Beaurepaires and inQuba: Embracing Customer Centricity

Australian National tyre retail chain Beaurepaires uses inQuba’s real-time Customer Experience (CX) management solutions to enable them to know what their customers really want – and how to give it to them.

For Rob Lewis, vice president of Beaurepaires, a network of 230 Australian tyre retail outlets owned by Goodyear, the idea of customer centricity was something the company desired, but didn’t really know how to go about implementing. Lewis’s first step towards achieving this was to decide who they wanted to be as a company. But as he soon discovered, it’s very easy to put the concept of customer centricity into a PowerPoint – but another thing entirely to actually bring it to life!

This was four years ago in 2014, and while at the time the company was using a global reporting tool that adhered to international standards, it didn’t provide them with the collaborative service recovery mechanisms that they needed, in order to do what was important – recreate customer experiences. “We weren’t putting our people in a position where we could guarantee to respond to 100% of customer enquiries, and that was our mandate,” Lewis explains.

Knowing where you’re succeeding – and where you could improve

This problem led them to engage with and implement inQuba, a real-time CX management solution set, across their business. “The biggest gain for us in using inQuba was understanding what the customer not only thought about us, but how they reacted to that shopping experience we were providing,” Lewis says. Since the inQuba implementation, Beaurepaires is able to receive summaries of customers’ experiences with the brand. This, in turn, enables him and his team to understand what the company is getting right – and what they need to improve on.

But business transformations can be challenging. At the start of their inQuba journey, Beaurepaires had around 900 staff who had what Lewis calls a “garage mentality” – that is, they were solely focused on running a workshop. His challenge was to transition this workforce into a retail environment where staff would meet, greet and qualify the customer, delight them, and then follow up with them afterwards.

A seismic shift in company culture

Today, the inQuba platform lets Lewis and his team understand exactly what their customers are saying to them, and they’ve adapted their retail operations on the back of these learnings. Their NPS (Net Promoter Score), for example, has moved from 65 in 2014 to 78 today. “We’ve actually seen a higher level of store manager engagement – our managers understand what customers are telling us and they’re responding positively to that,” says Lewis. From a cultural point of view, he says there’s been a seismic shift among his store managers of what the concept of customer centricity really means, and how to deliver it.

In terms of their specific inQuba programme implementation, the company has aligned the tool’s survey questions to their four-step sales process, and then make changes accordingly. “When we see, for example, that the delta on a particular step comes off the boil, we actually run national training programmes via conference calls and online to try and correct that parameter,” explains Lewis. This is the type of business agility required by the businesses of today who choose to put the customers’ voice at the centre of everything.

Practically and strategically, Lewis and his team first rolled out a five-store pilot. They then used the testimonials from those store managers to roll out changes nationally.

The future is online

As for the future for their CX and NPS Management, Beaurepaires is in the process of taking their business online. “We have an ecommerce programme that we recently rolled out, and we see the Net Promoter Score as an opportunity in the checkout process for online sales,” Lewis says.

In terms of the company’s relationship with inQuba, Lewis says it’s both strategic and a partnership, because they’re now seeing that it’s a long-term play. “They listen, they’re responsive – we have a great relationship,” he ends.

For Beaurepaires, implementing inQuba into their business marked the start of gaining real knowledge – and therefore real success – from learning about who their customer really is, and what they really want, and making those insights visible to the right areas of the business.