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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 Finniere. 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. Hello, my curious colleagues. This week, my guest is my colleague, Joe Mazer.
Denise:Hi, Joe, and welcome to the podcast.
Joe:Thanks, Denise. I'm glad to be on it.
Denise:Yeah. I know we kinda pulled this together last sort of last minute. Just glad it all worked out. Appreciate your flex flexibility. I don't really know you that well.
Denise:I hope to get to know you when I see you at a conference next month. I know we're LinkedIn friends. So tell the rest of my colleagues and me a little bit about yourself and what you've been up to currently.
Joe:Okay. Well, I've I'm Joe Mazer. I work for Michelin. I'm currently the director of consumer care for North America. But consumer care is new to me.
Joe:I actually I've been with the company 30 years, and most of that's been in sales, a little bit in marketing. And about 2 years ago, I had an opportunity to come over to the consumer care department, and I knew nothing about the consumer care space. So I, I I needed to learn. So I I joined SOCAP and, was able to, Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals and and was able to learn a lot as well as I had a very experienced team that has helped me, as well, kinda get up to speed. So I'm, I'm kinda very new to the space and and continuing to learn.
Joe:It's dynamic and it's changing, you know, so it's it's been great.
Denise:Yeah. Well, aren't you smart? Now now I see why they tapped you for this role because, you know, why not join an industry group that's, you know, has others doing what you're doing is the best way to learn, plus sounds like you're lucky with that experienced team. So speaking of SOCAP, leads me to my next question. I know that you are on the slate for, next year's SOCAP Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals, as you noted, board of directors.
Denise:And I'm just gonna assume that you're gonna get ratified. I mean, you've got my vote, buddy. So let's assume that, you know, you get ratified for this year or maybe even next year, if you decide to do it then. What are some of those areas of that interest you? And when you think about serving on a committee like that, what do you think would help the members that maybe you could bring to the party?
Joe:Well, I mean, I I think one of the things is I've kinda got that outside perspective. I mean, I I I have a lot of questions. Your your curious colleague is a curious guy too. So, you know, so I, you know, the one of the reasons I I joined was benchmarking. I, you know, I wanted to see how we compared to other brands, and I'm sure other brands have that same type of mentality.
Joe:They wanna see how they compare. The other thing is, you know, there's there's a lot of change in the space. I mean, we have a lot of data that comes into consumer care through all the different channels. And now with AI and, you know, NLP, there's all these things that are happening. And so it's kind of to to make sure that we're kind of on the forefront of that, you know, and and conversations with colleagues to understand.
Joe:And and I'm sure that, you know, I so I I I assume that people have the same type of, questions that I have. And so those are the kind of the key areas that I, you know, that I'm focused on, and I I hope to kind of communicate with others within SOCAP.
Denise:Oh, very cool. Yeah. That's all good stuff. And you're right. It's ever evolving.
Denise:I've seen it for 20 I've been involved as a worker bee, as I mentioned to you, in consumer affairs for 20 plus years, and it's gone from, you know, maybe your father's customer serve it's no longer your father's customer service, and it's gotten very sexy with all the channels, and it just gets more interesting, you know, every year. So great. Well, level set me a little bit. I know you're saying you're new to the group, but I'm kind of new to I don't know. Is it called higher ticket consumer goods?
Denise:Okay. Right? In a often sold in a retail space. So I'm very CPG classic CPG companies. So level set is a little bit about Michelin.
Joe:So Michelin, you know, we're in a lot of different spaces, and we I mean, the bread and butter is the tires that we make Yeah. That, you know, but we're we're with tires, we're around tires, and we're beyond tires. We also, you know, have the Michelin restaurants. So, that was a marketing thing back
Denise:in the day.
Joe:So so we do a lot of different things, but, obviously, we're a premium brand. And for the tires that we sell, mainly, we go through our dealer base. So, we we we have to work with our dealers, as far as going to market. So and some of those are more aligned with kind of the CPG companies, Costco, some of that. Some of them are more like mom and pop, you know, dealers that we deal with.
Joe:So it's it's it's really, in especially in North America. So that's kinda how we go to market. And, we're we're at the we're usually the tier one of of tire brands. You know, we have a long history where we've won a lot of JD Power awards and things such as that that kinda validate our status as far as the pricing. But, you know, that's that's kinda how we go to market and who we are.
Joe:Yeah.
