1. 36 July/August 2013 | APICS magazine 26 September/October 2012 | APICS magazine
Business leaders must identify new and creative ways to maintain and advance customer bases in this
exceedingly competitive marketplace. As always, this challenge is compounded by pressure to reduce
costs without compromising quality or service levels. An effective approach to the total customer experi-
ence can enable supply chain and operations management professionals to deliver sustainable value to
their consumers and organizations.
The new ultimate supply chain experience
It’s All About the Customer
By Elizabeth Rennie

2. APICS magazine | July/August 2013 37APICS magazine | September/October 2012 27
Customer experience management encompasses a strong
and consistent brand, smart marketing and sales tactics, cost-
optimizing technologies, a fully integrated supply chain, mobile
and social media, and much more. It is no longer sufficient for
organizations to be efficient and transparent; they now must be
great listeners, intuitive, responsive, and always flexible.
The Forrester Research report “2013 Customer Experience
Predictions” by Kerry Bodine and Ron Rogowski says mar-
ket forces have “catapulted the field of customer experience
into strategic stature.” Yet, the authors admit that it will be
years before customer experience is rooted as sturdily as more
mature business disciplines such as finance, human resources,
and information technology (IT). They write, “The customer
experience industry will be characterized by efforts that range
wildly from systematic change initiatives to desperate shortcuts
… While many firms have been working diligently to improve
their customer experience for years, still
others remain woefully in the dark.”
ACCO Brands, a supplier of office
and consumer products including At-a-
Glance, Day-Timer, and Swingline, is
one company that recognizes the impor-
tance of customer experience manage-
ment as a business discipline. “Our goal
isn’t to sell a customer a product; it’s to
secure a customer for life,” says Lissa
Cupp, vice president of e-commerce
and consumer marketing. “Anyone can
sell in a one-and-done situation … You
may make a quick buck. But without a
true experience by the customer, you
lose future profitability—not to mention
potential product and company advo-
cates and loyal supporters.”
Cupp leads ACCO’s direct-to-
consumer business. “Our planning and
organizing products are very personal,”
she says. “For that reason, we help
customers find the right set of tools for
them. This includes our expertise in how
people do short- and long-term plan-
ning; scheduling; note-taking; and, more
recently, interfacing technology with their
planning, including smartphones and
tablets.”
To achieve these goals, ACCO uses
some traditional tactics—focus groups,
surveys, and customer service call
evaluations—and some more innovative
approaches. “We perform ‘shop-alongs’
during the back-to-school season to
get hands-on, live feedback and input
on our customers’ buying experiences,”
Cupp says, adding, “The voice of the
customer should drive any business, and
we’re no different.”
A wide variety of analytics tools evaluate
sales fluctuations in ACCO’s very cyclical
business, monitor response rates to promotional emails, and the
like. In addition, the company employs a team of analysts who
specialize in long-range business forecasting and identifying spe-
cific trends on which ACCO can capitalize by stocking allotted
shelf space with the right products. Cupp says product reviews
play heavily in determining how to enhance the customer experi-
ence. “During every touch point with the customer, you should
be taking the opportunity presented to you and get customer
feedback, both positive and negative,” Cupp explains.
Know the score
Carlos Herrera is global customer loyalty leader for Life
Technologies, a biotechnology tools company. Like ACCO, Life
Technologies has been striving toward exceptional customer
experiences for quite some time through a program called
the net promoter score. Herrera and his team engineered this

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system for communicating with more than 75,000 customers
to ensure they are satisfied with Life Technologies’ products
and services. “We interpret thousands of comments every day,”
Hererra explains. “These connections allow us to build a blue-
print to a better customer experience.”
Calculating a company’s net promoter score is simple. First,
take the percentage of people who are “extremely likely” to rec-
ommend your company—those who answer the basic question
“How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a
friend or colleague?” with a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale. These
are the company’s promoters. From that number, subtract the
percentage of customers who answer with a 0 through 6. This
group is known as detractors.
For example, at Life Technologies, cross-functional teams
formed by IT, inventory planning, operations, and customer
care have addressed customer dissatisfaction with back orders
in two ways: by improving internal processes to reduce short-
ages in commonly ordered products and by finding ways to
communicate with customers about when they can expect their
orders to be filled. Herrera says changes like these, rooted in
customer feedback, are fundamental to increasing net promoter
scores and driving growth.
