0:00:01 - Alex
And you have that and it'll clap, and when I clap that means we're started. So you accepted the recording. All good, all right. Welcome to another episode of Experience Focus Leaders. Today, I'm very excited to introduce you to Gail Terry, who is the CMO and president of Domestic and Generals US Business. Domestic in general is one of the leading appliance care providers worldwide with over 100 year-long history and over 3,000 employees. Welcome to the pod, gail.
0:00:47 - Gayle
Thank you so much. Great to be here.
0:00:50 - Alex
Fantastic. Well, I'm experiencing a little bit of a connection issue, but hopefully this will not persist. Gail, one of the very special things that I love about your background is that you are a marketer for a recent part of your career, but you've kind of started in the general management. You are a general manager now and you care about employee experience as well as just the customer and marketing experience around marketing content. So tell us a little bit about what's the special sauce and how did you get into the marketing given where you didn't start out being a marketer as your first career move?
0:01:37 - Gayle
Sure, interestingly, I've worked in a few glamorous industries waste, energy and financial services. So you think how do you go from those three industries to kind of being incredibly passionate about customer experience and marketing experience? And actually that is the key theme that runs through each of the industries that I have worked in, industries which never necessarily put the customer at the front and center of what they did and needed to make some changes to start to engage with and create high touch, loyal customer experiences. And I guess my role in that has developed over time. So started off very much in operational roles, so running contact centers, running kind of engineered field force, which you really get to see firsthand in those roles what the customer interactions are, what our employees need to make those experiences better and what customers need and what they get upset about and what they're looking for, what their expectations are.
So I guess it kind of started off looking after operational functions and then I moved through a few different roles, looked after customer retention in a previous company and then I started to move into more product development and I do think product development really is a bit of a manager, general manager role. So you are concerned and interested in all of the factors that contribute to a great customer outcome profitability, and that's where I guess I started to get quite interested in both the breadth and depth of business. Really. From that I took the kind of out of product into more marketing and specialism and I've been doing that for the last, I'd say, kind of five to 10 years.
0:03:38 - Alex
So it sounds like the secret to your success is that you're able to connect the dots to what the real customer is experiencing. You've been there in the trenches. You're not sitting in some sort of ivory tower drinking up or drinking champagne and thinking big strategy. You can connect it to the customer experience how to engage the employees that are delivering that customer experience and oftentimes they're the touch points, especially in DNG. I would imagine that's critical, and so this feels really relevant and maybe let's connect it back to DNG, because I could add love.
First of all, that it's such a relevant and that it's a 100-year-old brand, like I think one of the goals for our relatively young startup, compared to you, is that we've got to think 100 years like what's going to happen. So here you are, a steward of a 100-year-old brand, but that's still highly relevant, because when it comes to all the appliances that we have in our home, I'm a total ninkum poop and I'm not a superstar, so I could have imagined you would could have helped me save the day and keep things running in the house when things go wrong. So this is a lot of trust in that brand, right, a lot of responsibility, both in terms of what you actually deliver and then certainly 100-year brand Like how do you combine that with innovation and trying new things and stay current.
0:05:18 - Gayle
It's such an interesting story. I certainly think it is Domestic in general started out, as you say, over 100 years ago ensuring cattle and sheep right. So not long after the Titanic went down there was a need all of a sudden right to have protection and insurance on your livestock and we started there over in Australia and we have, for a big and, some might think, traditional business, have actually been pretty creative. We've pivoted a number of times in terms of the core of our businesses about providing solutions, protection and insurance. But we have done that on different things over that 100-year history and certainly in the last kind of 20, 30 years we've really doubled down and specialized in appliances and consumer electronics and I guess we're quite different to insurance in some respects in that we don't care just about accepting a claim and settling a claim.
Really, what we want to do is put ourselves right at the center ofmake surand when that moment of truth around. Something's broken down, your washing machine is pouring water over the floor. How do we get out to make sure that customer gets the solution that they need as quickly as possible and get them back up and running? So we are very much focused on how do we get our experiences that are meaningful and I guess one of the other things which has changed a lot in the insurance sector certainly is, I don't know, go back a few decades much of the insurance industry was based on you have some sort of a policy and actually it was somewhat beneficial to companies that you didn't claim, so they were not looking for that high-touch interaction with customers.
0:07:14 - Alex
So you buy something and then forget it and hopefully it will be subscribed again.
0:07:18 - Gayle
Your home insurance. Hopefully, you'll never have to make a claim. So we think very differently, actually, and one of the things that we have launched in recent years is more of a subscription protection pay as you go. You're covered for as long as you have a policy, and that is quite a high-touch, high-engagement insurance plan, and for us, that's quite important to us because we really want customers to get great value out of our products, but we also want to create really positive experiences around it, and what we find with those subscription customers is they tend to protect other things in their home. So the next kind of looking at is how do you make it super easy for customers to protect all the things that they that are important to them essentially, and you know, maybe you could without providing individual data, obviously.
