Stay curious!

How can a fast-growing company like Hager Group make sure that it keeps its customers in mind?

The interview with Hager Group Board of Directors took place at Hager Forum in Obernai; an open working space dedicated to training and innovation. In its labs, you can see some of Hager Group solutions at work. One of them is the large, low voltage main distribution board, which controls and protects it.

I think the concept of listening to our customers is deeply engrained in Hager Group’s culture. When my father, grandfather and uncle set up our company, it was part of their business model to invite customers, listen to their needs and transform their insights into better products and solutions. That was their formula for success, and it is still valid nowadays. But today, we’ve brought this approach to perfection with many digital and analog tools. One very powerful is the Voice of Customer-process that you, Bertrand, are quite familiar with.

By this process which we put in place some years ago we can understand in a very confined environment how to improve a product or a customer’s perception of our product. It’s a methodology we use to evaluate very precisely with target groups what sort of product they’d like to have or where they see any problems with our or our competitors’ products.

I remember when on my very first days at Hager Group I went to the ‘Light + Building’-fair and listened for an hour or so to a colleague who presented ‘univers N’, a new enclosure from Hager. It was absolutely convincing to hear how this colleague explained the product to visitors and impressing to see how delighted these customers considered a product that was an answer to their questions. And that’s what we try with the Voice of Customer-process every day.

Of course this methodology comes to its limits when we talk about completely new products. Besides constantly communicating with our customers we have to keep a good level of curiosity in the company and to stay open to new things we haven’t defined yet.

What other chances are there to find out what customers really want?

One important aspect of developing a company like ours and our products is to listen not only to external customers, but also to our internal colleagues to support their work. Part of these are the people in companies who are joining Hager Group like the Bocchiotti Group, where our process of syntegration is based on understanding what each part of both companies can bring to the other, what we can achieve together and how we will create added value in the future. It is a very humble way of integration of which both sides benefit tremendously. And it works.

When you look at your external customers: Who are they today? And who will they be in the future?

Good question. Is it the electrician who installs our product and to whom we want to offer maximum easiness in transporting, unpacking and installing? Is it the wholesaler whom we help with modular design to reduce his stock? Are we talking about the architect or end user to whom we want to offer maximum comfort and design excellence? My answer is that we’ll have to focus on all of them. And the challenge for us will be to understand all these different needs and incorporate them in great innovations which are not following the Ford Mondeo example.

In almost every case innovation is a process of co-creation between different actors. Just to give an example: Before we started to create our range of switches in France, marketing teams made a tremendous effort to deeply understand the customers’ expectations and their lifestyles before they felt prepared to create products that really differentiate themselves from others. At the same time the French team started a dialogue with the electricians and thereby those experts who would have to sell the product by advising it to their customers. It was really a process of co-creation that led to our success with French switches.

What is, by your definition, the difference between listening and understanding?

You have to really listen thoroughly to be able to understand. And in markets like ours, where we basically deal with people and their needs, understanding is crucial.

Every good communication starts with listening. After you’ve listened, you can translate what you’ve heard into something different. And even for the person talking, sharing his or her thoughts often helps to come to a clearer vision of what is really important.

Thorough listening leads to understanding, deep understanding leads to trust. And trust is the platform every business is based on.

Same is true for us as a company: To become an Employer of Choice and attracting the talents we want to recruit we have to understand their expectations and earn their trust.

Trust is an important element in the leadership framework we’re currently developing for Hager Group. We want our management team to listen carefully and to deliver honest and robust feedback to the people.

Just recently, we did a quite radical step for a producer by founding our services unit. This is our answer to requests from customers, who no longer expect just perfect products, but satisfying solutions with comprehensive services around it.

This is especially essential for Hager Group, as we do share long-lasting relationships with a huge number of customers. And whereas this is a very acknowledging aspect of our work, the risk this type of relationship bears is the feeling of “I’ve seen it before”. If two parties have that sort of feeling, the communication usually becomes flatter and flatter. That’s why we oblige ourselves to stay curious and to scrutinise routines and stale news.

As not only the messages, but also the ways of communication change this should also challenge our way of how we listen to our customers. The Generation Y’s way of communication, for example, is more digital and interconnected than that of previous generations. And, of course, our listening process will have to adapt to that.

There’s a geographical aspect of that as well: As we continue to grow into new regions and markets, we are increasingly going to work with people from different cultures, backgrounds and languages. That leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding. But one of the big advantages of working in an international company like ours is the luxury that there’s always someone you can ask.

As the company grows internationally, it’s always a question if and how we adapt ourselves to other markets and cultures. We do have a strong core with our corporate values. But the way we live these values can vary from country to country and also from time to time, as authenticity, integrity and courage had a different meaning in the Fifties than they had in the Nineties and will have the next decade. It will surely be a challenge to remain true to ourselves when we grow to a company of 20,000 people with three billion Euro turnover. But I’m sure we will manage it the same way we did so while growing from ten employees in the Sixties to the 11,650 of today.

Is that also true for geographical differences?

In the same sense we do express our values differently in China or Australia than we do in Germany or France. As our customers have a strong regional focus, adapting our core values to local behavior is absolutely key to succeed in our industry and markets.

Don’t forget that our staff is getting more and more diverse. For example, we are very happy with the women in our French marketing and sales team. They are doing a tremendous job.

At the same time we have to admit that we missed our Project 2015 target to include more women and less German or French men in our management teams. Although we knew that the challenge would be tough, we tried hard, even by commissioning headhunters with the search for female candidates in executive positions. But we failed. For the technical jobs in our industry it is still extremely hard to find female candidates.

Nevertheless we renewed the task of increasing our diversity with our Project 2020 that is just about to take off. And we should keep in mind why we are fostering diversity so strongly: Increased diversity means opening up the company to new perspectives and ideas and will thereby help us to come to better solutions.

The key is to stay curious and not to assume you already know what the other will think, say or do before you even start talking to him. As it turns out in many cases these assumptions are false. So listening thoroughly is a strong remedy against misunderstanding.