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 years of history and over 3,000 employees. Welcome to the pod, Gayle.
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. Gayle, one of the very special things that I love about your background is that you have been a marketer for a recent part of your career, but you've kind of started in 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 you got into marketing, 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 being incredibly passionate about customer and marketing experience? 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 very much in operational roles, running contact centers and engineered field force, which you really get to see firsthand in those roles is what the customer interactions are, what our employees need to make those experiences better, what customers need, what they get upset about, what they're looking for and what their expectations are.
So I guess it started off looking after operational functions and then I moved through a few different roles. I looked after customer retention in a previous company and then started to move into more product development. I do think product development really is a bit of a general manager role. So you are concerned and interested in all of the factors that contribute to a great customer outcome profitability. 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 out-of-product into more marketing and specialism. 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 who are delivering that customer experience. 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, it's such a relevant and 100-year-old brand. I think one of the goals for our relatively young startup, compared to you, is that we've got to think about what's going to happen in 100 years. 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 have helped me save the day and keep things running in the house when things go wrong. 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. How do you combine that with innovation, try 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 rights. 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. 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 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. I guess we're quite different from insurance in some respects 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 of making sure 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 we get our experiences that are meaningful, and I guess one of the other things that 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, 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. What we find with those subscription customers is they tend to protect other things in their homes. 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 views as a data-driven marketer and I know your background. You're not shy away from that at all. Do you have this insight of what people care about? 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? What can you tell us about human nature in 2023 versus maybe the past? And you mentioned electronic devices recently, since you know they weren't around in the cattle times right?
What do we people go to you and where do those moments of truth really shine? Where you know people are like, oh my god, Gayle, this thing, you save me, that was nice. Like you saved our livelihood. Like you save our family. 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 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 work from home.
And a lot of people have stayed working from home, certainly domestic. In general, we operate an 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. You're making your story more food at home, etc. So people are pretty reliant on their household appliances, and therefore expectations around getting them back up and running quickly are really important. Thinking about customers, though and you were saying what really matters to them is very interesting.
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 one because they shop for different things or they are interested in different brands, so we do have a very interesting range of customers. For us, that makes it even more important to be offering something that is relevant and of 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 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 makes 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. You're a publicly listed company and we're a private equity-owned company. So is that a recent change? Has it always been?
0:11:58 - Gayle
We haven't always been but for the last 10 to maybe 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 must have deft. You know demanding owners. 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 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 or gaining one is a big difference for their organization. So how do you as a marketer, balance out those two? And then 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 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 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 client. 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, one of the most important metrics is that when we send a manufacturer and an engineer out, we want that appliance to be fixed the first time. Our first time kind of fixed rate, as we call it 75%, which is unparalleled in the industry because we're sending that manufacturer to engineer out to the brandy declines, and to try, improve that and stat we actually spent some time with the manufacturers, engineers themselves. So thinking about the engineer experience, what does a day look like for them? What barriers or challenges do they face with customers when trying and repairing something? 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 that 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 I think that's the role marketing can play between the client and the customer. We become quite valuable for a number of reasons and help, therefore, extend and prolong the life of those client contracts.
0:15:33 - Alex
Got it. So I think it's really like again, back to that original. 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 something technical.
0:15:56 - Gayle
Absolutely, and we're. I guess the role that we play is we are being white-labeled, we are creating those brand experiences. So you know, if a manufacturer sells an appliance through a retailer because they don't sell them directly. This, you go into a store, you buy an appliance, manufacturer, then we will be the kind of the initial branded experience for that customer and we immediately start to keep, I guess, just an interaction, start to build a little bit of 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 can 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 where you are there already and you know they came to you because you were able to support, and 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, in the US to be a super interesting marketplace, huge economy, huge footprint, and huge households, all of which are very interested in protecting stuff in their house insurance. There's a strong appeal and positive sentiment to covering items and protecting devices and appliances. So for a number of reasons, it's 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, and felt like a really good fit.
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 on some exclusivity to move out to the US and then start to build a program that met their needs and their business strategy. 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, the client nuances, and cultural employee nuances, but overall it's just 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 for me that's 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 starting to grow and spread our wings and it's great.
0:19:49 - Alex
How are you changing your approach in your day-to-day job where you have 3,000 employees and lots of these amazing brands that 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 get 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 & General is brilliant and is a very collaborative business.
Actually, when you stretch across functions, the team here is going to be just fine and 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, I think maybe about 10 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. That was my baby and essentially I 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'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 the green shoots and early days of rolling up your sleeves doing a bit of everything.
0:21:42 - Alex
Yeah, that's great. You really like coming back to the beginning of the conversation about the mix of your careers. You're a generalist, right? And you're running such a successful, independent, healthy marketing team. A lot of people who are the CEO and they need to run a marketing. They want to be more influential in the way the marketing strategy is run across organizations. They're busy and wondering what are the inspiration areas to learn. Where are the good go-to resources that still inspire you or you can recommend to your team, given that sort of typically? Some people just grow up and keep consuming marketing content that is very specialized across different disciplines. 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 unique answer for that.
I would say, I think as I've gone through my career, I'm very curious and I love to learn. I spend a lot of my time out of my comfort zone. If you can embrace some of that, it will help.
The key for me is having good people around you, how you understand who's good, and what skills you need. Make sure you recruit people that don't look and behave or have the same experience as yourself because that really doesn't get you anywhere if you're surrounded by lots of people who are similar to you. For me, it's just about being very open and honest. When I don't know a subject matter, I'm going to listen and say that I'm not an expert in this space. I would like some help, or I need some experts to help our team progress in that journey. And I've always found that success beats success. When you're surrounded by good people, you're empowering them and giving them their chance to shine.
0:24:11 - Alex
You know we will do and that elevates everyone in the team.
0:24:16 - Gayle
So yeah, there's no new news there. I'm sure, but they're the things that I tend 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 I saw you worked on is reimagining the customer charter, which I'm sure is interesting in a 100-year-old organization. I also saw you recently had more cultural blueprint work, where one phrase in particular really resonated with us as well as to make the world a better place, one repair at a time. For me, in my tiny world, we have a phrase which is to change the world one document at a time. You know it's sort of the same thing about interactions that you've really thought through, and as a marketer, I'm sure you've helped shape that organization-wide process. Tell us a little bit about that. How do you drive this sort of change and innovation in a 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 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 from going to landfill, so we genuinely think that we are having an impact on that kind of carbon impact circular economy, and so that's quite important to us. It's not manufactured, right? This isn't a manufacturer story, it's a real one. This is essentially what we exist to do repair appliances, keep working longer, and then when you start to listen to employees, whether it's attracting new employees, or retaining employees, people want to work for a purpose-led business. Warranty or insurance might not have that same appeal until you 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, I guess how we approach that whole process, and we're currently going back through a bit of a brand strategy exercise, is to engage people, all audiences, employees, customers, partners, and investors. It's really important to listen to people, understand what they think, what we should we stand for, what we should 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 help create the message, embody the message, drive the message, and share the message.
0:27:48 - Alex
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, Gayle. This is really amazing to see the energy, the openness to new ideas, and the broad range of skill sets that you're bringing in. 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 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!