Paul Tayler joins Knowde to share his insights on the massive opportunities at hand for greater reach, connection, and engagement with customers, following shifting customers expectations.
Read the transcript.
Ali Amin-Javaheri: Hello and welcome everyone. I’m your host, Ali, CEO and co-founder of Knowde, the leading digital customer experience platform for chemicals and ingredients. Our goal with this series is to share the perspectives that you need to navigate the changing digital landscape in our industry.
We have another amazing guest with us today, and I can’t wait to get started. I’m thrilled to welcome Paul Tayler, CEO of Nexeo Plastics. As I’m sure you all know, Nexeo Plastics is a leading global plastic resin distributor representing quality products from the world-class suppliers. Nexeo Plastics goes beyond traditional logistics and provides many, many services including material selection, support, application development, process optimization, supply chain optimization, and much, much more. They exist to help you solve your material challenges. I’m so glad to have Paul here. I’ve known Paul for a while. He’s an amazing human being.
Paul, anything else about Nexeo or yourself that you want to share before we get started?
Paul Tayler: Firstly, thanks for inviting me, Ali. It’s great to be invited on one of these podcasts. I’ve seen a lot of other podcasts you’ve done. They’re all great.
In terms of Nexeo, this year is actually our 50th anniversary, so it’s a special year. We have been around a long time. I would say innovation is part of our DNA. As a distributor, you constantly have to reinvent yourself in terms of how you can add more value to your customers, to your suppliers, and also internally with your employees as well. We’ve been looking and trying to lead in terms of innovations, use of technology, and things like that. It’s an exciting time for us. I’ve been in the CEO role for three years. Prior to that, I was running our operations in Europe. Thanks for inviting me.
Ali Amin-Javaheri: We’re going to jump right in. I’m going to ask the same three questions that our audience cares to hear about the most. Let’s kick it off with the first one.
We’re seeing and noticing lots of changes in both the supplier community and with distributors in that they’re increasing investments in their digital capabilities, especially related to customer-facing initiatives. Many folks invested a lot in ERP over the years, and now they’re shifting their focus more to the tech that their customers engage with. What’s the biggest opportunity for Nexeo Plastics from your perspective when it comes to digital?
Paul Tayler: We’ve been using ERP and CRM systems for a long, long time so we’ve been engaged. I think there’s a massive opportunity now though to get 1) greater reach and 2) greater connection, greater engagement, and deeper relationship building. We want to actually get as far forward as we can in terms of the purchasing cycle with our customers. As you mentioned in your intro, that involves product selection. So the easier you can make it for people to access information, the earlier in that process you can get in terms of engaging, the better chance you’ve got in terms of doing more business. So greater reach, greater engagement. Also with that is speed.
I’d say this gives us a great opportunity, one to provide what we call the easy button. It’s very complicated. We are a global distributor. We have more than 20,000 different products that we sell globally. We have more than 10,000 active customers globally. That’s quite a complex scenario to manage.
We need to try and make it as straightforward, as simple, as easy as we possibly can for our customers to get the information they need, so there’s no interruption in terms of that process: end-to-end selecting a product, getting advice, getting information right through to – is that product available? How can I order it? Can I check if it’s being delivered? Where is it? – So right end-to-end.
I think there’s a huge opportunity for us to really take that to a different level now, and that’s one of the areas we’ve been paying close attention to and investing in over the last few years, as I’ve discussed with you in the past.
Ali Amin-Javaheri: You’ve nailed it. From our perspective, there are still a lot of suppliers and distributors that are struggling just to get their product catalog accessible online. If you want to expand the reach and be able to generate new leads and those sort of things, you have to give your customers something to engage with. Customers being able to come in, explore your large catalog, hit a handful of filters, and find what they’re looking for is incredibly valuable. If you don’t set up that discovery process first, then you can’t build the rest of the end-to-end. I think you have done some amazing work there, so congrats on all that.
Paul Tayler: Thank you.
Ali Amin-Javaheri: There have been changing expectations from customers when it comes to the way that they engage with you. On your website, it clearly states: with a relentless focus on driving great customer experience, we’re always thinking about how we can improve your business.
How do you think your digital strategies help support and meet these new customer expectations?
Paul Tayler: If we step back, I think there’s been a big change in terms of what people expect. In everyday life now, whether you’re going to search, if you want to make a trip, everyone is very comfortable choosing a hotel, getting a flight booked, buying anything from groceries to other items. People have great confidence in doing that and getting answers immediately. And so with greater expectation in terms of: I want to know something, I want to know it now, and I want to be able to act on that, we’ve really enhanced what we’re doing in terms of connecting our different digital platforms together, as well as investing in a platform called MyNexeo that we launched just over a year ago. We’ve had reorder capabilities for quite a few years, and that’s a fairly basic capability. But people want to know all the things I mentioned earlier in terms of: is the product available? Where can I get it? If I order it today, when will it be delivered? They want all of the information at their fingertips in terms of the safety data sheet information, the product characterization information, and that’s stored for them so they can go back.
We want them to use it as a tool in the hub. Ordering products is one thing, but that’s really only the tip of the iceberg. The wealth of information and how easy you can make it for people to do business is the key to getting people to come back and use the tool. We launched it in June last year across North America. It’s been very, very successful.
We’ve found that people come back and they use it, as I said, not just for ordering in terms of the whole process in terms of product selection, and when you have 20,000+ products, being able to select and filter, we can also prioritize.