0:08:09 - Alex
Maybe you have some amazing View as a data-driven marketer and I I know your background is very you know You're not shy away from that at all, so you're. You have this insight of what do people care about? Right, and I think home is such a private place to some degree and Maybe you're forcing sometimes a decision of like, what do I? What's really important, what's really essential to my life? Do you what? What can you tell us about human nature in 2023, you know, versus maybe the past? You know, and you mentioned electronic devices right recently, since you know they weren't around in the cattle cattle times right, like what, what do we?
what do we people, you know, why do we go to you, you know, and where those moments of truth really shine, where you know people are like, oh my god, dale, this thing, you save me, that was nice, but yeah, this, this, this really is. Like you saved our livelihood, right. Like you save our family, like what can tell us about that?
0:09:14 - Gayle
sure it's so, like, I guess, just your point on how does consumer behavior house consumer behavior in 2023 versus before? Well, I tell you it's changed a heck of a lot in the last two years. So with COVID, lots of people moved to working from home.
And a lot of people have stayed working from home, certainly domestic. In general, we operate a kind of everyday flexibility Approach to work, so we have many of our employees at home, and when you're at home, your appliances become even more paramount. Right, you're making your story more food at home, etc. So, and people are pretty reliant on their household appliances, and therefore expectations around getting them back up and running quickly is really important. Thinking about customers, though and you were saying what really matters to them is very interesting.
We're a I'd call us a B2B to C brand, so we're actually, in many cases, white labeling through huge manufacturers and retailers that are household names that you know everyone would know about, whether that's Bosch, miele, wobble on Lewis Argos.
There are many brands that we are offering protection plans through, and actually the customer demographics, by the nature of the brands that we work with, are quite different. So, you know, we have different demographics from the brands that we work with. We have different demographics for one retailer versus another retailer, because they shop for different things or they are interested in different brands, so we do have a very interesting kind of, I'd say, range of customers, and so for us, that makes it even more important to be offering something that is relevant to them and of an interest to them, and so we are constantly investing in data driven marketing and data science and how we understand customers at an individual level rather than a segmented level, and we are we are talking to those people at the right time, event driven, experience driven, to make it offers over to them. I guess that makes sense to them and make their needs.
0:11:30 - Alex
Right, and so it has to be by brand and by their audience specific. That makes a lot of sense. If I'm buying a really premium device, you know one set of expectations versus a low. So I'm not. No, so obviously you know you're a public listed company and you have no no, we're private equity owned company private equity owned. So is that? Is that a recent change? Is it always been?
0:11:58 - Gayle
We haven't always been, but for the last 10 to maybe 15, 15 or so years. We've been private equity owned and you have.
0:12:05 - Alex
But you have that in the capital you have, you must have deft, can the capital market Sorry, that's, that's the computer. So you, you have some, so you, so you still have some. You know demanding owners. You have, you have, and you know. I think the connection point is that you have these what I imagine very large contracts, and so one of the things that I find really fascinating about B2B to see business is that you have to have this, you know, really in you know amazing kind of Consumer grade experience. But then you know that the deal sizes must be very nerve-wracking, right, because losing one contract, you know, you know, or gaining one is a big difference in For their organization. So how do you as a marketer, balance out those two? And then you know, maybe you know, for the, for those folks that are more in the B2B side of the spectrum, doing big deals, what is it that you're doing, bringing that data-driven, another approach into that world that helps your teams?
0:13:06 - Gayle
I think one of the the kind of coolest and most enjoyable things about being in marketing in this particular business is that the marketing team sits right in between the kind of partner or client that we you know contracting with and the customer, and so it's our job to understand what customers needs are, build propositions around about that, build marketing experiences around about that and almost take that to via our client teams to talk to clients about what customers need, how we can service them and how we can deliver great value.
And almost we become the glue between the customer and the and the client and like I mean just thinking of a completely random example but we we really prioritize and champion what we call first-time resolution.
