Embracing the Power of Omnichannel Experience

“In the end, it’s just marketing.”

Keith Barber, Director of Digital Customer Experience at Tyson Foods shared the stage with Managing Partner Paul Lima during a presentation at Digital Food & Beverage 2023 on What to Do After you’ve Built your Digital Foundation: A Manufacturer’s Perspective in Delivering World-class Experience and Loyalty

Keith is the first person at Tyson to hold his title – and he isn’t alone. Over 75% of the audience we polled at the conference were also the first in their organization to hold their title. Being a visionary isn’t easy.

Before Keith started in his new position, Tyson struggled to get the ball rolling on anything digital. There were a “trail of bodies” that had dared to venture down the digital path but nobody had succeeded in breaking the inertia or building a business case for digital. Keith inherited a website and not much else.

Early on in the journey, Tyson began a partnership with Lima Consulting Group. Tyson sough out LCG to provide a roadmap for a digital foundation and a digital strategy. Using the LCG Balanced Scorecard and Digital Transformation Maturity Model, Keith was able to define what digital meant at Tyson and define a way to keep score.

The LCG Loyalty Funnel

Using a new metric, Digital Marketing’s Contribution to Sales, Keith was able to transtition away from “having a bake sale outside the front door to raise money for technology”. With a proven methodology and business case in hand, the inertia began to break and accelerating a digital foundation became realistic at Tyson.

Tyson’ s data readiness posture progress from 2018 – 2023, mapped on the LCG Curve of Automation

Together, LCG and Tyson continued to craft an omni-channel customer journey further down the acqusition & conversion funnel. “When we started the process we knew maybe 8,000 customers. Today, over 200,000 are actively engaged.” With the top of the funnel capabilities activated, Tyson began to seek ways to find its customers more efficiently and build effective ways to influence their path to purchase.

One of the insights Keith shared was the value of being okay to seek alternatives to digital in parts of the customer journey where it just doesn’t make sense. “98% of our customers say they want to be digital, until they don’t. They’ll entertain your chat function for about two minutes, until that doesn’t give the answer. And then they start hitting the zero button on the phone and want to talk to a person. So we’re really thinking through the approach to the customer experience, and making sure we show up right for that customer.”

Tyson strengthened the purchasing intent of its customers across the market with an accelerated content velocity and high-quality customer experiences, all driven by an increased data readiness posture. However, there’s a difference between a short-term customer and a loyal customer. The value of a dedicated customer is exceptionally high, especially in Tyson’s margin-slim business.

Seeking to drive loyalty, Tyson once again turned to its partnership with Lima Consulting Group. LCG conducted a multi-departmental, multi-disciplinary design thinking workshop to help Tyson uncover the loyalty-driving value it could offer to its customers. Reflecting on the use of design thinking at Tyson, Keith said:

“Whether you sell B2B or B2C, you certainly sell B2H – business to human. Design thinking really moved the needle and helped us empathize with the customer. I see it moving beyond my group and into other groups, whether it be the sales team, and other customer facing teams…that we are starting with customers, and we’re changing the way we think about our marketing. We’re putting their needs first, we’re starting with their needs and deliberately invoking empathy at every step of our process to design customer experiences that makes their lives better and easier.”

Tyson is re-writing the playbook in its industry. One-size fits all loyalty is no longer relevant. “This is really very little about technology. It’s all about process – a lot more about change management and people.”

LCG offered free assessments to conference attendees on data readiness and content supply chain. We’re excited to continue to offer the assessments through the end of the Summer of 2023. Free Assesment Posted in BLOG