As Walmart’s former Chief Customer Officer, Janey Whiteside believed emotional trust anchored the brand’s consumer relationships. Building that connection and upholding it was central to Walmart’s approach to not just new business — but innovation too.
“Infusing customer-centricity in everything we do is incredibly important,” she told John Battelle during Signal 2021. “The reality is, if it doesn’t deliver for our customer, it’s not going to get funded, it’s not going to get staffed, period.”
Hear more from Whiteside from Signal 2021 in the video below or read our lightly edited transcript.
TRANSCRIPT
John Battelle
When you think of commerce, chances are you might think of Walmart. Our next speaker is Janey Whiteside, the EVP and first ever Chief Customer Officer at Walmart. She’s responsible for looking after Walmart’s brand and thinking through the customer journey, both for the Walmart stores, and for their very large e-commerce offering. Before joining Walmart, Janey spent more than 20 years at American Express, and leadership roles, including international pricing, relationship management and marketing, customer engagement, global products, benefits and services. She serves on the board of directors of the Walmart Foundation, which is a powerful and important part of the infrastructure of philanthropy around the world, and on Walmart’s joint venture with interactive technology company Eko, whose founder was a speaker at Signal just two years ago. Welcome, Janey.
Janey Whiteside
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
You’re Walmart’s first Chief Customer Officer? Can you explain what that role is?
I do have the privilege of leading the customer organization for Walmart. When you think about the components of the team, I guess the single thread is that when you add them up, we touch every part of a customer’s journey with us so that’s everything you mentioned from customer insights and journeys, and all the data that we have about our customers, to our design and UX organization, to marketing, to our membership organization, our B to C businesses, so financial services, etc. B to B businesses, Walmart Connect, our media and ad business, our data ventures business, and then we sort of round it back off with with our customer care, organization, and anything that we’re doing talking to customers, before, during or post transaction.
As we built this team, we kind of thought about building an end to end experience for our customers with a few key principles in mind. All of which really stem from this notion of we want to have a functional relationship with our customers in terms of trust, but more than ever, we want to have an emotional relationship with them.
Why did we create a customer organization? We’ve talked a lot about the customer, for anybody who knows, Walmart. We talked about who’s number one, and the customer is always. But infusing customer centricity in everything we do, is incredibly important. Part of what we’re doing now is really putting the customer at the center of every project. The reality is, if it doesn’t deliver for our customer, it’s not going to get funded, it’s not going to get staffed, period. So we need to make sure that we continue to do that. We need to make sure that we continue to innovate on our customers behalf. Walmart has grown up, as an organization that’s grown very quickly on the back of incredible merchants, incredible logistics, and a growth store operations business. We need to continue to do that. But we know that when we know our customers better, when we understand them, we can fit into their lives and solve problems on their behalf. That’s really important to us. Often the customer organization we joke because we start to get really attached to our customers, so it means a lot when we can, we can deliver on behalf of them.
Finally, what I think is different about being running a customer organization at Walmart versus something else is for us, it’s about our heart and our humanity. One of the reasons that I joined Walmart was because we have a real deep sense of purpose across the organization. I heard you mentioned the Foundation, but we do have a unique position across communities. We have 1.6 million associates in the US, and they’re fueling communities across the across the country. That is really important. When you think about that, and add it to the fact that we know that 80% of Americans, that they will remember the companies that did the right thing by their customers and their workers during during the pandemic, it’s really important that we think about the role that we have to play and how we tell our story for our customers, but also our associates. By telling our story, I mean, not just telling our story as marketers, but how do we deliver against that with great quality physical and digital experiences, both for our customer and for our associates.
A key part of understanding consumers, understanding how they’re changing, you see so much of that. I know you have a very strong data business and you understand your customer very well. What insights over the past year, have you noticed? And what do you see coming from sifting through all of that information?
Knowing your customer’s got to be at the core of everything we do. We’ve talked a lot about the pandemic. What was really interesting, through the pandemic, obviously, was watching the way that that consumer behavior changed. Everybody who’s listening to this, probably lived through it, but you could see what was happening based on what people were buying. At the beginning, obviously, it was the stockpiling of you know, PPE, and basic staples, and then we moved on to things like board games and school equipment, and then it was baking equipment, and then we’re into home improvement, and then we were into personal grooming and all of those products. Interestingly enough, as we sort of started to open back up, one of the first trends we saw a few months ago was dramatic increases in people buying teeth whitening and toothpaste, and mouthwash and deodorant, which is a little bit scary. Which indicated to us that probably masks are coming down, and people were feeling comfortable going outside. We continue to watch those trends, clearly. You heard Nilam [Ganenthiran] talking about the pandemic drove rapid, I would say more rapid than would have happened otherwise, adoption, particularly of groceries online, shopping for groceries and thinking about having those delivered.
