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My intent is to Educate, Celebrate and Elevate the Consumer Relations function in CPG (Consumer Product Goods) companies, especially for Brand Specialist and Analysts roles and responsibilities... !
Welcome to the My Curious Colleague podcast with your host, me, Denise Venneri. We'll be talking all things consumer relations with a focus on consumer product goods organizations and the brand specialist and analyst roles and responsibilities. So if you like CPGs, like I like CPGs, marketing, insights, and caring deeply for your consumers, Well, take a listen.
Denise Venneri:Hello, my curious colleagues. This week, I'm curious about supporting food service in the CPG contact center.
Denise Venneri:And to help me is my colleague and dear friend, Vicky Cherne, Manager of Consumer Affairs and Customer Concerns at Land O'Lakes. And in addition to her leadership at our 9 to 5, Vicki is very active in our industry group called SOCAP. You've heard me mention it before. It's the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals, and she is currently the SOCAP board of directors and serves as the chair of the member service committee. So with that, welcome to the podcast, Vicky.
Vicky Cherne:Well, thanks for having me on today, Denise. I'm so glad we finally made this work out. I'm so excited to visit with you.
Denise Venneri:Yeah. Same here. Same here. I'm honored. Let's start with, if you don't mind sharing a top line of your consumer care journey for the audience.
Vicky Cherne:Sure. Well, my career has always been centered around consumer care, even as a kid growing up in a family fishing resort in Northern Minnesota. I waitressed when I was 12. I think I sometimes wonder about that, but it was a family business. So Right.
Vicky Cherne:But since then, I've held consumer affairs roles in the life and health insurance industry and in the food world. I've been a manager of 2 teams at Land O'Lakes for the last 12 years, and I've been a total of 18 years with Land O'Lakes. So I oversee the consumer affairs team, which focuses on retail consumers that are calling us or emailing us, and the customer concerns team, which focuses on our b to b customers, including food service products for the Land O'Lakes dairy foods division. Land O'Lakes, as you may know, is a farmer owned agricultural company, and we're based in Minnesota.
Denise Venneri:Thank you so much for for that. Alright. Well, I'm gonna start with a prediction, which is something I rarely do. But here it goes. I predict that in the next 3 to 5 years, all of our consumers, CPG colleagues, will have responsibility for both the retail and the food service sides, and let me tell you why.
Denise Venneri:This is based just on my gut feeling and some observations. My experience in this industry or in this function really is used to be, I support consumer care for the retail side of the business. We really don't cross pollinate in any way. But things have begun shifting back, especially with the pandemic, you know, with the consumer behavior shifting from out of home consumption to more in home consumption, and recently swinging back the other way. Now I know that this out of home that I'm referencing, you know, the restaurant piece is just one part of the food service side of the business, but things are beginning to blur.
Denise Venneri:Now as you mentioned, you've been at Land O'Lakes and have been supporting both sides of the house, both the retail and the food service for quite a while. And that's why I wanna pick your brain, of course, and let the audience learn from you. So again, let's not again, but let's level set. How are you defining the food service side that you're supporting? Give us a sense, please.
Denise Venneri:For sure.
Vicky Cherne:A great question, Denise. You know, when we think about food service as products that are sold to restaurants, k twelve schools, colleges and universities, and hospitals, but it's important to note that we sell most of these products to food distributors who then sell to those end user customers. So those food service customers are our customers as well. And what you may not know is in addition to food service, our customer concerns team at Land O'Lakes also works with ingredient customers like milk powders, for example, that go into other products like chocolate. And then the retailers and grocers that sell our products are our customers as well.
Vicky Cherne:So we separate out consumers from customers and we think about consumers as the people buying our product at the grocery store and our customers as the store, the distributor, the restaurant, etcetera.
Denise Venneri:How do you keep that all straight? We're gonna speak to that. Right? You're right. Well, I appreciate the setup there, Vicky, and, you know, I like the detail.
Denise Venneri:So let's dig into it a little bit. What types of contacts do you handle for fruit the food service products?