So if an appliance breaks down, for us that one of the most important metrics is that when we send an engineer out, so let's say, like manufacturer a and sends an engineer out, we want that appliance to be fixed first time, and our first time kind of fixed rate, as we call it's a 75%, which is unparalleled in the industry, because we're sending that manufacturer engineer out to the brandy deplines and to try and improve that and stat we actually spent some time with the manufacturers, engineers themselves, so, thinking about the engineer experience, right, what does a day look like for them? What barriers or what challenges do they face with customers when they're going to try and repair something, and what kind of solutions or Propositions could we help to develop, purely focused on that engineer experience, to try and make that better? And I think, learnings from from that and kind of in a previous life, if you get engineers or technicians Like really bought in and on board and try to solve some of their problems and their needs, it just has this you know great kind of through, and then the employees and what have you. So and yeah, I think that's the kind of role that marketing can play in between the client and the customer. We become, you know, quite valuable for a number of reasons and help therefore kind of extend and prolong the life of those, those client contracts.
0:15:33 - Alex
Got it. So I think it's really like again back to that original a-ha of like if you can, if you're not touching as a marketing organization, you're not touching the customer yourself. You better work incredibly hard to create wonderful Experiences for the people who do touch them, so they can focus on the customer and not you know something technical.
0:15:56 - Gayle
Absolutely, and we're. I guess the role that we play is we are being white-labelled, we are creating those brand experiences. So you know, if a manufacturer Sells an appliance through a retailer because they don't sell them direct generally this you go into store, you buy an appliance, manufacturer a, then we will be the the kind of the initial Branded experience for that that customer and we immediately start to keep, I guess, just an interaction, start to build a little bit of, I guess, engagement with the customer for that brand. So the way that we talk to our partners is about creating actual brand experiences.
0:16:42 - Alex
So they create loyalty.
0:16:44 - Gayle
And you know, when that appliance comes to the end of its life, we'll replace it with a new manufacturer, a brand. So you have this kind of cradle to grave cycle.
0:16:54 - Alex
Got it. So really you're an extension for those teams in a way that they think about the world, and so this is interesting, right, these are global brands, or some of them are UK centric but generally global, and you're in 12 geographies. You run one of those, the US, as you could hear from my accent, one that's near and dear to my heart but tell us about kind of supporting that geographic range. Is it that the customers that are pulling you into the new markets were you there already and you know they came to you because you were able to support, provide this global footprint?
0:17:35 - Gayle
Yeah, really interesting. So it was a couple of years ago now. We have always found, like I'm sure, many businesses, the US to be a super interesting marketplace, right, huge economy, huge footprint and huge, you know, households, all of which are very interested in protecting stuff in their house insurance. There's a strong kind of appeal and positive sentiment to covering items and protecting devices and appliances and such like. So it felt, for a number of reasons, a very interesting market.
For us to enter One of our partners, whirlpool, who are headquartered in the US we've worked with them in the UK and continental Europe for over 30 years Felt like a really good fit.
So we, through the relationships that we've got in Europe and the UK, we started to work together with them on a potential opportunity to move there and agreed some exclusivity to move out to the US and start to build a program that met their needs and their business strategy. So we've been doing that with them for about 18 months now, live in some channels and extending to some more channels. It's just been a great experience overall for me on a personal level, starting to learn about some of the customer nuances, some of the client nuances, cultural employee nuances, but overall it's just been. It's been great. It's kind of like having a start up, but with the backing of a business that's the market leader in the UK and that's, for me, a winning combination. I feel hugely supported by the business. It's an important strategic priority for us but we've got this kind of nice start up feel to it where we're on employee number.
Well, we were on employee number 23. We've just acquired another business out there, so we've added another 125 and we're kind of starting to grow and spread our wings and it's great.
0:19:49 - Alex
So how are you changing your approach in your day to day job where you have, you know, 3,000 employees and lots of these amazing brands who you represent, but now you're effectively a start up founder, at least in the US market? Right, it was just one anchor customer, so it's not like you still got a ways to go. How is being in the start up world? That's near and dear a little bit to us. How is that changing how you're running the rest of the business?
0:20:19 - Gayle
Yeah, so I guess a couple of thoughts.
I have got an amazing team, so the marketing team at Domestic in general are brilliant and is a very collaborative business.
Actually, when you kind of stretch across functions, the team here are going to be just fine and they, you know I'm there when they need me but they don't need me so much anymore is what I would say In terms of how to approach a start up about I think maybe 10 or so years ago when I worked at British Gas previous business, I had the opportunity to start the Connected Homes Division in British Gas and I think that was a tiny back then and you might have heard of Hive, the remote heating control thermostat. So that was my baby and essentially me and the team of five kind of kicked that initiative off back in the day at British Gas and within a few years of hard graft it, you know it's now a kind of mainstream technology product with its own brand and who knows what kind of million pounds P&L it's running in its own right. So I very much enjoy and have had some experience in that kind of, you know, the green shoots and the kind of early days of rolling up your sleeves doing a bit of everything.