Denise:Did you mention because I heard dealers in there. I know you've had a very varied career at Michelin. God bless you, first of all. Long and varied career. Did you work did you mention one of the dealerships or had
Joe:So I I I worked so I would I I started in territories, for Michelin. I I've handled some of our bigger customers, Costco, Discount Tire, you know, through my sales career, and so Okay. Before moving to consumer care. So
Denise:Yeah. So just leaning on that varied career a little bit, just wondering, you know, as you look back on that career and decided to, you know, move into this consumer care role, I think it was 21, 2021. What did you sort of take with you? What did you leave on on your approach to, leading this this team?
Joe:So one of the things that that was that intrigued me was that, you know, in working with the dealers, obviously, we're working with them. They're working with the consumer. Correct? You know? So so we we there's a little bit of a gap between understanding the consumer.
Joe:They actually probably understood it better than we did. So there was always that, like, hey. How do we get that consumer data? And, you know, when somebody kind of approached me and said, what about consumer care? And we we dealt with consumer care because, you know, it's it's a valuable part of, like, how we make dealers happy, how we make consumers happy because we've gotta go through our dealers.
Joe:And I kinda realized all the data that was coming in from the different channels and the consumers are communicating with us. And I said, hey. This is interesting. And and, you know, the voice of the consumer was one of the things that I was always trying to get. And I thought maybe I can help out kind of bridging the gap knowing where it comes from on the sales side and the marketing side to to kind you know, what if I move into this role.
Joe:So that's that's really why I joined it, and it's been exciting. And I've had to learn a lot, which, you know, you said you're a worker bee. I was a worker bee, and it it's it's good to kinda look at a different perspective and and learn something new. So that was that was exciting to me.
Denise:Perfect. I did do some, you know, little research. I know you've got a website or 2. I think there's one for the master brand and one for, you know, more consumer base. I think you have social media channels. Right?
Joe:We do.
Denise:Things like that. What what really and ratings. And we re reviews some of that basic stuff, and I did see the live chat button. And as I looked at it more closely, I was really excited to see your and help me if I get this wrong. Is it a virtual assistant named Mitch?
Joe:A virtual assistant. We call we call him Mitch. It's our chatbot that's on our website. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, we it's a Michelin. We call him Mitch. So he's our virtual assistant that helps out the consumer on the website.
Denise:Side note, 2 episodes ago, I had a brand naming expert, and my question to her was give us some tips to name a chatbot. So I didn't have this on the script, Joe, but who named him? Who named Mitch Mitch?
Joe:I you know what? So it was the team and and my predecessor combining with, you know, our our our BPO, our our our marketing teams to kinda come you know, they had a brainstorming session, and they came up with the, the name.
Denise:Okay. Well, you know, we all love a good alliteration. So Mitch from Michelin, that's that's perfect. That's perfect. So what I wanna do is I think I had one other virtual assistant.
Denise:So Lisa Diehl from, Lisa Diehl from Freshpet. Excuse me. They have one that you just launched called Scalp, which I love that name too, But she just launched it. So, really, what I'd love for you to do is share with colleagues. Let's let's get into it as much as you can.
Denise:I know you did not initially launch it. Your predecessor do did, but really break it down for us, if you don't mind. What did you what do you know of that launch other than the naming? You know, what are the tools? Is there a vendor?
Denise:Like, just break it down for us, please, Joe.
Joe:So, I mean, it it's supported by RuleAI, through our vendor through our BPO that administers it, which is Foundever. But, you know, one of the things that we've we've kind of learned, about Mitch and and and how to apply Mitch over the last couple years, When my predecessor, Martha, when she kind of she she had the forethought of, like, hey. We need this virtual assistant. It's gonna be a great experience for the consumers. But one of the ways that she kinda sold it internally was, hey.
Joe:It's gonna it's gonna eliminate calls and, you know, it's gonna be more efficient, because the consumers are just gonna interact with that. Yeah. When I came in, you know, I was questioned like, hey. That's not happening. Like, what's going on?
Joe:And so, you know, that was one of the first questions of, like, what do we do? And and the other thing is is we you know, from a user experience, you know, Mitch used to come on right up as soon as you got onto the website, it was, hey. I'm there. You know? And it was big, and it was kinda like, hey.
Joe:I'm Mitch. And, you know, from a usability standpoint, we had to learn that consumers don't necessarily want that. It needs to be a little more subtle so they understand where they can go. They may wanna search around before they actually use Mitch. But we started to look at the actually, you know, why isn't that happening?
Joe:Why aren't we getting calls? And so so we started to analyze, you know, we knew kind of the use cases who was calling us, you know, and it was more related around warranty, around, you know, if you had an issue with a a product, those type of things. When we started to look into the what the Midge Mitch data was, it was prepurchase, which was great. Right? I mean, we wanna Yeah.
