Campari 'Goes a Sip Beyond' by Transforming their Employee Experience

Pasi Nikkanen: Welcome to HappyToday podcast. This is a podcast for those who want to improve service experience of internal services. If you use ServiceNow or other enterprise service management system, then this is for you.

Hi Chris. Nice to have you here in the HappyToday podcast.

Chris Fazey: Hi Pasi. It's great to be here.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. Hey, tell us a little bit about your background and how did you end up in Campari and your position?

Chris Fazey: So as is always the case or often the case, it was actually through a number of different connections, but with a previous organization that has some links into Campari and doing similar work, and it was a great, a great opportunity to actually move over and join them.

Pasi Nikkanen: Okay. What's the passion like? What are you trying to achieve with Campari and in your role?

Chris Fazey: Yeah. It's an interesting ... It's one of the things that was really appealing about Campari. It's quite a passionate organization, strong Italian roots obviously, and the big transformational journey that Campari is going on. So there's really a sense of the whole business wanting this to really be successful and really see a big step change. And so these were really one of the interesting things about it.

Pasi Nikkanen: Okay. And what does employee experience mean to you and the organization?

Chris Fazey: Yeah, it's a good question. I'm an IT person. I'm really about tickets, incidents, requests, service, these sorts of things. So I'm always looking at it on that side and how did the actual service work and how do people rate it. So I always ... It's an interesting dynamic for me because on the one hand I'm always really sort of primarily focused on, was the service successful, did the user get what they need, did we fix it within the time or whatever are the parameters?

But you can certainly see how some of that is starting to become less relevant. And the focus around, well, was the actual employee experience that they had of the service, whether it was delivered in time or not, or whatever, was how did that actually view. And I think when you combine those two it gives you quite an interesting dynamic.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. Yeah. When you got started, like what kind of challenges did you face? Any fears? What about external partners?

Chris Fazey: Yeah. So for Campari then it was quite a straight forward approach I would say because we were working with this health right from day one, and we had no measure. I suppose one of the difficulties we didn't have anything to compare against.

Pasi Nikkanen: True, true. Yeah.

Chris Fazey: And we all had some fairly high expectations, I think possibly maybe initially a little bit too high as to what the service would be like when we went live. So I think one of those initial fears or challenges was also then actually looking at some of the real data once we've gone live. And it's been a very rapid transition as well, I think, which has introduced some of the challenges.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. I guess you started like three months ago or two months ago.

Chris Fazey: Yeah. We went live with just a couple of hundred users in New York in June, but that was really just a pilot.

We actually went live beginning of September for the entire organization and we did the transition, the pretty much the bulk of the work in less than four months. So it was pretty aggressive.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. So what are now the main kind of pains or the problems that you tried to fix with the using the experience data?

Chris Fazey: That's quite a ... I think it's difficult to be specific about with pain. I think knowing the tool and having used the data before, what I'm ... what we are able to see is any service, any location, is it working or not. So I think we have to be realistic about what we can do that not trying to eat the elephant as some people say.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Chris Fazey: But what we need to do, particularly at this early stage of transition when without this data we don't really know what people are thinking. It's a very new service. There's still going to be problems. It's looking at where are the priorities and actually dealing with those.

Pasi Nikkanen: So how do you practically use it in your daily work?

Chris Fazey: We look at the surface information within the tool, what are people rating, how are they rating their experience on a service level. So then we can look at those service lines within the organization working with Capgemini and understand what the problems are. Are these global problems? Are we seeing them across all different roles or different locations, or is it specific locations where we're seeing specific issues? Is there even a language element into that? So it's helping us and guiding us into and it directs us to where the high priority issues are if you like.

Pasi Nikkanen: Okay. Okay. Now that you have the data for a couple of months and of course in your earlier position, in your earlier company for a bit longer than that, how would it feel to now come to work without having it?

Chris Fazey: Yeah, painful I would say. It is very insightful. It really, it really, really helps. And not to have that we would be reliant on either what we thought personally or only when people really screamed about the service.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah, the one who starts to shout the loudest.

Chris Fazey: Yeah, exactly. Whereas with this information with a good response rate as well, then actually we can pretty much see how all of the services in all locations are actually functioning. And we'd be blind virtually. We'd be reliant on service levels and ServiceNow ticket data or something. It's very different.

Pasi Nikkanen: Did you get any feedback from the real employers who are actually rating about your approach? So did you communicate it somehow to them, or what kind of feedback have you again, not the actual feedback of the services but actually gathering the feedback? If that culture was missing, the employees react on it somehow that ...

Chris Fazey: Yeah. So two different scenarios there. When we launched the service within Campari, there was a lot of organizational change management and we included details about how to give the feedback in a loss of those communications. And it was quite widely known. And the response rate at day one was pretty good.

I think if you look into earlier experiences, having launched this in a larger organization, we posted an update on an online site. We didn't send one email about the service. We didn't tell really anyone. It was just in case people actually happened to read this newsletter online. And within a week we had a very high response rate. It was incredible how easily users just saw it in the email and clicked a number.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah, I think it's the culture. People are kind of used to it in consumer life. Like that people are asking feedback and also people are giving nowadays feedback. It used to be that you were just left silent and you were just left maybe angry about it. But you now take feedback and now it's very direct. I think because of the, all the social media and all this stuff, how people have get used to communicating.

What about future plans? What kind of initiatives will you try to kind of support with the experience data or what [inaudible 00:08:07] kind of move forward?

Chris Fazey: Obviously there's the continual service improvement we need to do. That goes without saying. But Campari is also on a big transformational journey. A lot of workplace technology changes coming up in the next year. And we can use the experience data to actually see how the users are, what their experience is of that service. We can link it very clearly into when actions or services are going live in different locations and understand what people think. And we can even through some of our communications also start to encourage people to give some of that feedback as well.

But I think on top of that, because this will tell us what the users think of the service, but also we can use that same data to then understand how well our service partners are able to support these new services as well.

Pasi Nikkanen: True.

Chris Fazey: Because it's always the two things in terms of what the users actually think of the service and what their experience was and how well do we think the vendor actually delivered the service.

Pasi Nikkanen: Right. Then lastly, any surprises, happy or unhappy ones after the roll out or during the roll out?

Chris Fazey: The roll out was, it was fine. It was easy. It's a really simple and easy tool to deploy. So that was great and expected I think. And no, in terms of the tool itself, no unhappy surprises.

Pasi Nikkanen: Any comments from the IT department colleagues who have never seen this kind of like not seen experience data before? How did they react or ... ?

Chris Fazey: Well, I think we're still in that journey.

Pasi Nikkanen: Okay.

Chris Fazey: And I think that there are a few of us that kind of understand it, and I think there are a lot of us that need to start to learn it and understand it. And that's going to be part of our challenge I think.

Pasi Nikkanen: Okay. That's actually a pretty common challenge. I think all these things are very easy to take and to use, to keep and understand it. But then like rolling it out into, it's still like a change program in a way. It changed the way of working, change the way of thinking and the cultural change.

Chris Fazey: And I think as well it's particularly in our scenario where we're in and out of [inaudible 00:10:20] environment, it's all too easy for the service partner just to think about the service level and the SLA. And it's green, so it's fine, when actually we don't really care about that anymore and we really want to understand what the users think.

Pasi Nikkanen: All right. Thank you, Chris. It was a blessing.

Chris Fazey:  Thank you very much.

Pasi Nikkanen: And we always end it in a way of saying like, stay happy.

Chris Fazey: Same to you.

Pasi Nikkanen: Thank you.

Chris Fazey: Thank you.