We can actually do launches, campaigns, whether it’s a webinar linked to different products and different applications to also promote different things as well. So there’s lots of areas where we engage, and I think we have a deeper engagement now. North America was just over a year ago. That went very well since then. Just to give an update, we’ve actually launched that across the whole of Europe. We now have 19 countries covered. We have seven different languages covered. We have all the various different currencies covered. I’m really proud of the team in terms of how they’ve been able to stand that up in a very short time period to get an edge in terms of differentiation and how easy we can make it for our customers to find what they really want.
We link that back to our suppliers as well. We also really want to focus in terms of their strategy, what they want to promote, and what they want to focus on. So it’s a whole raft of different areas that this helps with.
Ali Amin-Javaheri: Love that. We’ve focused this conversation around the customer experience. I’m going to go off script a little bit and also ask about whether you’ve thought about creating similar experiences for your suppliers? And how do you take some of those customer insights along with other information and give them a portal into your world?
Paul Tayler: Yeah, I mean we work very, very closely with our strategic suppliers and we’ve demonstrated what this platform can do. We’ve had numerous conversations in terms of how we can connect, what they’re doing to the platform, to the promotions, to the campaigns. In the past we’ve had different connection points from a digital perspective in terms of things like EDI links, for example. So we’ve done some of the more basic capabilities that have been there for some time, but it’s really about integration, how you can integrate the different systems together.
We also have a philosophy of being very transparent in terms of what we’re doing with our suppliers and linking together. So in terms of developing new programs and projects, in terms of new business, that’s very closely linked with our suppliers in terms of what we’re doing together as a partnership. And I think that’s what digital capabilities give you as well, is the ability to form much faster, more responsive, more productive collaborations. And so it’s all about collaboration, and we’ve discussed it in the past, Ali, in terms of: you can’t do everything yourself, so you need to find other partners who are really good in different aspects, learn from them, and then move really quickly going forward. That’s what we did with MyNexeo. We engaged with a pilot list of active customers, and we designed it and developed it with those customers and tweaked it along the way prior to the launch. And we’re constantly doing that.
For me it’s a question of making sure you start, make good progress, and don’t have too broad of a scope when you start, but then iterating in a very active and fast way so you can keep improving on that. And we’re still doing that today.
Ali Amin-Javaheri: Based on what I’ve seen around MyNexeo and some of the other capabilities you’ve built and what you’ve shared today, I can tell the audience that you are in the top, very high percentile of this industry. Your capabilities, just what you’ve developed over the past year, I think have leapfrogged a lot of folks. I give you all a ton of credit for continuing to put in the investment to stay ahead. It kind of leads to the third question. I think the most important question.
Times have changed. This isn’t like what it was in 2021 or 2020, there are certainly headwinds. What we see is there are two types of leaders in these environments. There are types that are looking at cost-cutting initiatives and preserving expenses for the future versus those that say, look, we’re always in cyclical environments and we’re going to balance these short-term challenges and continue to invest in long-term initiatives like digital.
I know you’re more of the latter, so what’s your perspective and what would you share with your peers?
Paul Tayler: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. It’s about balance at the end of the day. You can’t just have everything focused on the short-term environment we’re in. You constantly need to reinvent and also see how you can increase your efficiency, productivity. We talked about reach being really important and increasing the scope that you have. We actually invested in this area during a difficult time. 2021 from an economics perspective was a pretty good year. There were challenges for sure, but it was, from an economics perspective, a pretty good year. Since then, things have moved towards more of a challenge, more headwinds as you say. But I think that’s when you can differentiate more as well.
Investing in tools that can differentiate you I think is the right investment to make. And again, you can decide on the scope. So, we decided to pilot it. We worked very closely with key partners. We worked initially here in North America. We’ve since expanded that in terms of Europe. You have to constantly be moving forward, but you gain a lot from that. So yes, we invested, but it is very targeted, so you need to decide where you’re going to put your investment in focus. For us, this is one area that we think will provide big dividends in the future. And it definitely is one area to differentiate on.
So tough choices, you have to balance that in good times and bad, but you also need to stick to your end goal. For us, it’s about how we can really become an invaluable connection for our customers in terms of the choices they want to make and making their businesses stronger through the support we can give them. And then as a distributor, we’re in that sweet spot between our suppliers and our customers and connecting them.
For me, the digital connection is one of those really critical areas that you do need to excel. We did a lot of collaboration with people in the industry to check best practices, and what we can take to build the right tools. So it’s external in terms of customers, external in terms of our suppliers, but it plays a big part in terms of how we connect internally with all of our employees as well.
So it’s been a key focus for us and we prioritize in this area. And for our business, we think this is really key.
Ali Amin-Javaheri: I obviously have a biased opinion, but I can’t agree more. Everyone is looking for that edge or what’s the differentiation, maybe not in two years, but in five years. I’m a firm believer that digital is one of those things because it creates more information flow, it gives you access to data, and it creates those collaboration opportunities that you spoke of earlier. Hopefully now nobody debates the merits of moving further and further online. This is obviously where the world is going.
I love the insights that you provided. I think it was very real, it was very tangible. I know that everyone loves listening to these short, informal conversations, especially from folks like you who are grounded in real digital capabilities, and you’re helping shape the industry with these capabilities. So thank you for everything that you do to move this industry forward. I can’t wait to see where MyNexeo and Nexeo Plastics go in the future.
I stand by what I said earlier. You guys are in that top percentile and so, keep investing, keep innovating. And congratulations on 50 years. I’m sure the next 50 will be much more fruitful.
Paul Tayler: Thank you very much, Ali. Thanks for inviting me.