Denise:But, again, it was It was prepurchase. Okay. Yeah.
Joe:It was so so they were asking a lot of questions. You know, they were gonna buy a a a set of tires. Right? So they're looking at what tires do I need, what are the tire specs, those type of questions. They still had some of those other questions about warranties and things like that, but it was primarily prepurchase, which is even better.
Joe:You know? So, I mean, because we wanna sell more tires and help them, assist them with that. Yeah. So when we realized that, we were like, oh, you know, maybe this is you know, if you do the Venn diagram, it's not gonna, like, match up because that's why the calls aren't going down necessarily because they're calling about something else. But the consumer that wants to engage with the website and with Mitch and our chat, you know, they they they're, they're engaging, asking different questions.
Joe:And so that was the first kind of the So, like, some of our training that we had for Mitch, wasn't you know, we were using use cases from phones and things such as that because that's what we had. And we realized that so we did kind of a, you know, constant monthly checkups or every 2 week checkups to see what were they asking. What was that first user message so that we could train him to to handle that? And so we realized, you know, that the chatbot could help with prepurchase, that, you know, and there were some other questions that were outliers that were interesting, that we were able to help the web team with. For instance, when you register tires, there's a 16 digit DOT code on the side of the tire on one side.
Joe:Well, the other side has 12 digits. Right? So it would say enter so people would go on to the website to register the tires, and it would say, enter your 16 digits, and they would say, I only see 12 because depending on the side of tire. And so It's showing. We Yeah.
Joe:Yeah. Yeah. So we were just like, hey, web team. Can you just say it's on one side and not the other? And all of a sudden, we saw those questions go down.
Joe:So those are, like, simple things like that that we would see engaged with, the chatbot that we, you know, that we could do and and, you know, give some insight to the web team to make the better website as well. So we we've continued to do that. In fact, we, you know, we had a recall earlier this year, and and one of the questions that, you know, that my team was like, you know, we're gonna get all these calls about what it is and what it isn't when it's first announced. And so we were like, what if we could put that on our website, all the FAQs, and allow you know, if they ask Mitch, he can take you right there and give you all those answers. So we trained Mitch on that.
Joe:And, actually, that did lower our calls significantly because you know, you know, increased significantly at the beginning, and then it kinda settled down. So we we've learned of how to use them and, you know, it's mainly for prepurchase, but it can help out with some other things that are web related issues that we see kinda escalating up, on the website. So
Denise:Okay. I think I got it. A lot to process there. I and one of my questions was how how has Mitch evolved? I think you you, you know, talked about that where, like, the initial hypothesis was that it was gonna reduce calls.
Denise:That's what everybody thinks when you added a channel. Is that such an that it looked like, the sweet spot was logical now that I think about it because you're, you know, you have a prepurchase before your the journey the journey is just beginning. Once you get your answer there, then you could just hop on or, I think, click on something that starts you know, put put your card name in and then all that sort of good stuff, and you can start looking at what's available. Pardon me?
Joe:Yep. And and I'll I'll just add one thing that, you know, one of the things is prepurchase and and, you know, you know, showing value and trying to not be just a cost center for our, you know, consumers. Since we deal with dealers that, we don't own our distribution in North America, we go through our dealer base. We basically we now we send leads from the chatbot on the website to our buy now button, which is portal for different, you know, dealers that are on the the the that we deal with. So they think if they wanna buy tires, they can buy it through there.
Joe:So we're sending lots of leads now too. So, you know, we never thought about we thought of it more of a cost savings, you know, lowering, making more efficient, answering questions without a call. And what we're now doing is we're actually generating revenue because we're sending leads to the to the buy now button.
Denise:Let me dig in there for just a second because I'm I'm just trying to make the CPG sort of analogy of that or the use case for that. So you're saying you go on to Mitch. They find out what tire spec for, you know, their car. And is there a link there in the chat where they you click on it and it takes you to the vent to the dealer, excuse me, that has it, or does the consumer have to use it? How's that go?
Joe:Yeah. There's a a link to the buy now button, and then that takes you to a portal that basically gives you options for different dealers that are in your area based on your ZIP code.
Denise:Yeah. People aren't having them delivered to their home and putting them on themselves. Right? No.
Joe:No. Tires are yeah. No. There's not I mean, unless you have some people could, but, but most people don't have a place where they could install tires, so they rely on the dealerships to install them. So, basically, what we're just trying to do is kind of, you know, continue that process purchase process.
Joe:So if they if they can decide, you know, on our website, they don't have to go to another website to buy. They can continue that process by going through our dealer's base, and and we'll send that lead to the dealer, and they have a portal page where they can purchase based on wherever they're located.
