From soup to strategy: Campbell’s recipe for a winning digital workplace

Digital Workplace Impact – Episode 161: Transcript

Look to your data. It’s like a trail of breadcrumbs waiting to be discovered to go help the cause, right?

Nancy Goebel
Welcome to Digital Workplace Impact. Today, I am joined by James Krick, Director of Digital Workplace at The Campbell’s Company. James and team recently won DWG’s Award for Data-led Experience Management. And sharing this milestone moment with you felt like an important celebratory and sharing moment wherein we have a chance to dive into Campbell’s transformation journey; to uncover the strategies that set them apart and share some practical insights, which in combination are designed to inspire you based on the Campbell’s team’s innovative approaches, commitment to excellence, and putting purpose at the centre of their transformation journey. This is Nancy Goebel, your host and DWG’s Chief Executive Officer. Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by Digital Workplace Group.

Join me now in conversation with James. Happy listening!

James, welcome to the Digital Workplace Impact podcast studio. I have been so looking forward to this conversation. Of course, we have a chance to connect on a regular basis, but this feels like a special milestone moment. So thank you for taking time out of your day to come and chat for a bit.

James Krick
Thanks, Nancy. Let me first say it’s very exciting to be here and I really appreciate you having me on.

Nancy
It’s a pleasure and doubly so because the backdrop for this conversation is of course Campbell’s recent DWG award win. And it just felt like this would be an important moment to recognize you, the team, the organization, the story that’s wrapped around this – and to share some of the insights that have led to this culminating moment this year. And, of course, we know this is a step in a journey, it’s not a destination. And so the work continues and hopefully we can do a little bit of future-gazing together too. I guess the best place to start is to ask: ‘What did this award win mean for you and the team?’.

James
Sure, and yeah, it’s been a wild ride this year; it’s been pretty crazy, pretty great. But yeah, the DWG award, we’re extremely honoured and humbled. Certainly having an external party with such authority as DWG is worldwide is really a validation of the work that you do, winning this type of award for sure.

But it also serves as a motivator. So it kind of validates again that you’re on the right path – it’s motivating us to do even more, right? Because you get all excited. You want to keep going on the journey, as you mentioned. And then with that, it brings a lot of this positive attention and opens up more doors. You have other people knocking on your door because they want to hear what you have to say, but then you end up having two-way conversations and you’ve learned from them as well. So it’s just been opening a lot of doors of opportunity and excitement.

Nancy
I love the fact that you’re seeing this both as a milestone and an opportunity to learn and to connect with others. And that’s such a strategic way to think about it. And so let’s take a step back now and talk a little bit about the landscape at Campbell’s when this journey began and help us come away with a little bit of a snapshot moment in time. And then we can talk a little bit about the transformation that has unfolded since.

James
Going back a few years, the journey began with quite the land of opportunity, I would say. When I first joined the company, which was late 2019, customer SAT (CSAT) scores were low for my standards. It was in the lower 80 percentile. Market general best practices are somewhere above 85, right? The knowledge base was pretty stagnant, had no governance, articles never expired, there was no review cycle. So it was kind of ineffective.

There was not much in terms of meaningful SLAs, KPIs, even metrics. One of the first things I do when I walk into a new enterprise is I look for the oldest ‘still open’ ticket. It’s usually in the hundreds of days and this one was no different. I think the oldest ticket was, I don’t know, 200 and something days.

Nancy
And so clearly those were among the drivers to kick off a transformation. Anything else to round out that picture?

James
I mean, part of it to me is, well, that’s why I was hired, right? They were looking for subject matter experts, and I had spent the majority of my career – mostly in outsourcing, actually –in the digital workplace space and user services traditionally. And in the outsourcing world, it’s kind of wash, rinse, repeat. You come in, you see the lay of the land, you pull those levers of best practices and you drive that improvement. And so I kind of treated it in that fashion, if you will. But times change and those levers are all different, right? And so in this particular case, there were different levers for the transformation.

