[00:00:02] Sebastian: You're listening to the Insightful Connections podcast. Our guest today is Nithi Kumar. Nithi is Global Head of Experience Solutions and CX Growth for North American APAC at Kantar. Kantar is the world's leading marketing data and analytics business and an indispensable brand partner to the world's top companies, including 96 of the world's 100 largest advertisers. Prior to joining Kantar, Nithi was leading CX for Telnor Group in Asia, one of the largest communication service providers. In his 13 years at Telnor, he held various positions across various countries, including Norway, Serbia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bangkok, developing and executing marketing and CX transformation strategies. Nithi, thank you for being on the podcast today.

[00:00:42] Nithi: Thank you for having me, Seb. This is super exciting.

[00:00:46] Sebastian: So I'd like to start with this context setting question to understand a little bit more about you and the sounds like very global journey that you've taken in this industry. How did you originally get into market research and how has that accounted for the places you've gone in the years since?

[00:01:22] Nithi: Oh, yeah, fantastic. After I graduated with my bachelor's, before I did my MBA, I interned in TNS, which was the formerly known content, right, Taylor Nelson Software. So yes, I started for about a year, six months in TNS, and then I moved on to product marketing, segment marketing, and so on and so forth at a communication service provider in Malaysia. And then 17 years later, I find myself back in the research world, which essentially again, with the work that we do in Kantar right now, it's literally becoming a departure to research Sebastian, we are actually now working more with managing how insights are interpreted into decision making, rather than just focusing on the research per se.

[00:02:09] Sebastian: That's interesting. If you can flesh that out a little bit more, what does that look like for Kantar?

[00:02:13] Nithi: Essentially what we do now is there's so much data already available to anyone out there who wants to make a decision or an informed decision on anything, right? A lot of companies have such powerful CRM setups, database setups, that they have their own mining capabilities in terms of business intelligence. So what we do then is to bring value by leveraging our global scale. For example, Sebastian, like sitting in Malaysia, supporting a program in Mexico, that is looking at how to unpack retail journeys with best in class practices. So finding a way to see what works, what hasn't worked in other parts of the world, because borders don't exist. So our insights that we provide to a client, obviously one element of it is the primary research that we conduct with the customers or non customers of a particular brand or category, but majority of it is through expertise, Sebastian. So it's the people behind the research that actually makes a lot of difference to how we are working and delivering value with Kantar.

[00:03:15] Sebastian: All right, very interesting move by Kantar. So I was really taken in by an article that you recently wrote called The Experience Paradox, right? And the idea behind it is kind of challenging some orthodoxy around some sort of fundamentals of customer experience. And you're the CX expert, so you can jump in and let me know if I'm off anywhere here, but kind of challenging the historical focus on satisfaction scores and maybe arguing that there are more important things to be measuring. So maybe a good way into this discussion is to just sort of ask you, why aren't satisfaction scores all they're cracked up to be?

[00:03:51] Nithi: Very good question. When you talk about satisfaction scores, are you referring to customer satisfaction as a question and a KPI, Sebastian, or are you talking about total CX KPIs?

[00:04:01] Sebastian: Let's talk about customer satisfaction as a question.

[00:04:04] Nithi: All right. Yeah. Okay. So for me personally, right? Customer satisfaction, as far as I know, and I've been trained in CX throughout my life, it has been a traditional measure for physical service experiences. What I mean by that is either it's contact center or retail, right? So the customer satisfaction is you're asking a customer like you and me, how satisfied we are with the services rendered. So in today's world where customer experience has become multidimensional, a satisfaction score in itself doesn't tell you the full picture. In fact, it doesn't even tell you a part of the picture of the entire story of CX, Sebastian. Again, when we're asking satisfaction, you're asking based on drivers or satisfaction that you set for your service quality index or whatever. So when you're driving service levels in your business, whether it's in your retail store, whether it's a contact center, you are focusing on an inside out matrix, whereas when we talk about customer experience now, a lot of customers look at service as hygiene, especially with Gen Z, Gen Alpha customers of today and of tomorrow. These young generation, they're used to services, they grew up with services. So for them, they're looking for the next best customer experience in order to decide where they're spending. So for us, that's why we say stop focusing on a particular score, whether you're higher or lower than your next best competitor, start focusing on what you are doing and delivering different than your next competitor.