Denise:It's improved CX, improved what is that called? UX user experience. Yep. Love it. Now, Joe, you quickly said 2 names that went by me.
Denise:You have a BPO. I just wanna just capture this for people. And then also somebody who developed the website the, chatbot. Excuse me. Who's the BPO? Say it again for me and spell it.
Joe:So our BPO is found ever.
Denise:F o spell that, please.
Joe:Like found f o n f o u n d ever. So
Denise:And then right next to it, ever found ever. All one word.
Joe:Yes.
Denise:Okay. Got it. And then the group that set up the chatbot, if I'm using
Joe:that correctly? Yeah. So so so they use the software they use is Rule AI. So, RU AI. RU.
Joe:RU l AI, I guess. Rule AI.
Denise:Word. It's r u l dot a I, maybe.
Joe:Yeah. I think so. Yeah.
Denise:Okay.
Joe:And so and but we also you know, obviously, within our IT team had to kinda connect it to we we use a CRM platform, Salesforce, so they had to connect it to Salesforce because, obviously, you know, it contains the chatbot contains about 75% of the questions that are asked. But if it doesn't, you know, it'll it'll go to a live chat agent, and that's, you know, that's all done through Salesforce.
Denise:Yeah. I was gonna ask you that. So Mitch gets stumped. You then say something like, hey. You know, we're gonna connect you with one of our humanoids.
Denise:What what do you say?
Joe:No. One of our live chat agents.
Denise:One of our live
Joe:chat agents. Questions. Yes.
Denise:And then okay. So that's very transparent.
Joe:Right.
Denise:And and you're very transparent when I found the chatbot. I mean, there was, like, I love that your mascot or the Michelin man, you know, that we all know from the commercials. There's, like, an outline of him, I believe, that's right on the chatbot. So you know, like, kinda who you're getting. So I love that transparency.
Denise:What was the other thing? Oh, one of the barriers I feel that maybe someone will have or I've heard people say it's like, oh, that training piece of, you know, it's just easier for my, my brand ambassadors to go into knowledge base and and answer all this because we are the source of truth, and we know, you know, what to say. So let's dig in again to the knowledge base piece. I know you weren't there at the very beginning. How has that evolved?
Denise:How does that work, and how do you keep him current? Can I call him a him?
Joe:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Alright.
Denise:Okay. With the with the knowledge base. With the knowledge. Yeah.
Joe:So, I mean, you know, we we, in some ways, it's kind of a decision tree initially. We knew that, like, we've seen the data that says most of the people are asking about products. Right? So finding tires is one of them. Or maybe a dealer that wants to know a tire spec, you know, what fits on my vehicle.
Joe:So those are the 2 big use cases. So that's easy to say, finding tires tire specs, and it can lead you to different places in the thing. And then there's the warranty one. And then and then there's a lot of other stuff. So that's the hard stuff that's, like, the long tail that we have to train on.
Joe:And quite frankly, you know, we use some of the knowledge that we had within the team that we utilize for voice or for, you know, the live chat agents, you know, based on our knowledge articles. But then we've had to evolve it a little bit for Mitch. So, you know, we would see which questions come in. So what's that first user question? What are they asking for?
Joe:And then we kinda group that of, okay, do do one of these other knowledge articles answer it, or just there's something else that needs to be generated? And so it's kind of an iterative process that we've had to go over over the last couple years. But so we've been been able to get most of the cases. So, basically, you know, our chatbot now can like, it'll answer the question, and they don't escalate to live chat 75% of the time. It understands the question 90 but it understands that.
Joe:So then there's another 10% that is always analyzed, you know, to see, can we improve that 90% and that 75%.
Denise:Cool. Really cool. What how does that manifest itself? So conceptually, I get it. Right?
Denise:You're saying 90% of the time, they understand the question. 75% of the time, Mitch knows the answer, and it would you know, might get to the live chat live agent, pardon me, and then you're always striving to sort of train him and see what that 10% was. I think I got some of that right.
Joe:Yep. Yep. Yep.
Denise:What is that you mentioned let me see. Let me see. Found no. Rule AI
Joe:Yeah.
Denise:Was is the vendor. So are you working with them every month? Like, how are you
Joe:working with all this? Mainly work through our BPO. And so they have a team, a digital team that we work through. And so we yeah. We do have at least 2 times a month, and then they have reporting that they give us.
Joe:So, obviously, we give them some direction, and then they come back with reporting, that we kinda look as a team and kinda analyze and and provide more direction. And, you know, it's kind of a continual process.