Vicky Cherne:Sure. Well, we handle a variety of contacts around product quality. For example, the customer's product experience. Perhaps, something isn't working the way they thought it would work, and we might investigate that. Perhaps there are performance questions or concerns where a customer may question the way something is melting or the way it's used in a recipe.
Vicky Cherne:We work really closely with our culinary staff to answer those kinds of questions. There could be packaging or storage questions and maybe a question about a package seal or how to handle the product once it's opened. So, you know, more questions about, you know, the quality and the usage of the product. And while we work with those product quality questions, there's another group, our business information team and they work with some of the day to day questions about specifications or certifications, product questionnaires. So they handle those contacts, whereas my team is looking more at quality and usage.
Vicky Cherne:We work really closely with that other team as well, though, because you know, people get confused about where to send. And so we just pass the context between our teams as we need to.
Denise Venneri:Alright. Let's move into now some of the key differences between the 2 when you go to support food service, you know, versus the retail side. Maybe touch on the different martech you might support, or is it based on volume or maybe location of, you know, where knowledge information's housed, things like that.
Vicky Cherne:Absolutely. So first, the main difference between retail and food service, care teams is really the size of the issue. With a consumer, you and I both know it's, you know, it's a few packages of product. The product representative works directly with the consumer. We resolve the issue, we send out some sort of reimbursement.
Vicky Cherne:When we're dealing with food service or b to b customers, there's typically more product involved, they buy by the case for example and we probably have more people involved in the contact and, and working on that customer relationship. So we might be handling, something that where we have to work with the sales representative or the broker representative, we might work with our, customer logistics team that handles the order, we might work with our plant quality team. So there's a whole lot more people that we're involved with on each individual contact than there is with our consumer team. And we often say that handling our food service contacts is a little bit like a project management situation because there's so many pieces that are taking place and we're coordinating communications and investigations with a much broader team in order to deliver a result to that customer.
Denise Venneri:Got it. Now what about the agents? Training them and maybe some of the, software that you use to support food service versus that consumer. Yeah.
Vicky Cherne:Sure. So while not the same format as our consumer team, we use the same same CRM company. We just have a little different structure to it. So, again, with a with a consumer, it's one consumer, one address, you know, one one contact. With a customer, we we have to add in an end user name, a sales rep name, maybe the distributor of the product.
Vicky Cherne:So there's more people that we have to keep track of. So the fields are set up differently in the CRM. We also have the ability to track requests, so if we send something to a plant or we send something to sales in order to get more information, it allows us to stay on top of those pending requests. You know, our team for our customer contacts is a lot smaller than our consumer team. We have 1 full time and 1 half time person handling our customer contacts versus 6 seats in our consumer care team.
Vicky Cherne:But the customer side is, you know, often big customers, high dollar amounts. So really, although it's a smaller number of people, it's a very critical role to our team.
Denise Venneri:Oh, that's interesting. How about that? Okay. I'm I'm wondering now some well, you're sort of feeding us some of these best practices as we go along, But I'm wondering if you could now share with us some best practices for those other companies who currently support both or maybe thinking about standing up the food service side for their organization? What are what advice might you give them?
Denise Venneri:This episode is sponsored by the launch of my very first website, aptly named mycuriouscolleague.com. There, you'll find links to episodes of all my podcasts, YouTube videos, downloadables, and links to the podcast accolades and rankings. There's even a store feature for future products. Right now, my official sticker is available with the CPG CX hashtag on it. And it is available for free.
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Vicky Cherne:I would say one of the things that's really stood out for us over the years is that often your product types between retail and food service are similar. They're just different pack sizes coming out of the same facility. So having our teams work alongside of each other, we can track complaint situations quite quickly and the data we collect is valuable to our production team. So whether you're buying something in a large tub or in a small cup, you might might see the same issues. So that's been really helpful for us.