Nancy
What do you think are some of the most compelling results that you and the team and the organization have seen as a result of this transformation that was undertaken, starting back in 2019?

James
Well, first, let me talk a little bit about what those main levers were, right? And then the result. So introducing DAX digital employee experience was tantamount, right? The whole concept of putting the customer or the employee at the centre of the equation and not the technology, and then driving that relentless focus for improvement was huge, right?

Bringing in a digital experience management tool – we’ve actually had two, I won’t go into those details – but having a tool that focuses on digital experience is also critical because it yields the data that you need, the forensics to find and manipulate the issues, and the opportunities to do that widespread proactive remediation. And then, of course, the introduction of DEX scores, right? A digital experience score around the experience that that user is having with the digital technology.

And then, on top of that, we did some trailblazing. The space is somewhat, you could argue, still in its infancy. So there aren’t these industry standard service level agreements (SLAs) in place in this space. So we did our own trailblazing and came up with what we thought the SLAs and then even [slash] XLAs (experience level agreements) with our partner (because we’re outsourced), what those would look like, right? So that helped establish a kind of a north star of what looks good, then being able to drive toward that and then toward the continuous improvement. So then what results did that yield, right?

So I mentioned the journey started back when I started at Campbell’s in late 2019. So, fast forward to today, right? Whatever that is… the math… six years! So we’ve seen password resets year over year decline, like a stair step down over five years. Usually password resets are the number one reason why people call the desk; so that’s always low hanging fruit you want to go after. Similarly, over the course of those six years, incident volume, year over year – down. Contact volume into the desk, whether that’s chat, phone, email, portal, contact volume, went down dramatically year over year – so, more than 10% every year successively.

Mean time to resolve (MTTR) improved year over year. That’s kind of the stopwatch when someone does put in a ticket: the stopwatch starts when the ticket opens; the stopwatch ends when it closes. It never stops. MTTR’s not like an SLA where there’s holds involved. It’s open duration. So if the ticket goes over a weekend, those days count, those hours count. So that improved year over year.

And those CSAT scores I mentioned, at 80% when I walked in the door; the last three years they never went below 95, so 95 plus – so that’s all gravy! And then that whole concept of DEX scores, right? We’ve only been doing DEX scores for the last three years because we only had a DEX tool for the last three years. But we started around the low to mid 70s (70 in the Nexthink world – Nexthink is our digital experience management tool – 70 above is good, 70 below is bad, or below 70 is bad). So we started right around that baseline of 70. We now, over the last several months, are above 80. Just last October, last month, it was 86, which is arguably very high. They do have benchmarks – everybody who has the same tool can see the average score across all the enterprises. And the average is around the mid 70s. So 86 is pretty good and we’re pretty happy with those results. So collectively, yeah, a lot of glaring data points of improvement we can point to for sure.

Nancy
And it’s a story of driving performance, improving experience and the sentiment that gets wrapped around that. And that’s a powerful story. And of course, you know, we’ve done benchmarking on a practices level as an added component. So it helps bring together the picture of quantitative and qualitative snapshots around performance and progress towards what it looks like. And so I know for us watching this journey unfold, it’s been terrific to see not only those impacts around efficiency and efficacy, but also the employee experience as well. Anything to add in terms of impacts that we haven’t hit on?

James
Yeah, I’ll share with you one that we were forced into, I’ll say – but it ended up being a big deal. We do a four-year traditional PC refresh at Campbell’s, right? So, when somebody’s PC is at or beyond four years, we would replace their machine. And so I basically didn’t have enough budget to do that. So then the question became, OK, well, how do you decide who gets a new machine and who doesn’t? They do the lottery? What do you do?

