Driving change with the customer first

I joined JATO as Interim CCO in September 2020 to review and build our customer experience across the business. With a company mission to put our clients’ successes at the core, we are always looking at ways that we can improve and evolve our processes to achieve this. My strategy was to create an organic approach to customer listening and response to implement a structure that would drive real commercial and experiential improvement, not only for our customers but our colleagues too. I wanted it to be simple yet effective to ensure it was inclusive for customers of all sizes.

I was fortunate that I joined at a time when JATO was already in the process of building new customer service technology and product roadmap. This customer-first approach perfectly complemented what I also wanted to deliver as part of my customer experience strategy.

At JATO we’re very proud of the diverse range of automotive customers we work with from original equipment (OE) and component manufacturers to leasing, retail and insurance. As our business has grown over the years, we needed to evolve and update our processes to ensure we had the skills and capability to manage our clients with a truly customer-first approach.

To start, my priority was to meet and understand our customers, their challenges and how our data can play a pivotal role in their success. I also wanted to understand the current processes and structure internally. I carried out 28 in-depth interviews with customers as well as an all-customer survey, which received an impressive 900 replies. From the data captured, we were able to analyse a number of key themes on customers’ priorities. We know there is always room for improvement, and we were able to recognise areas that needed attention and could be developed.

Running alongside the customer research, we built a simple, high-level customer journey and a set of customer experience principles to use as a basis for all our client activity.

To guarantee the success of the new strategy, it was important that all colleagues were involved in crafting our response and action plan. Using the feedback from customers, we ran a series of internal workshops to discuss where we needed to prioritize to really shift the dial; and what that action plan might look like.

We refined the findings from these workshops into a shortlist, and then developed the three core areas of the Customer Commitment, which I’m thrilled to have now published. We’ve launched a network of JATO Experience Ambassadors across the business, and I couldn’t do this without them – they have been key to helping drive adoption of the toolkit and our new customer experience principles.

I’ve recently gone back to the customers who we interviewed individually to give them an update on our progress, and I hope they feel their input has been interpreted and played back to them in a way that resonates. As we move forward into the second half of the year, I’m now focused on expanding the reach of our customer experience initiatives across the business and improving the customer service and value that we deliver at JATO.