Vicky Cherne:Another thing is that the variety of teams we support, we found it's important to, you know, if I were to give advice to somebody is to really build your relationships with your internal partners. And I know you talk about that in your podcast frequently, building trust in our process and and helping our partner teams see the value of what we do, and ultimately, they help us improve our products. So as new people join our cross functional teams, we work really hard to have onboarding meetings with those people. And, again, I know that's something I'm I'm telling you that's nothing nothing new to you, Denise.
Denise Venneri:But it's interesting how that just, you know, makes sense for both sides for both sides, but, you wanna touch on agent training and opportunities?
Vicky Cherne:Sure. I'd be glad to. Oh, you know, over the years, we found that the customer role is quite broad. You have a lot of different products to know. So moving from retail into the customer role can be a way to increase your product and your internal partner interaction.
Vicky Cherne:The customer role is also really detailed and it can be a little higher stakes and perhaps a little higher stress, so it's not for everyone. It doesn't mean we always hire from the consumer team to the customer team. Sometimes we might, hire somebody who comes with some sort of background similar that easily translates into that customer role. But, and then while handling of a complaint, you know, uses many of those same skills, the reimbursement piece is very different as I mentioned before. With a consumer we, we can reimburse right away.
Vicky Cherne:With a customer, we have to work closely with our marketing and sales and logistics teams in order to to help with that process. We don't control that process, somebody else does. So we, we just help guide guide the situation.
Denise Venneri:Got it. Have you perhaps implemented a project recently that you might wanna share that demonstrates how your consumer care, that demonstrates how consumer care in general can support the food service?
Vicky Cherne:Sure. One change that, over the last few years that's really been great is the, the relation to social care. So we use Facebook and Instagram in retail, and we've been monitoring that for a number of years. So when our food service teams were looking to roll that out, it was a very easy opportunity for us to support those platforms in food service and because some of my, our our team on the customer team, one of one of those folks was already working on the retail side and she knows the food service products, it was a very easy fit for her to help monitor those and then it also helps with additional training for those retail reps who haven't maybe worked with food service. Now they get to learn something else and, you know, we all know every time we learn something, it makes our jobs that much more interesting.
Vicky Cherne:So, so that's, that's been a really great opportunity for us as we answer those questions and, and our team just answers the questions or the concerns in social media. We don't do any of the, of the other engagement. We work with another team that helps with the, what we call the positive engagement.
Denise Venneri:Is that similar to how you handle the the retail side where it's the inquiries and, concerns, and then someone else handles? Okay.
Vicky Cherne:Yep. It is. Yep. We do both. We we do this that same the same process we use in retail, we were able to apply in food service, which just made the transition so seamless when the time came to stand up those platforms.
Denise Venneri:Perfect. I went a little off script there, so thanks for rolling with me.
Vicky Cherne:Oh, of course.
Denise Venneri:Oh, my gosh. We're getting close to the end, sadly, Vicky. And I'm wondering, first, well, 2 things, kind of like the future. Do you agree with my prediction that I shared at the top, and, maybe what are your thoughts for the future of, CPG as it relates to food service versus retail
Vicky Cherne:care. Retail care. You bet. Yeah. Yeah.
Vicky Cherne:Not the other r word.
Denise Venneri:Yeah. Yeah.
Vicky Cherne:I, you know, I think it's a great prediction, Denise. I think service models are always evolving. We're combining retail and b to b business models can be a perfect way to expand your agent skill sets and from a quality perspective, ensure you're tracking all the product made from a facility in one place. And while our team began handling b to b interactions a number of years ago, we know it's an area that more companies are starting to consider. So your prediction is spot
Denise Venneri:on. Well, time will tell...
Denise Venneri:but you have been a pioneer in this sort of dual support side, and and I really thank you for your time today. It's been it's been great. I really appreciate it, Vicky.
Vicky Cherne:Absolutely, Denise. It's a pleasure to see you today and visit with you, and, I look forward to talking to you again soon. Thanks so much for having me on.
Denise Venneri:If you've learned even a kernel of an idea or was inspired by this episode, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Be sure to share out the hashtag CPGCX because CPGCX really and truly rocks.
Doug Venneri:You have been listening to the My Curious College podcast with Denise. Thank you for your
Doug Venneri:time.