Denise:So you actually get some sort of analysis back that helps you understand what kinda what's working, where the opportunity areas are. And then how do you close the gap? Is do you have a team member that will go and find out this, you know, maybe one of that 10% question? How does that work?
Joe:Well, I mean, we've been closed. It's been getting less. Maybe a year ago, it's probably 80% understanding, so it's getting better. However, you never know. I mean, there may be a website issue, and the consumer will, you know, type in, hey.
Joe:This doesn't work, or I don't see this product or, you know, whatever it may be. So all of a sudden, you get a spike of not understanding. And then we go to our web team and say, hey. You know, this issue's happening. And, so it's kind of a fair it's an earlier work alert, you know, in some ways that we all able to give to.
Joe:So Yes. I don't know if you'll ever get to a 100%, but there's probably you know, it's getting harder and harder, but the issues and the things that are popping up may be helping, you know, other things, and it may be an early warning for that.
Denise:So To be honest, please don't get me wrong. I thought the 90% that that he understands and the 75% that he responds to, I thought that was way higher than I could ever imagine. So kudos to you and, and your team. Is there going to be a time when you might just say, let's hang it up at 93% or whatever? Because you do have the staff, the live the live agents to handle that, you know, the the balance of it.
Joe:So what we realized is that, you know, the consumer wants to engage with us in however they wanna engage with us. And, obviously, you know, like I said, most of the the the chatbot is dealing with prepurchase. So those people are shopping. They may not wanna call and say, what tire do I need? This is my vehicle.
Joe:They may and we'll handle them that way. But they may just wanna browse, you know, and get kind of an idea. I mean, just the purchase process. Right? So we're just providing that information to them in that way.
Joe:And so, in fact, we know that since it's lead providing leads to the buy now button and and and that, we're actually gonna expand it. We you know, the chatbot currently is only on the US Michelin website. We're gonna be expanding soon to the Canadian. There's some, you know, French and and, you know, they just gotta get he's gotta learn French and and that type of thing for Canada. So, so that's that's coming in the near within the next month or so.
Joe:So, so we're, you know, we're kind of expanding it because now we realize what he's doing. We kinda put him in time out until we figured everything. Like, what was the the user experience? What was the what were they asking? And now we're trying to expand it because we realized that actually leads to sales.
Denise:Yeah. This is juicy stuff. This is juicy stuff. And you threw out NLP in the very beginning, natural language processing. So you guys, like, do you think you're slow to adopt this technology?
Denise:I don't think so. But, like, in your, you know, comparing yourself to competition or what you've done before, do you think you're slow, or do you think you're ahead of the curve on that adoption?
Joe:I don't know. I I I always think we're slow. Although, I think we are pretty good. We are using it. We are looking at it.
Joe:Obviously, you wanna do it quicker. You wanna look at all channels and see all those insights to provide the voice of the consumer the quickest way you can to the organization, the marketing sales team. So I think we're the direction, obviously, with all the new technologies that are coming out. I think it's gonna enable us to do it quicker. We are doing it.
Joe:It's more of, you know, it's probably slower than what I would like. We're you always hear these, you know, the new stuff, the AI that's out there and chat GPT and stuff. And so we're we're we're exploring some of that, but within our own data and, you know, so that we're we're trying to learn. But it's it's important. And then also, you know, like we talked about the differences in channels to better understand the differences in channels and how consumers interact with us so that we can take that and and not only learn with the chatbot, but learn in other channels to improve.
Joe:So
Denise:Yeah. Mike drop on that. That's you get it. You get it in your short time here in consumer affairs. You you get it.
Denise:Alright. I've got my last and easiest question for you. Do you have a volunteer or nonprofit organization you'd like to give a shout out to?
Joe:Yes. 1 of the one of the organizations that Michelin supports in Greenville as well as our team because we did a, kind of a volunteer effort at with Harvest Hope Food Bank. So it's a local food bank that obviously provides food and and resources to people in need. So, we we we went together as a team and did that, and everybody had a great experience, you know, helping out, and and that's a great organization in within Greenville, South Carolina.
Denise:Perfect. Is what is that URL like harvest hope foodbank.org, something like that?
Joe:Probably. I don't know off the top of my head, but I'm sure that it probably something like that.
Denise:I'll check it out and, include that in the show notes. Let everybody know. And and thank you again, Joe. This has just been delightful to get to know you. Thank goodness for the podcast, and, thank you so much for taking time out of your Friday evening, early evening to chat with me.
Denise:I really appreciate it.
Joe:Thanks, Denise. This is this is great.
Narrator: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.
Narrator:You have been listening to the My Curious Colleague podcast with Denise. Thank you for your time.