How JAX Tyres & Auto employees became CX believers

The franchise operation already had an instinct for customer service but partnering with InMoment has formalised its CX program and boosted its metrics

When incoming JAX Tyres & Auto CEO, Steve Grossrieder, took the reins in 2017, he soon discovered  the company had been quite good at customer service, yet was lacking the consistency of an embedded customer experience platform and approach.

As a self-confessed CX believer, Grossrieder soon had the franchisee business on a five-year program to inject CX into the DNA of the business.  

“I know intrinsically, everything you do is from a customer-centric approach,” Grossrieder told CMO. With 90 stores across the country, all separate franchise businesses, there’s an understanding that each franchisee knows the business and knows the location, and fundamentally understands the importance of good customer experience in driving commercial value from the operation.

“The franchisees already had this flair for CX, but I wanted to put some structure around it and then make sure it was measurable and then turn it into part of the organisational culture,” he says.  

Discovering a certain ‘X Factor’ in the JAX business when it came to customer experience, Grossrieder said he was astounded at the way individual franchisees understood the link between profitability and customer experience.

In 2018, JAX Tyres & Auto embarked upon an ambitious program to make high-impact CX part of the business’ DNA by driving repeat purchases and supporting new customer acquisition. To do this, it partnered with InMoment to roll out a CX improvement initiative across the business.

“Bringing on InMoment, we could use the metrics to help us find out where we were going really well and where there were some blind spots,” Grossrieder explained. “Within a matter of months, it was amazing how quickly the franchisees gravitated to the change we were looking for with the CX program because teams actually already understood the link between the customer experience and the financial performance.”

Having real-time access to a combination of voice of customer, employee and franchisee insights helped the business identify opportunities to improve across the store network. Using InMoment’s technology, the JAX team was able to close the loop on customer challenges, with an added step of re-measurement.

There was significant benefit from having both the franchisees and the franchisor along with employees in head office engaged in the process of developing customer touchpoints for the CX program. “We were able to bring all that together to improve the customer flow from end to end,” Grossrieder said.

“We already had the customer information, we then introduced a re-measurement loop. And then we got feedback from the staff on how they were interacting with the customer and supporting the franchisee. The last touchpoint was InMoment developing a franchisee mechanism of touchpoint where every 12 months we pull information back out of the franchisees on how we can support them, and assist them with serving the customer."

Embracing a change mindset


In the past two years, JAX NPS has increased from 78 to 83, with franchisees rewarded and incentivised for customer-centric behaviours. The successful CX strategy is now set to be replicated globally by its parent company. The business has been able to demonstrate a solid link between better CX and store profitability, with repeat business up from 58 per cent in 2018 to 72 per cent this financial year.

Sales and EBITDA have exceeded targets with both growing by 20 per cent+ YoY for the past two years and, in May 2020, sales hit an all-time record (11 per cent higher than best), only to be surpassed in June (22 per cent higher).

Seeing the results of the program didn’t take long and it helped the franchisees embrace the program of change, Grossrieder said. “There was so little resistance and that was such a welcome surprise with this kind of program of change,” he said.  

The franchisees then quickly became protective of their CX standing, like NPS, and were even inclined to scrutinise changes coming from the top, on the basis that they may have been potentially detrimental to CX.  

“We have a very integrated digital channel that has thousands of unit prices on it in real time and customer impacts can flow into the store from any online changes,” he continued. 

As part of its strategic plan, JAX has identified that one of its business enablers is to create a customer-centric culture across the organisation. The next step is an ongoing program that sees it operationalise its approach to customer experience, Grossrieder said.  

“We will review on a regular basis our customer process flows. And with InMoment we will look to improve the current customer flow and look at how we can innovate for the customer,” he said. “Yes, we want great customer experience and we want to make sure the operation moves forward, but we really want to start thinking about where the customer experience goes. What are customers expecting moving forward? What is the innovation?”

“It’s about embedding that customer centrism into the DNA so that if anyone leaves the business or there’s a change, it’s just part of our business process and remains there.”

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