0:21:42 - Alex
Yeah, that's great. So you really like kind of coming back to the beginning of the conversation about your mix of your careers You're kind of a generalist, right, and then you, you, but that you're running such a you know, successful and now independently successful was out of your health marketing team. You know a lot of people who are starting out, um, or maybe they are the CEO and they need to kind of run a marketing, you know, be more influential in the way the marketing strategy is run across organizations, like they're, like they're wondering, you know I'm busy. You know what are the inspirations areas to learn, like where the good go to resources that you use to, maybe, if I wonder if anything still inspires you or you can recommend to your team, you know, given that that's sort of typically not, uh, some people just grow up and just keep consuming marketing, marketing content, which is, you know, very specialized across different disciplines. You had you had a bit of a jump, right. So how did you manage that?
0:22:47 - Gayle
Um, yeah, I think I don't have a very clever or, you know, unique answer for that.
I would say, I think, kind of, as I've gone through my career, um, I'm very curious and I love to learn and I spend, you know, a lot of my time out of my comfort zone and so, if you can, if you can kind of embrace some of that, it helps.
Um, the key for me is having good people around about you, um, and how you kind of understand who's good, what skills you need. Make sure you recruit people that don't look and kind of behave or have the same experience as yourself, right, because that doesn't get you, that doesn't really get you anywhere if you're surrounded by lots of people that are similar to you, um, and, I think, being very like. For me it's just about being very open and honest, um, and when I don't know a subject matter, I'm going to listen, um, and I'm going to say that I'm not an expert in this space and I kind of would like some help, or I need some experts to kind of help help us as a team kind of progress in that journey. And I've always, I've always found that, you know, success beats success. And when, um, you're surrounded by good people and you're empowering them and giving them their chance to shine.
0:24:11 - Alex
You know we will do and that elevates kind of everyone in the team.
0:24:16 - Gayle
So yeah, there's no like kind of new news there, I'm sure, but but they're the things that I kind of tend to to think about and prioritize when I'm moving into something new.
0:24:27 - Alex
Something new. One of the things on the marketing side that you know I saw that you worked on is kind of reimagining the customer charter, which I'm sure is interesting in a 100 year old organization. And then I also saw you recently kind of had a more of a cultural blueprint work where one phrase in particular really resonated with us as well make the world a better place, one repair at a time. Um, for, for for me, in my tiny world, like we have a phrase of like you know, change, change the world one document at a time. You know so, so, but it's sort of the same thing about like interactions, repair some kind. So you've really thought through and you know, as a marketer I'm sure you you've helped shape that organization wide process. Tell us a little bit about that. How do you, how do you drive this sort of change and innovation in the, in the large organization?
0:25:24 - Gayle
Yeah, I think that, just just picking up first of all on the kind of make the world a better place, one repair at a time, I think our business model is very symbiotic with the sustainability chat like challenge that we all have, right, and I think that businesses can be a force for goods as well as good business if that makes sense.
And so for us, we're in 8, 8, about 8,000 homes every single day repairing stuff, and if we can repair and extend the life of appliances, we're at the moment in the UK alone, we're kind of preventing over 2 million appliances going to landfill, right, so we genuinely think that we are having an impact on on that kind of carbon impact circular economy, and so that's quite important to us. And it's not manufactured right, this isn't a manufacturer story, it's like a real. This is essentially what we exist to do repair appliances, keep working longer. And then when you start to kind of listen to employees, whether it's attracting new employees, retaining employees, people want to work for a purpose-led business, right, and you know, warranty or insurance might not have that same appeal like until you kind of scratch a little bit on the surface and then you find out actually there's some interesting themes here and there's some good that we can do.
So for me, kind of, I guess how we approach that whole process and we're currently kind of going back through a bit of a brand strategy exercise is to engage people, all audiences employees, customers, partners, investors. Like it's really important to kind of listen to people, understand what they think, what should we stand for, what should we stand against, what drives and motivates them? The difficult bit is trying to get one like one golden theme, because people have lots of different views and opinions. But we certainly engage people and we try to create advocates. So right now, some of the brand work that we're doing, we're actually going to be pulling together a group of brand advocates to then help kind of create the message and, I guess, embody the message, drive the message, share the message.
0:27:48 - Alex
So yeah, Well, one thing I'm confident about as we wrap up this half hour is that the future of a hundred-year-old brand is in safe hands with you, gail. This is really amazing to see the energy, the openness to new ideas, the broad range of skill sets that you're bringing in, and I think, hopefully you've challenged the general managers to be better at thinking about customer experiences and really owning it and vice versa, helping CMOs everywhere to think a lot more like a general manager and how do they create a holistic, interconnected journey for the customer. So thank you so much for joining us. This has been fun.
0:28:32 - Gayle
No, it's been great. Thanks so much, see you.