So, we went back to the data: what is the data telling us? And we had heard some industry speak that said you could use DEX data as a means to decide whether or not it’s time to replace a PC. So we decided to dig into that data and we were blown away by what we found. We basically laid out kind of on a chart each year of a PC being a bar, if you will. And then what was the average DEX score across the span of those machines for year three, year four, year five, so on and so forth. And we found that, as you would think, the data basically said, sure, the DEX score for a year one machine is fantastic. In year two, it’s a little less. In year three, it’s a little less than that. And so it was a perfect stair step down. But the data also said there are PCs that are four years old, five years old, that really still have a superior DEX score.

And there’s an element of the DEX score called an endpoint score, which is your hardware score. And that one we took more seriously. If the endpoint score was above, again, that threshold of 70 – if the DEX score or the endpoint score was above 70, arguably that’s still a good experience for that user. And so we basically decided to take that four-year refresh model, which is traditional since the dawn of the PC in the 90s, and threw it out the window!

We started working on a philosophy that basically said, once the warranty is out (usually a laptop comes with a three-year warranty), after year three, if the DEX score or the endpoint score is below 70 for a continued period of time, maybe three to six months, that’s when we’re going to replace that PC. So if you think about it, the old model was predicated on this mathematical equation, just based on H, right? It didn’t really have value beyond that. And so basically now you’re entering the equation of a true data point of DEX score. It now considers it as a persona or use case where somebody that is a user-light person, be it a salesperson – I don’t want to box any particular group – but there are users that don’t bang the crap out of their PCs versus power users who will really maximize that machine. So basically, the data ended up telling us that with a four-year refresh for 8,000 machines that I support in the environment, we were replacing 2,000 machines a year. And looking at the data in this new lens, if you will, basically said, well, we could do 500 to 600 machines less per year. And that 500 to 600 machines less translated to half a million dollars in savings. So we were only looking for our budget shortfall, but then we actually found a bigger bucket of savings or kind of cost deference, if you will, which was pretty huge!

Nancy
So the culmination of this DEX data is informing both experience-level decisions of the individual and portfolio-level decisions that support enterprise agendas, like being risk-smart number one, but also optimizing the use of resources and the duration of those resources, and translating that into cost and operational efficiencies because that’s saving money for a period of time on the refreshes but also the overhead that goes with ordering, enabling, distributing those as well. So those are the hidden costs that are not captured in this paradigm but add to that number you’ve just described. So, you know, it’s to a factor. `

And I think this is one of the interesting patterns that we’re seeing in the digital workplace. This idea that data-driven decisions are allowing for a better approach to managing this portfolio, the ecosystem, the experience that individuals have within that. And that’s been a moment of levelling up for the digital workplace and the digital employee experience associated with that. And it really feels like we are poised to see even more strategic value coming out of the digital workplace as a strategic component, not only of the employee value proposition, but the supporting and enabling elements of the workplace. And so that’s a pretty big ‘aha moment’ for the team.

Have there been any others that you would want to point to, whether they were part of the awards story or have come about since, because I think this data-driven approach just really denotes a paradigm shift and there may have been other things that you want to share as a call out?

James
Yeah, well, believe it or not, the one we just talked about was done as I described out of necessity due to budget constraints. So at the time, I didn’t think of it as an ‘aha moment’, to be quite honest with you. Just a few weeks ago, actually last month, Bill Francesconi on my team, who runs the modern device platform space where DEX falls under for me, he and I were invited to share our DEX journey at Campbell’s at the Nexthink conference. Nexthink is my DEM (digital experience monitoring) tool and they have an annual conference and it’s a big deal. And so we were very honoured. Again, this is going back to that this year has really been crazy and the stuff keeps feeding itself.

But we basically had a breakout session where we were asked to share the journey at Campbell’s. And so I had this chart that I described to you that showed this whole concept of pivoting to managing our PC refresh by DEX score. And it was a surreal moment because that’s where when I got to this slide, all the cameras came out, right? You’re standing up on stage and there’s people out there and you’re in the moment and then you’re just talking through it. And all these cameras came out and people are snapping! And that’s where for me, that’s where the ‘aha moment’ was. I was just doing it because I had a problem and I needed to find a solution to fix the problem. I didn’t at the time – forest for the trees – I didn’t think of it as this big deal of paradigm shift. And so, when the cameras came out, that’s when I was like, wow, this is a bigger deal than I really thought. And then after that, I got a lot of questions about it. And people were interested to use that scenario to help justify getting a digital experience management tool in place.

