Oliver Bendzsa - Export Development Canada
I’m very pleased to see that this year’s conference is making the split between B2B and B2C, allowing us more time to focus on the unique challenges we face in a B2B environment.
Oliver’s case study of a governmental financial services organization certainly resonates in today’s context of low confidence in the efficiency of many of those institutions. EDC is Canada’s credit agency dedicated to helping exporters and investors develop their overseas business. What’s unique about EDC in their domain is that they operate on commercial principles. Highlighting how advocacy has driving growth during EDC’s journey towards ‘Customer Centricity’.
Oliver commented on the key benefits from their program:
- constructive feedback has allowed them drive diversification of their portfolio and broaden their offer
- they’ve been able to validate that customers are repurchasing more and buying more of their wider portfolio
- they’ve seen a strong boost in customer referrals. Previously 20%, the referral rate has now reached 50% allowing EDC now to be more selective and effective in their marketing efforts
- employees love working with Promoters. Employee moral has grown sharply, attrition rate is down and EDC is now consistently one of the top 100 employers in Canada.
Likening it to snowball effect where employee engagement has grown rapidly, EDC found that putting the information in the hands of employees plus liking it to employee compensation has strongly supported their engagement. However, Oliver cautioned that the link with compensation can in some cases push people to focus too much on the validity of the measure and not enough on the actions.
Looking at the main action areas we heard about several key initiatives at EDC that has resulted in a progressive growth of ~ +40 points during the 3 years since launching the program:
- speed was identified as a key driver for the exporters; being able to get a fast answer from EDC is critical for their ability to catch market opportunities. Adoption of ‘Lean’ methods helped to optimize EDC processes and remove the ‘wasted space’.
- multiple legacy systems often obscured the real customer picture causing inefficiency and inconsistency in following-up the feedback. Oliver highlighted that ‘cleaning’ the customer database has to be a priority so that you can be clear on who you are talking with. A dedicated project to implement unified CRM helped EDC a lot there.
- recognizing that EDC’s initial sample approach wasn’t working (250 accounts but only 25 responded) Oliver migrated to a census approach guaranteed a more representative picture that could really be used to drive the right actions.
Oliver ended on a very interesting note. We heard from him that closing the loop means more than calling back detractors (which they do, of course). It also means thanking customers for taking the time to give their feedback. Oliver ran a short video message, prepared by EDC’s senior leaders, that will be shared shortly with their customers. It seemed a great way to demonstrate the sincerity of the company to really act on their customer’s valuable feedback.
