Rubix exists to keep the wheels of industry turning, right across Europe. We keep factories and plants up-and-running, and we keep our customers’ businesses moving forward. Without customers, we have no business and we serve no purpose.

We try not to miss any opportunity to listen to, and to speak to, our customers. We invite them to our annual leadership team event. We invite customers to our most senior management meetings. Apparently, that’s quite unusual in our industry. Our customers really appreciate that we do those things.

We sample customer feedback every day, in lots of ways. One highlight of our approach is to formally ask our customers once a year to rate our performance. This gives them the opportunity to give us their feedback when we are not in the room, where they can be really honest.

We learn the most from those customers who are not completely satisfied with our performance. We may think, from time to time, that there is nothing more or better that we could do for our customers. In reality, that just isn’t the case.

Three measures are key for us. The customer net promoter score (cNPS) is well known. The other is a proprietary measure called TRI*M that belongs to Kantar, who we work with on our survey. cNPS tells us whether our customers would recommend us and TRI*M tells us whether our customers prefer us to the competition.

The third measure, eNPS, is an indicator of employee engagement. We understand the link between high engagement in our teams, customer satisfaction and business performance. That is why we systematically measure those indicators from HQ to branch, and everywhere in between, in every country where we operate.

Any customer that states they would not recommend us gets a call within 24 hours from their account director. In addition, a member of the senior leadership team will speak to that customer. The conversations focus on one message, and two questions. The message is ‘Thank you’. And the questions are: ‘Why did you give us that score?’ and ‘What can we do to improve?’.

A fast response is the first step to addressing the issue. It shows that we care deeply and are committed to putting it right, throughout our business.

The individual feedback from these customers is collated and converted into a series of customer promises, supported by associated action plans. These are tracked throughout Rubix. We even generate some healthy competition about who is the most customer focussed. We publish the list of our top 100 branches by customer satisfaction on the intranet.

Then, we update our customers on our progress throughout the year. It’s the best way to make sure they hold us to account when the next survey comes around.

This process – closing the loop – takes time and effort but it is important. When you consider that we don’t have a business without our customers, what could be more important?

Keith Reville
Chief Digital & Marketing Officer