[00:05:40] Sebastian: This comes into the concept that I think you wrote about and that Kantar has been introducing, right? Is this idea of meaningful difference. And I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about what meaningful difference is and why it's so powerful as an idea.

[00:05:53] Nithi: I'm very, very happy that I'm able to unpack the Kantar meaningful difference salient framework and have that connect the dot between what you say, which is what you promised to your customers or create expectations of and what you deliver, which is what customers experience of your brand, right? So what you say and what you do. So the meaningful different framework in particular, the analysis that we do with the approach that we have in Kantar is we look at how a brand is providing meaningfulness to meet its customers' needs in a very relevant way that creates an emotional bond with the customer. It's all about resonance, how well the brand fits into the customer's lives and values. And then in talk about difference is how well the brand is standing out against competition, whether it's through innovation, through personality, through unique positioning, it's about distinctiveness and trend setting. So how much you resonate with your customer, which is what meaning is and how distinct you are to your customer and how you're setting trends of the X versus meeting hygiene factors. So that explains how meaningful and different actually to us humanizes customer experience. We see a lot of brands talking about humanizing customer experience. You went from industrial economy to knowledge economy, and now we are in an experience economy. And I think that's the crux of it all. When we talk about all these concepts on humanized CX or human experiences, trying to understand how to create one-to-one experiences, personalized experiences, and I think what we are able to then finally crack the code on what it means to actually do human experiences is you need to create a meaning and a difference. By doing so, you then forge a trusted, winning relationship with your customer or even with any each other.

[00:07:46] Sebastian: There are some examples of brands that you, Kantar, have pointed at and said, this is an example of a brand that has really delivered on the idea of meaningful difference. And it's positioned it such that it's able to challenge incumbents in their space, regardless of maybe the high degree of satisfaction that those incumbents and maybe the increasing degree of satisfaction that those incumbents are measuring. They're still losing market share to challengers that are effectively able to provide this meaningful difference that you're talking about. I'm wondering if you can walk me through a couple of examples of meaningful difference Meaningful difference done right from a customer experience lens.

[00:08:31] Nithi: I think, you know, for example, we have the partnership that we have with Virgin Atlantic in the UK, with Orange in the UK that we have won multiple awards with. So let me just give an example with Orange Telco, right, in the UK. As a brand, it's promised on delivering the best communication services, right? And that's built on data, network, internet. And hence, the promise and how it's being delivered through its different touchpoints and journeys. I think what we found is that the CMO is able to then look at the total picture of the customer journey, whether it's the customer journey, which is an outside inflip of processes, right? So the leaders of the business are able to identify through the meaningful different framework, which of these touchpoints is creating meaning and difference that resonates with what the brand stands for. Because at the end of the day, your brand, your communication is what customers perceive that you're able to offer. Your touchpoints and journeys is how they then experience that. So through understanding which of these different elements of your brand or the signals that your brand provides customer, you're able to then connect the dots between where you're strong on your meaning and when you're on the others where you're not strong on meaning or difference. You are able to then connect the dot between your OPEX and your CAPEX in terms of where you invest your priorities from a technology point of view, from a personnel point of view, and so on and so forth. So an example of that is exactly as I said, in terms of bridging the gap on the digital services provided by Orange and ensuring that again, in a space where you have multiple different digital players, right? The tech codes out there that are grabbing revenue market share, even on the multisim channel, right? You have all these different eSIM providers that are able to now provide a seamless experience for travelers. Orange is able to now compete and provide meaningful difference for roaming, for example. That's an example where we are able to see meaningful difference come into play. Another simple and classic example of that, which I truly, truly love is during my time in Bangladesh, Sebastian, I worked there for three years and that's one of the first places where I started driving customer experience. And Bangladesh, this was like, what, 12 years ago, one of the more maturing markets in the world where we are still a lot below the poverty line. And I'm sure our customers, if we have listeners out there from Bangladesh, it's such an amazing country, amazing diversity in the different customers or the different population of the country. However, there's a lot of them who are not able to afford the next meal. And again, Bangladesh is ridden by the monsoon. The country is sinking year on year, unfortunately, due to climate change. And before this, monsoons wreaked havoc on people's lives. And in order to afford a feature phone, a simple device to make calls between families, it takes a lot of money, a lot of savings, a lot of debt for that person to buy. And when the rain hits hard, floods happen, they lose their little investment on their device. So what we did was back then, we had a very simple thing in another country in Asia, Thailand, if you've ever been Sebastian, you know that they celebrate Songkran, which is the Thai New Year, where they splash water as a act of celebration during the Thai New Year. Now, everyone who celebrates in Thailand, I'm sure you remember and you recognize this. Every brand provides a little plastic hanging thing that is on your chest that you wear across your body to protect your passport or your handphone or whatever, without getting affected by the water damage. We took a bunch of those, got it shipped over from Bangladesh, started distributing it across our retail shops to anyone and anyone who wanted to protect their phones from the rain. That little act of providing protection to a simple device by a person that is not able to easily afford protection to those devices against the environment of the monsoon created so much meaning, resonated so much across the country. It picked up multiple different media attentions. It got such recognition for providing personal care for someone that we are not just focusing on digging up revenue across the different customer bases, but actually trying to help them protect their assets. And that is another example of how we see meaning and difference make a huge factor. It doesn't have to be expensive. It doesn't have to be fancy. It's a human touch that gives that edge for the customers to remember and give us that winning growth in our business strategies, Sebastian.