I’ve spoken a lot about the fact that I think we accelerated five years of customer adoption in five months. Our ability to leverage and make sure that we’re thinking about ways to be able to solve that on behalf of customers is important. But interestingly, now, as things open up, we’re also seeing customers want to be back in store. There was a lot of dialogue, if you remember, going on a lot of people hypothesizing well, is the store dead? Is the physical retail store dead, and is everything going to going to be online? Definitely not. Customers want to be back in store, not just they want to be able to pick stuff up, they actually want to be in store and are looking for interesting experiences when they’re in the store, too.
We continue to see this this adoption, we continue to see new segments of customers be interested in digital offerings, but very much they’re in the back in the store, they’re back engaging and they want to be able to leverage whatever structure, whatever, opportunity works for them wherever they are.
You mentioned your work on the Walmart Foundation Board. It makes me think about one of the pillars here at Signal, which is corporate citizenship, and sustainability, which we’ve already had many discussions about. Walmart has some very aggressive sustainability goals, and you measure yourself aggressively against them and report it out every year. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
The events of the past year, whether it’s the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, you know, what we’re seeing in terms of rising income inequality, obviously, the intensifying climate and ecosystem decline. All of those underscored the relevance of our shared value philosophy that we have. While all of these have challenged us, internally, obviously externally, but also internally, they’ve reinforced our desire to accelerate our omni-channel transformation. But as we do that, to do it in alignment with our commitment to being a regenerative company. That means that we want to fulfill our customer mission we want to solve on behalf of our customer, but do it in a way that restores and renews and replenishes both nature and humanity.
Specifically on sustainability, we sourced an estimated 36% of our electricity needs from renewable energy. Through Project Gigaton, we’ve had 3100 suppliers report a cumulative 416 million metric tons of avoided missions since 2017. We set 2040 as a target date to achieve zero emissions across our global operations and have committed to help protect, manage, restore at least 50 million acres of land and a million square miles of ocean by 2030. That sounds like a lot, but there is just so much to do here. The challenges facing businesses and society, I think require collective action from all of us. One of the things that I’ve experienced and observed at Walmart is because of our scale, because of the breadth of practice that we touch, it’s really important that we lean into this aggressively, not just for our impact, our impact, but as a leader and pull people through.
I think the pandemic demonstrated how really small but widespread changes and individual behavior can produce large scale positive impacts. We certainly believe that business can be part of the solution. We are excited about P&G as a stakeholder in Walmart, and your collaboration with us on this journey as we attempt to solve or play a part in solving these issues that are facing all of us and the next generations to come.
I want to dig into the customer-centricity of the company, and specifically a program design understand it is relatively new or renewed, which is Walmart+, which is an ambitious loyalty program for your very large base of customers. As you described it in research that I that I did, in preparation for this, noted that there were two kinds of trust that a customer will place in a brand. Functional trust, which I sort of feel is self evident,’Do I get what I expect.” And then what you called emotional trust. What is emotional trust? How do you break it or keep it?
To me, yeah, the story I always tell is, I like to think about emotional trust. When you think about customer relationship management, you think about loyalty, in general, I always liken it to people when they ask me about it as a friendship. I think emotional trust is like a friendship. When you have a friend if they’re late to dinner, or they say they’re gonna call you back, and they don’t realize one thing, you can get over that. We might be annoyed at them for now. But you’ll get over it. But if that friend was to forget to pick up your kids from school, when they said they were going to left them stranded. I that friend was to betray your trust by telling others a secret, you told them in confidence, be really hard to get over that. You’d really struggle to get back to being to them being a friend. When you think about loyalty in those terms, it starts to feel different.
When you liken that to Walmart+, if we invite you to be a member of Walmart+, you engage with us, pay us to be a member of Walmart+, we’ve set up an expectation or a contract or friend contract, a loyalty contract with you. If we let you down.,If we commit to you that we’re going to get you groceries or other items, but particularly groceries by certain time, if we don’t get them to you by certain time. Or if that order is missing something it’s really important. If you were relying on us getting you chicken breasts to be able to make dinner for your kids that night and your order comes and doesn’t have chicken breasts in the broken unemotional trust. When we don’t get it, right, it’s really interesting for me, because I get all of the customer feedback, to see the words that customers use. So very often it is you’ve broken my trust, you’ve let me down, I trusted you. I trusted you because I thought I was giving something over to you.
