Nestlé lists the ingredients necessary for the sweetest CX
If Chris Wright ever wondered whether he was in tune with Nestlé’s customers, his appearance at SAPPHIRE offered all the proof he needed.
Speaking during a session at software giant SAP’s annual customer event in Orlando this week, the food and beverage conglomerate’s group CIO was asked to choose his favorite Nestlé product. He opted for Nespresso – which also came out on top among all those voting onsite and virtually.
It was a challenging question in part because Nestlé oversees more than 100,000 products across some 2,000 brands, including Kit Kat, Smarties and Ovaltine. While the flavors of those items may vary considerably, the entire organization needs to work in unified fashion to provide a consistently great customer experience (CX).
Wright said this mandate has changed how he sees his role as an IT leader, and the priorities for his team.
“We used to think about developing solutions and making sure they had great UX,” he said, referring to user experience design. “We now need to make sure not just that we bring point-to-point solutions that look great and are seamless, but that they are coherent. And that’s tough.”
The way Nestlé uses data and applications, for instance, need to be well-orchestrated not just from one brand to another but across all of Nestlé’s marketing teams, sales teams and its supply chain. Using SAP Commerce Cloud, for instance, Nestle has developed tools such as a portal where business-to-business (B2B) customers such as retailers can gain insight into their orders, invoices and delivery information in real time.
On an even larger scale, Nestlé has been using RISE with SAP, which includes the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform among other tools, to integrate various cloud-based applications and systems that now support more than 275,000 employees around the world. Connecting front and back-office systems may not be something the customer sees, Wright said, but it ensures the organization can deliver on its CX promises.
Wright said he is also focused on how Nestlé can leverage data – not just to reduce or eliminate friction in CX, but to make customers more successful. Examples could include giving its field service and sales teams greater intelligence to solve customer problems.
Nestlé’s CX approach has to work across multiple routes to market, from retailers and distributors but even direct to consumer (DTC) channels such as Nespresso locations. For consumers, part of a great experience might be products with the best aroma, smell and taste. “I can’t help with that, but how we get there (as a business) – that I can help with,” he said.
Retailers, meanwhile, have been growing their e-commerce stores incredibly quickly, Wright said, which has made them hungry for more digital content to drive consumer engagement. Nestlé therefore needs to strike a balance between providing that content scaleably at a good cost and with quality data.
Of course, SAPPHIRE was like any other major industry event in putting a huge focus on AI. SAP introduced several new AI capabilities to its CX toolkit, such as an AI shopping assistant that allows shoppers to ask questions using natural language, an AI expert recommendations feature that connects employees with internal experts for swift and accurate answers, and a new generative AI tool builder that helps retailers meet specific customer business needs.
Wright didn’t get specific on whether Nestlé will deploy any of those features, but he pointed out that most organizations have already been using machine learning for years to drive growth and efficiencies.
“When we get our data together, we can make better recommendations to B2B customers to stock the right products. We can help get the pricing better to drive growth,” he said. Generative AI, meanwhile, could help companies like Nestlé generate the content it needs more quickly and summarize information its employees need.
“Some of that is emerging, some of it is real. But the potential is huge,” he said.
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