I had the luxury that my boss did a great job of drinking the Kool-Aid, knowing that DEX was a big deal and helping to justify and get that tool in. I didn’t have a lot of work to do (that actually failed at my last company, trying to get a DEX tool in the environment – I couldn’t convince my CIO). I didn’t have that problem at Campbell’s with my leadership. But other companies might have that challenge, right? It’s not cheap. So the example of that ‘aha moment’ of the cameras coming out and then the questions that ensued about ‘Talk to me more about the cost savings. How did that work?’. A lot of people were starting to use that as a means to cost-justify getting a DEM tool in-house, let alone all the other benefits we just talked about.

Nancy
And I know just having been part of the judging panel and of course being connected day to day, that the team’s work has also attracted attention from organizations like SustainableIT and led to a special call-out as part of Climate Week in New York. And I think it’s worthy of signposting that vignette as well. So, tell us about the significance of that moment for you, the team and for Campbell’s.

James
Sure, thank you. First, let me give a shout-out to Kerry O’Donnell, because without her, I probably never would have even been able to go down that path, right? So Kerry turned me on to an organization called SustainableIT.org. It’s made up of IT people from companies around the world, usually executives. And basically, the intent is to put this kind of global harmony and focus toward sustainability focused within the IT sphere, if you will. So she not only introduced me to that org, but she turned me on to the sustainability concepts and opportunities that there are in the IT space.

The only thing we were doing before that was, like most companies actually do now, we dispose of our hardware in an environmentally sound fashion by working with a vendor that’s usually certified in that regard. But that’s kind of easy and it’s what everybody else does. It’s just kind of the norm, right? The membership at SustainableIT.org connected me – kind of like DWG connects me to all these SMEs and peers around the organization, right – they connected me with different SMEs in the sustainable IT world. One of the ones that I met was a gentleman from a company that basically, again, equitably disposes of PCs and equipment in a socially correct manner. But in just speaking with him, we shared, again, that whole concept of PC refresh by DEX. And that captivated his attention – but he saw beyond the cost elements, he was more focused on the sustainability impacts of it. You’re getting more life out of the machine, so you’re not disposing of them.

The analogy in my head is kind of like a used car; we were just talking about kids in their cars, right? Buying a new car for a kid going off to college – me personally, as a dad, I’m not going to go buy a brand new off-the-line model, because with a new driver, there’s odds and percentages of getting into a fender bender at a younger age. And so you want to get a used car, probably with a certain amount of miles, that kind of thing. And so, there’s a certain type of car that you’re looking for… bringing that back to PCs, and talking about what we mentioned, there are certain users that use their machine in a certain way that the life of that PC will last longer. And then even when you work with organizations like this, they might reuse those PCs before throwing them in dump, right? You might be able to get them to schools. There might be different use cases that can still get value out of that PC. And so it’s better for the environment. And it goes to all those other tangible ancillary ways, the labour and all that other stuff lessens as well.

And so he was captivated by this. He actually was the one who was doing a speaking engagement at the New York Climate Week. And he asked, can I share that at Climate Week and use your slide? And I was like, absolutely, because he was more evangelizing the concept of the sustainability benefits and the impacts on energy consumption and CO₂ emissions and less in the dumps, if you will. And so he looked at it from a totally different angle than I had even thought of.

Nancy
It’s a ‘yes and ‘moment and a powerful one at that, especially when you stop and think about how many CIOs, executive teams and boards are now looking at the explosions of data and energy consumption tied to the use of AI. And as we see more organizations become either AI immigrants or natives, as it were, the importance of looking at sustainability, not just cost savings, becomes increasingly important in the overall portfolio and experience management, and so quite another significant ‘aha’. Have we missed any in the current story to be shared, James?