I talk a lot in Walmart+about being the ultimate life hack. Sometimes people say I don’t understand what that means. I think it’s about lifting the cognitive load, which is I trusted you Walmart to bring me items that you’re going to I was going to be able to use for dinner. And in my brain that item was done. I’ve moved on. If we let you down, next time, when you place an order with Walmart, in the back of your head, you’re thinking well, what if they don’t bring the chicken? So what else am I going to have? Do I need to have a backup plan? Right? Just like with a friend, if that friend didn’t go and pick up your kids, and they left them, next time, if you let them go and do it, you’d be sitting in the back of your head,I need to check up or wonder if they’ve got them. That doubt would be there. We talk a lot about where we create these emotional trust contracts with our customers and how do we make sure that we understand what they are and that we’re living up to them. Because once you’ve let somebody down, once you’ve broken that emotional trust, really hard to get it back,
There was an example that if you could briefly tell this story of when you sold more PlayStations, than you ended up being able to deliver on, what did you do?
We had a glitch. We oversold our PlayStation 5’s, which if you have teenage kids like me know, are very hot items. We had a decision to make. On the one hand, there were people saying, well, what we should do is just cancel the orders, we’ll just forget what we communicated to customers. But rather than send a Dear John email to customers, we thought about that emotional trust contract. We brought a team together to see what we could do. When we looked at what was going on, we found we had enough inventory of the better version. So we oversold the online version, and we have the disc version, which can use online and disc, to be able to fulfill the number of orders that we don’t sold. So we sent a letter out letting customers know that we’d upgraded them, no cost to them, same timeline and they’d be getting their order just when they thought, only it will be a $200 upgrade in terms of the PlayStation. It was the right thing to do on behalf of customers. I was blown away at how much chatter it created on gaming sites, and how much interaction I got from people on social sites, A saying thank you and then be as you can imagine the number of people who were, great, I’d like an upgraded PlayStation. But to me, this is a really great example of what thinking about that trust contract is and thinking about how you can and should be really customer-centric.
It’s a great story. In a little time we have left, I was wondering if you could give our audience an overview of something you mentioned earlier, which is your Walmart Connect business. This is your media and advertising business.
I heard Nilam talking. The reasons we’re in this business exactly the same reasons that he said he was in this business. Retail margins are declining, we need to be able to put great innovations in on behalf of our customers, we need to think about other ways of being able to create revenue to, to feed into doing that. I heard Nilam say the word connections a lot. I think that media and our business is about connections. We’ve always since the beginning been about connecting customers and great brands, and now we have the ability to do that more than ever, at the right point of time, and to be able to create connections for brands who otherwise potentially wouldn’t ever be able to reach that customer. So we built a business that we think, can serve clients in a way that nobody else can, as a real closed loop, omni-channel media company.
One of the things that I’m really excited for our business is that because we have the Connect business and marketing in the same team, we are both a buyer and a seller of media, were one of the biggest buyers and also sellers of media. Because I know what I hold my CMO and our marketing team to in terms of the data, the insights, the reporting that we need back when we’re buying media, I think it helps us be able to put together a media business, which says, would we buy what we were selling. So Walmart Connect is creating ways for partners to be top of mind in our stores, where we’re able to leverage assets. Everything from the TV walls we have in our stores, to the checkout screens to when you check in to pick up. We are now the biggest out of home advertising platform in the country by turning that on. We give people a chance to act as customers on the internet in a way that we feel really is accreted to a customer’s experience because they get to see things that they wouldn’t otherwise do. All while we’re able to deliver substantial value and high margin for our merchant partners. For us, that’s about, as I said, our own digital properties and offering holistic campaigns across those, the in-store experiences as I mentioned. Then thirdly, we’ve done this partnership that I’m really excited about with Trade Desk, the demand side platform. We’ll be able to leverage our first-party shopper data, which you can imagine is pretty unrivaled, and use that with everybody else’s data in order to be able to target ads off platform. That’s something we’re working on aggressively with P&G right now and Marc and the team. We’re really excited about that I helping create more compelling results for our suppliers, for our advertisers, etc.
Janey, will have to leave it there. I have many more questions for you but I have a feeling we’ll be speaking with you again at Signal, so thank you so much for being part of today’s event I really appreciate it
My pleasure.