[00:13:24] Sebastian: I really like that example and it helps crystallize for me almost a framework for thinking about meaningful difference. And I think even as market researchers, we can be thinking about this in our approach to our own customers, right? It's almost like if you put some thought into doing something you don't have to do that means something to your customers, you are most of the way there. I hope that's doing justice to your framework.

[00:13:50] Nithi: Fantastic, Sebastian. That's exactly what it is. We're giving it a bit of thought that you generally would not think that this would work because you're so used to sort of the business mindset, right? We're all trying to do what's within the mandates that we're given. But when we think of the customer as another human being, then how does that person want to understand and create resonance with our brand? You nailed it in terms of going that extra mile.

[00:14:16] Sebastian: So what are some other ideas for how companies can operationalize this idea of creating meaningful difference in their space?

[00:14:23] Nithi: I think it's as simple as understanding which of the drivers that are within your brand architecture, your brand promise, right? So what is driving your brand forward? What are your key values that you want your customers to know this is what you stand for? And looking at those, you understand whether that's the drivers that are tagged to meaning or those are drivers that are giving you a difference against the rest of the category and then operationalizing that through everything that you practice and do. Even for example, when you talk about contact center, how meaningful is your contact center experience or is it just a run of the mill IVR? Are you making customers getting lost in your processes in order to not reach your agent in order to make sure that you're reducing costs on your end? Or are you really using your agents to provide that additional next best experience that they cannot get from another competitor in the category? So I think operationalizing it cuts across the difference element, not just within these touch points or journeys, but also within culture, Sebastian, it's how meaningful and different is your company culture versus somewhere else, because that really helps you totally become truly customer centric. Awesome.

[00:15:38] Sebastian: Nithi, one last question on more of a personal front. What keeps you motivated?

[00:15:42] Nithi: Doing what I do, Sebastian, probably sound corny, but I'm glad when I think again, coming back to my time when I was in markets like Bangladesh, Pakistan, whatever, sitting and working in markets where as in a telco, there are a lot of the conversations is on revenue market share, when we are able to look at reload dollar by the second, you know, like which region, which cluster is driving revenue, which is not, why, so on and so forth. Customer experience puts heart back into business. I think that resonates strongly with my personal values. I believe in being kind, I believe in being confident, and I believe in a combination of both that really makes a difference in terms of how we manage day to day life. And I think that is something that I find motivating in the job that I do now with Kanta or other just rather with CX, because you are putting back kindness out there, you are trying to make someone's lives a little bit better on that day or that week. So that whether it generates value in terms of finance, of course, that's what we're all working for, right? We want to drive business value. But in order to get business value that is sustainable, you do then start with the basic human value. And I think that's what keeps me motivated in my current role. And hopefully in the future, as I keep driving CX forward, Sebastian.

[00:17:05] Sebastian: Customer experience puts heart back into business. You heard it here first, folks, Nithi, I think you should print that one out on your business card. That's an awesome quote.

[00:17:13] Nithi: Thank you. You know, I'm going to put it into my LinkedIn bio. I love that. Thank you. Yeah.

[00:17:20] Sebastian: All right. Nithi, thanks so much for being on the show. It was a great conversation.

[00:17:23] Nithi: Thank you, Sebastian. It was truly an honor and I loved reflecting a little bit on CX and on my own personal journey as well. Thank you.