James
There is one more related to the sustainability. So, again going back to the data, going into Nexthink and looking at the data, we discovered that our user base were basically leaving their machines on perpetually, kind of like phones. You know, when do you shut off your phone? When do you reboot your phone? You don’t. But the operating system on a PC is not the same as a phone, so it actually wants to be shut down when you’re done for the end of the day, or a reboot, right? And there’s benefits around that. You flush the memory. There’s a whole host of reasons why. A lot of times when you get a tech and say ‘I got problems’, what’s the first thing that tech does? A tech reboots and you’re like, I could have done that! Well, you should have done that! So rebooting is kind of a common practice but I think with tablets and phones that are more perpetual leave-on devices with different OSs, this habit of leaving my PC on perpetually came about. So we basically created a campaign, a PC reboot campaign. We did a video – and I know you’ve seen some of our videos, we’ve shared some of those – but some of those in-house one-minute, two-minute informational videos of the reasons why you want to reboot or at the end of the day turn off your PC. So again, there’s benefits of that from improvement of the PC performance, DEX score, if you will. But then there’s the sustainability. If your PC’s off, well, guess what? You might save money on your electric bill, those carbon emissions – all of that improves as a result.

We’re still in pilot with that, I’ll be honest. So I have a baseline of CO₂ emissions and energy consumption, and my hope and guess, like I’ve seen in other stuff that we’ve talked about, is there’ll be a cause and effect, right? We’ll do this campaign with a pop-up – if you have left your machine on for more than seven days, you’ll get a pop-up that basically says ‘Hey, you haven’t rebooted your machine or turned off your machine in seven days’. You’ll have a link to that video I mentioned of educating them why, not just do it but basically encouraging them to do it. I think we’re toying with the frequency of, do we just be nice about it and then ask them to do it at the end of the day? If they don’t do it, should we force it on them? Because at some point, we kind of have to. We want to do that, but walk that tightrope between being annoying and yielding a good user experience. So we’re still in beta. But that’s one of the ones we’re going after that we definitely think there will be in the metrics a cause and effect where sustainability metrics will improve as a result of this.

Nancy
And helping people see the impact of doing that, both at an individual level and then accumulatively, starts to really help inform behaviour change and sustain that behaviour change just to pull the concept forward. And so, to my mind, I think it’s vitally important as you have successive generations of the campaign, to drop in the total impact that employees have achieved and maybe even throw out a challenge to get to a target state. Just like when we were talking about client satisfaction scores, right? The goal was to go from a certain level to a benchmark, gold standard benchmark. And so gamifying this could, well, have an important part in changing individual and collective behaviour. So I’ll be excited to see what you do with that little nugget, James.

James
Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it.

Nancy
And so that could be one of the things that’s next for the digital workplace and the digital employee experience. Any other exciting initiatives on the horizon that you can share with us?

James
Yeah, so hot off the presses for us, everything today is AI, right? And AI is changing the world at an incredibly rapid pace. Today at Campbell’s, AI is like a lot of companies, we put in guardrails, we don’t want people and our data exposed out to the world. So we kind of have AI in a box within the company with the guardrails. But it’s a subset of the company.

And so we’re monitoring people’s patterns, usages where we’re educating. But basically leadership has said ‘Hey, we’re watching from our end what other companies are doing, what the world’s doing.’ And we feel like we do need to make AI access available to all the employees in the company. So that’s a big deal, right? Because the subset is probably less than half the company right now.

It’s going to be a big undertaking as far as educating people and showing them the value and then seeing what that value is and generative AI and learning from itself. It’s exciting times for sure, but that’ll be a biggie for us.