Company initiatives at Life Technologies are closely related
to this feedback and are prioritized based on the likelihood of a
customer recommendation. Feedback management tools help
the business consolidate voice-of-the-customer information
and achieve real-time and on-demand reporting.
The Forrester report adds, “Companies often start their
journeys to better customer experience [by] integrating net
promoter scores into a more comprehensive measurement
framework. Many firms have gained proficiency in these areas
and are ready to tackle their next big challenges.”
It’s interesting to note that even employees who don’t interact
directly with customers can help improve net promoter scores.
For instance, say an employee has a particularly good experi-
ence with her telephone company. She can share details about
what that business did right with the customer group at her own
organization. Sharing these experiences may help spark new
ideas for how the business can satisfy its own customers. “You
can share ideas on how to improve internal processes to make
them more lean and efficient, which has an impact on customer
interactions with the company,” Herrera says.
Calculating net promoter scores also helps Herrera and his
colleagues better understand customer loyalty levels and where
Life Technologies stands compared to competitors. The score
tends to correlate positively with revenue, as well. “Good things
happen when customers are loyal,” Herrera says. “This is not a
numbers game; it is about people and relationship building … and
the best measure of loyalty is increased revenue. So ask yourself what
gaps may exist if your top line is not consistent with loyalty metrics.”
Take a fresh approach
The very basic foundation of customer experience manage-
ment is this: Greater satisfaction results in customer loyalty and
higher revenues. “The goal of all business is to make money.
Loyal customers result in repeat business,” says Subhrojyoti
Mukherjee, vice president of loyalty, enterprise marketing man-
agement, for Customer Centria and director of germination
management services at Germination Technology Services—
both of which are customer engagement and experience solu-
tion providers with offices in Mumbai.
Mukherjee believes feeding “rich” data to team members is
crucial, whether that information is about product engineering,
brand positioning, target segment analysis, or another process.
His companies use analytics, data mining, and measurement of
various customer engagement programs to get products to the
appropriate customer segment. “Once the right product and
right customer
segment are
mapped, a
campaign
management
suite [is used
to] reduce
the cycle time,” he says. Campaign management can identify
the 20 percent of customers responsible for 80 percent of the
business—an example of Pareto’s law—making it possible to
generate ever higher demand levels and present specific offers
to customers with similar consumption patterns.
“Supply chain management ensures … satisfaction to the
customers, internal and external,” Mukherjee says. “However,
the delivery of the right experience is possible only if there is
integration with [customer relationship management] (CRM)
supplying input to the supply side value chain.”
Experts say an integrated system makes customer centricity
significantly easier for employees to achieve. Benefits include
• cost savings through improved productivity, fewer data
errors, uncovering new cross-sell opportunities, and faster
resolution of customer issues
• revenue growth driven by clearer understanding of cus-
tomer buying patterns
• improved efficiency of strategic processes, which provides a
platform for winning, keeping, and developing customers
• giving staff access to information that helps them perform
better
• faster response to customer inquiries
• enhanced management of the sales pipeline
• more targeted marketing campaigns
• improved customer communication and longer-lasting
relationships.
In short, customer experience is a function of all the
activities performed by each part of the value chain. “It is an
outcome,” Mukherjee says. “If the experience with a product or
service is greater than expected or perceived, then experience
equals delight. Delight results in customer retention and higher
lifetime value.”
Mukherjee also cautions that loyalty programs often fall flat
due to lack of integration. He offers the example of Company X,
“This is not a numbers game; it is about
people and relationship building.”

4. APICS magazine | July/August 2013 39APICS magazine | September/October 2012 29
a Fortune 500 conglomerate in India. One of the most trusted
brands in the nation, it deals in consumer goods, both durable
and fast-moving. It sells its products across 26 states in India.
“In these days of stagnating and saturated consumer demand,
as well as clutter in the market with cheap and localized ‘me too’
brands, supply side efficiency is key to sustaining operating
margin,” Mukherjee explains. He and his colleagues worked
with Company X to create two pioneering projects. They first
created a fantasy cricket league to engage customers. In three
months, they reached 1 million registered users and collected
demographic, psychographic, and consumption habits.
