, I know that's hard in industries with high regulation, but you've just got to do your best to put the tools and the information in the agent's hand or the people at the front line's hand so that they can try and resolve things first time. And I think that's an important part of culture. The other part, the really important part is having a really clear vision and a really clear purpose of why we exist.

That's very important. Why are we here? Why are we doing what we do? Why is that important? And making sure that everybody understands that. And then, of course, you really need to understand whether that's resonating or not. Do all the people in your organization connect with that? Because if they connect with it, they live it out. And

And so making sure that you understand whether people have connected with that. And then, look, the other thing that, you know, considering I think a lot of the people that might listen to this are interested in technology, I also really believe that, you know, if we make the employee experience better, both culturally but also how they do the work, there's a really much better chance that they're going to deliver a better customer experience as well.

And a lot of, you know, we spoke earlier about, you know, the centralising of data, but also for our centralising of process and the way they do their work into a single pane of glass.

So that we can at least, you know, take the pain that we're in, you know, that we can control out of their life so that their jobs are more enjoyable and they can focus more on supporting the customer rather than navigating 14 different service screens, for example, or system screens. And then, you know, there's specialities around navigating these tools rather than doing the important work for the customer. Yep.

Come. Completely. Completely. It is so, so important. We cannot create a seamless customer experience without doing the same for our team. It is paramount. And I hear that so much on this podcast. It's one of the things that has been the most pleasant surprise in interviewing leaders like yourself, where this comes up time and time again. And I really just want to underscore the importance of focusing on your team and

as you're also thinking about your customer because you can't just have a great customer experience without having a great employee experience. Yeah. Look, just an old methodology that's been around for a long time around people, process, and technology. You can use that in customer service transformation. And I often see service leaders when I'm out talking to my peers and that's really focusing too much on the technology

Actually, you know, where the rubber hits the ground is people and process. And I use the term process. When I mean process, I mean service design, service experience in the context of customer service. There's so much value to be gotten out of empowering your team, leading your team well, and then having a great, you know, well-designed service experience. I mean, you can get success.

70 80 of the way there where the technology can really help you is make it scale and streamlined and fast and provide self-service for your customer but it's not the only tool that a service leader has in its toolkit i think it's really important to remember that as much as i'm an advocate for automation and technology actually there's so much value to be extracted out of

really, really great leadership and leading people well, as well as great service design and understanding your customer and what they need from you and making sure that you're building how you operate around your customer, not around your own internal processes.

Yes. So, so true. And I actually want to come back to something that you had spoken to earlier, which is about employee empowerment. And when it comes to people and process, that's where it really matters because you can have perfect automation and an amazing tool and suite of tools that enable your team to do things well and quickly and scalable. But if they have to go through, for example,

five layers of approvals in order to give the customer a refund on something, it's still going to slow them down. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about your philosophy on employee empowerment and how that actually takes shape at Fisher & Paykel. Yeah. Look, I just want to be clear. We don't have it right every single time. And that will happen. You know, it just happens organically and sometimes by accident as you're moving really quickly in a business.

But, you know, one of the things that our team focuses on is you've got operational metrics that usually give you a sign as to whether you've got this right or wrong. So, for example, if you're moving chats and calls between people

internal departments that's usually a sign that you've got some of this happening in in your contact center or in your service in your service center and i know our team focuses greatly on making sure that the handoffs between our teams is minimized and reduced so they're always listening and looking out for those things and making sure that they're they're where it's appropriate to to

put the power back in the person who's looking after the customer's hands. Now, you can't do that all the time, as you know. And I know, you know, when I talk to people from other industries like the banking industries where you have to have things like segregation of duties, it's, you know, it is more difficult. And I acknowledge that. But it's about minimising it and then when it happens, about making sure that you make it as least impactful on the customer as you possibly can. Mm-hmm.

Always thinking about what is the impact on the customer. I think it's kind of going back to the technology that you just referenced. It can be really tempting for us to think about, well, what's the fastest, easiest, most scalable way for us to do it? And we're not thinking about the cost to the customer.

per se, right? Like it may be better to have those, that segregation of duties and many different experts who deal with like one specific thing. But if the customer has to then speak to five different people and tell them their story over and over again, they're probably going to be really upset with you. So let's try to avoid that. What about

What about when it comes to tracking your KPIs? What are some of the key metrics that you're really using to track success of your customer experience? There's layers of KPIs and metrics that I believe that you should look at. And of course, you want to start off with the voice of the customer. And things like NPS are really critical just to see whether your overall proposition is accurate.

is coming to life. And, you know, NPS is all encompassing. It's not just your service experience. It's also your product experience and your end-to-end brand experience. That's a really important touch point with your customer.

Then you've got other touch points where you can seek feedback along the way, things like customer satisfaction or effort metrics, which we absolutely use just to see, are you making it as easy as possible for the customer when you're interacting with them? And then when you come down below that, you've also got, like I mentioned before, operational metrics.

operational metrics, which are really important just to give you a little bit of a lead and lag indicator of whether you're on the right track or not. So those operational metrics like are you transferring calls, are you getting to interactions fast enough, and those type of things are really also important just to see how you're going in the moment, but they shouldn't be relied on exclusively. You've got to use them with your customer insights as well.

And then, you know, we, a lot of companies invested a lot of time in self-service and actually measuring whether those things work is really important too. And whether you're getting deflection rate. There is an overwhelming amount of opportunity in the AI space and it's super exciting, but also how do we actually, you know, find what works for our business and implement the right thing. It's a big challenge. There's a lot of challenges.

There's a lot of challenges, Lauren, around building in the right guardrails, protecting your data, protecting your customer data. We spoke about trust before. You know, we focus highly on protecting our customer data. And I'm going to be very careful around how we bring generative AI into our organization to continue to protect our customers' information. So there's some challenges there for enterprises that we have to, you know, that we have to think about. But

We can overcome those. They're exciting challenges and I think the opportunities are plentiful.

Yeah. And it's, we have to be thinking about what are our values as we're implementing this technology? What are the things, like you said, in your case, you know, that like having that trust, having that privacy is really important to you. You've mentioned it multiple times. It's very clear. It's something that you're thinking about often. And I think that's something that's really important for any company that's starting to implement AI. What are the values of the company that we really need to uphold as we implement this technology? Because it's,

It's different than what we've done before and it is a bit of a snowball. My last question here is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? I think I touched on a little bit before, which is don't obsess about technology. And what I mean by that is don't let that be the only tool in your toolkit because

because there's so much value in fantastic leadership, a really clear vision of what you want to achieve and great service design to understanding your customers, how they interact with you, what they need from you, what are the jobs that need to be done because there's so much value to be extracted in those areas. And then...

And doing a really good job in those areas means that when you apply the technology, you do it in a way that's aligned to your people strategy, how you want to work, as well as how your customers interact with you as well. And like I said before, I see people just go, I need this tool to solve my customer experience problem or my service problem or whatever.

you know, my digital touchpoint, but actually understanding the customer is really, really critical. I could not agree more.

Well, Rudy, thank you so much for sharing your wealth of knowledge. Really appreciate you coming on the show. And for those of you listening, if you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on wherever you listen to your podcasts and leave us a review. We would love to hear how you've been enjoying the episodes. So thank you, Rudy, again, and I'm sure we'll speak to you soon.

We are clearly in an AI revolution. And thankfully, Salesforce is helping customers navigate each new wave of AI. But the question is, how do you actually use AI effectively? And my answer to you is, it starts with your data.

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