I mentioned this Nexthink conference we went to last month. And so at these annual conferences, they usually unveil the latest modules and the newest features – so they have a lot of AI infusion into their tool, which has us excited. So from two ends with the Nexthink, one is there’s a module that allows us to view the data usage and the adoption of the AI. So it’s kind of hand-in-hand, great timing with the fact that we want to expand this to the rest of the environment. We’ll be able to see really, really good data of the adoption, how people are using it. Are they using the right tools? Should we block certain tools? Those types of things.

And then there’s an aspect of it as well where we do have IT support people leverage Nexthink as a means of problem determination and then sometimes remediation. And now they’ve introduced AI prompting where you can just, instead of clicking and looking for a dashboard and mining through dashboards and data, you can actually just go to a prompt like AI and say, you know, ‘What are the top three things that negatively impact Nancy’s machine?’ And it’ll boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, right? It’ll not only pop up those, but it’ll probably give you resolution recommendations and things like that. So huge, huge potential game changers.

And then the last one I’ll mention is – and this one I’m starting to get pushed: ‘You’ve been saying this for a couple of months, James, get it out there!’ But we’re looking to unveil in the next couple of months – finally – the ‘Self-service DEX’, I call it. So basically, we’re a big Teams shop in Campbell’s, so we’re envisioning on the left-hand part of the screen on Teams, there’s a bar of buttons; we’re looking to put a DEX button where a user can click on that and they’ll see a screen that basically shows them their DEX score. And we’ll put in explanations of what a good versus a bad score is, those pillars of a DEX score. And then off to the side of that, kind of stoplight green, yellow, red scenario colours against certain key items that impact, like the one I mentioned, the reboot. When’s the last time you rebooted? If it’s more than seven days, that’ll show up red. Are you almost out of disk space? The common things we would find of driving a good or bad experience for that machine or the DEX, right? And if they show up red or yellow, there’ll be a ‘fix it’ button right next to it and they’ll be able to push that button and self-initiate that remediation action. And that will in turn drive up their DEX score and improve the things that are possibly hurting them in their digital experience.

Nancy
And that is teaching them to look for the right data points; it’s empowering them to be part of the solution and a building block for what’s next, so it’s a very powerful window into what’s coming next – and I certainly appreciate you sharing that.

I guess we’re fast approaching the end of our time together and I’d be remiss not to ask you what advice you want to leave our listeners with, whether it’s those starting their digital transformation journey or those who are well on their way. I’ll leave it to you to pick your audience – but let’s make this conversation actionable and leave that as a parting thought and any other final reflections you may want to cap off our time together with.

James
I hope it doesn’t sound clichéd but: Look to your data; it’s like a trail of breadcrumbs waiting to be discovered to go help the cause. Certainly embrace DEX, digital employee experience. You’ve got to put your customer – your employee – at the centre of everything you do and drive that digital experience to a better place in a continuous improvement fashion.

And then, yeah, for me – and for us, Campbell’s – bringing in a digital experience management tool is like (and again, I hope this doesn’t sound clichéd), it’s like turning the light bulb on in a dark room. It shows you data you never had access to before, and it not only shows you that data, but it gives you the means to drive that proactive remediation and continuous improvement.

So those are the things that I will share for my peers out there. But overall, Nancy, I do want to sincerely thank you for having me here. I enjoyed this. It went so fast.

Nancy
It’s amazing how our time together always does.

James
It’s very enjoyable. I usually look at the clock while I’m talking, and I hadn’t this whole time. And I’m looking at it now. I’m like, wow, that went fast! I feel like we’ve only been on here for 15 minutes. So, very enjoyable. Thank you, Nancy.

Nancy
Well, you know it’s a pleasure for me. I always enjoy being in conversation with you, and to be able to do this in a shareable format is an added bonus. And so looking forward to continuing the conversation on all levels, but I have to pause for a moment to say a big thank you for joining me in the studio together and, of course, to be continued.

James
… to be continued. Thank you, Nancy.

Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by the Digital Workplace Group. DWG is a strategic partner covering all aspects of the evolving digital workplace industry, not only through membership, but also benchmarking and boutique consulting services. For more information, visit digitalworkplacegroup.com.