“We could segment customer statistical analysis, such as
association and correlation, based on parameters like geo-
graphical location, zip code, age, responsiveness to various
communication and sensory inputs … consumption habits,
and shopping destinations,” he says. For each segment, his
team arrived at a “market basket”—a modeling technique
based on the idea that, if you purchase certain items, you are
more (or less) likely to purchase certain other items. Then,
it became possible to create segments and predict market
baskets for different locations’ particular customer archetypes
(needs, wants, and aspirations).
Mukherjee adds that, in India, each state is quite distinct
in its culture, preferences, habits, and lifestyles. However, the
data—after being fed to supply chain and CRM systems—
brought about greater responsiveness to these differences. The
end results included improved operational efficiency, faster
turns, and reduced marketing dollars.
The second part of the customer experience initiative with
Company X involved creating a three-dimensional, virtual
world similar to Second Life. The design and activities of the
initiative’s eight regions were based on psychographic charac-
teristics, with the customer archetype mapped to match. “The
look, feel, and activities were developed for those archetypes,”
Mukherjee explains. “We measured consumer behavior based
on interactions with these regions. Products with brand per-
sonalities also were mapped to these regions. Thus, a synergy
was established between product-customer archetype behav-
iors and attitude toward the products.”
This was no doubt a fascinating take on customer experi-
ence management—and certainly something to be considered.
At the same time, however, the Forrester report warns against
“prioritizing big data over big insights.” The authors say they
expect to see analytically driven organizations become “abso-
lutely mesmerized by the potential of … information—and go
overboard in their efforts to catch up in the area of customer
understanding.”
The potential danger is in spending enormous amounts of
time and money stockpiling new data sources and not enough
effort determining what to do with it. Firms that are predis-
posed to quantitative inputs may neglect research methods
such as observation and one-on-one interviews and thus
miss out on essential qualitative findings. Still, the authors do
encourage taking a new look at things: “Invest in people and
new methodologies,” they say. “The same employees doing the
same things they’ve done for years will not miraculously lift
your organization out of the customer experience doldrums.”
Listen smart
Without a clear listening strategy, valuable feedback very quickly
can become noise. Thus, Herrera says, more than selecting the
type of feedback on which to focus, the real measure should
be the effectiveness of the listening strategy. This includes how
to capture information from customers in different channels,
prioritize the responses, and take appropriate action.
Clare Cummins, manager of product management at Sage, a
CRM cloud software provider, agrees, noting that “listening in”
offers a chance to improve customer relationships when things
go wrong. “By tuning in to all the relevant conversations, the
chances of finding unhappy customers quickly and address-
ing their issues before they do serious damage to a brand are
dramatically improved.”
She finds that Sage customers and prospects have a renewed
interest in the various needs and wants of customers. They
are embracing modern methods such as social media, email
marketing, and reporting and analytics. “Without social media
interaction, a business can only know about the conversations
[it has] had directly with customers. What happens when those
customers talk about the business in other forums?”
Manage the experience
As customer experience professionals scrutinize processes
and operations, they likely will realize that these initiatives
pivot on corporate culture and employee engagement. “It’s a
natural and desired outcome for employees to learn the ins
and outs of your products and their true customer benefits,”
Cupp says. “However, just because you know all of this
detailed information, you must always remember that most
customers do not.”
She advocates asking your employees to put themselves in
customers’ shoes in order to become fully educated on your
products and services and their true benefits. Customers will
truly appreciate it and, most likely, become your best product
advocates. “The pivotal catalyst to improving the customer expe-
rience is people,” Herrera says. “Yes, tools help measure, direct
workflow, communicate … However, if teams are not engaged in
serving customers, all this infrastructure is of little value.”
He adds that organizations must promote diversity of
thought and weave it deeply into the company culture. This
creates a vibrant, powerful mix of talent, backgrounds, and
ideas. Still, Herrera maintains that the process starts and ends
with the customer: “To be acknowledged makes people feel
important, valuable, and recognized. And this is exactly what
our customers deserve.”
Elizabeth Rennie is managing editor for APICS magazine. She may
be contacted at editorial@apics.org.
To comment on this article, send a message to feedback@apics.org.
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