Customer experience management is a beautiful tool for getting all positions in a company to look at their work through the eyes of the customer. It brings a whole different perspective.
Tomáš Přikryl is co-owner and CEO of P-LAB. Before joining the company founded by his parents, he went through several corporations in the financial sector. Mainly IT and process professions. Today, he brings his experience to his own company, making it unusual in its category.
Kateřina Kolovratníková works at P-LAB as a sales director. Her whole professional life revolves around laboratories, she also has experience from corporate companies in this market. Her insight is the engine of P-LAB's business development.
P-LAB is an established supplier of laboratory equipment, operating in the Czech Republic since 1991. It supplies a wide range of laboratory equipment, chemicals and instruments, primarily to customers in research institutions and universities, but also to industry.
In this podcast, we are therefore looking for answers to these questions together:
What is the difference between B2B and B2I (business-to-institutions)?
What are the advantages of having a strategic investor/shareholder?
How do they look at product and process innovation?
What do they get out of well-tuned processes?
Why is it important to manage the customer experience?
Important links:
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Martin Hurych
Hello, I'm Martin Hurych and this, this is Ignition. The ignition is the beginning of acceleration, and acceleration is something you need to move from a place. By finding this podcast, which I thank you for by the way, you've taken the most important step for your acceleration, which is the first step. In Ignition, we share experiences from B2B business, from business, from innovation, from working with people and other areas of corporate life. Today we will be accelerating with Tomas Prikryl and Kate Kolovratnikova from P-LAB.
Hello.
Tomas Prikryl
Hello.
Kateřina Kolovratníková
Hello.
Martin Hurych
Tomas, before we get to you both personally, would you introduce P-LAB?
Introduction of P-LAB
Tomas Prikryl
P-LAB is a company that supplies a laboratory, typically a research laboratory, with everything it may need to operate. From test tubes to furniture, there are tens of thousands of products today.
Martin Hurych
That means the manufacturer, the distribution...
Tomas Prikryl
We are purely a distributor. We buy, we sell, we import most of what we sell from abroad, and we sell most of it in the Czech Republic.
Martin Hurych
I was wondering what your personal professional journey to P-LAB was like?
Tomas Prikryl
P-LAB was founded by my parents, but the path to me being the head of P-LAB was relatively unplanned. Of course, by starting it, I've worked for P-LAB for the entire time the company has been in existence. From wrapping packages in our living room at home, to everything else there is to do. But when I was figuring out where I was going to work after college, or civil, working full-time with my parents was the last thing I would have wanted at the time, and after a brief entrepreneurial episode, I got a job with a large corporation in banking, where I spent over 10 years. I didn't get fully into P-LAB until my parents were figuring out how to pass the company on to someone else. And because the scenarios that were on the table didn't resonate with me, at some point without much thought I asked my mom what she thought about me trying it, her eyes lit up, and then there was no escape.
Martin Hurych
How did they feel about you taking a break or an episode in the corporate world?
Tomas Prikryl
I don't think they thought anything of it, they were happy that I found a job I enjoyed. I never really had a set idea of what I wanted to do, so it was more of a coincidence. I'm sure the experience I had gained at P-LAB before played a big part in it, because my focus was very much on processes and improving and changing them, and that's the kind of job I went looking for. So even though it was called that at the beginning in the bank, but it was about something completely different, the corporation managed to surprise me quite a bit right from the beginning.
Martin Hurych
Corporations can do that. How did you get into P-LAB, Kate?
Kateřina Kolovratníková
That's my favourite story, and maybe Thomas's too. I don't know if he had anyone like me there by then. I was bored on my second maternity leave, I didn't want to sit at home for three years, and I knew the job because I'd done it at a competitor, I'd done it for many years in college. Through a friend, I forced my way in, but the problem with Thomas was that everything takes him a long time. So I waited for the phone call, which still didn't come, until one night I called myself. Then I got there, asked what they were doing, and maybe I even asked more questions than Tomas.
Tomas Prikryl
You asked a lot of questions, and they were really interesting, which is probably the main reason why Katerina is where she is today, and because even when she came to talk about a part-time job in marketing, it was clear to me that her potential was somewhere else. We're looking for a job for whoever comes in and is interesting, rather than the other way around. Of course, with growth that changes too, but here it was clear right away. And by the way, it had two rounds because Katherine had already applied to me for a job once, but she cancelled before she came to the interview.
Kateřina Kolovratníková
Yes, that's right. It was because I found out I was pregnant the day I was supposed to have the interview, so we postponed it. We waited about three years. Then when I got there I said, you have this, you don't have this, you should have this, you really need this, why don't you do it? So I went in with a lot of ideas, Tomas always listened to them and slowly tamed me. Over the years, I think I've been able to tell myself what's a yes, what's a no, and now I'm on the other side, taming my colleagues, but I still have ideas and actions.
Martin Hurych
And that's why you two are here today. That brings us to what you do in the company, because we forgot to say that, Tomas is the managing director and CEO of the company, co-owner of the company, Katerina is his sales director. And I, when I met you, I was looking in vain for a more seemingly different pair in these two positions. When I read your hobbies in preparation, I thought you should switch them.
Kateřina Kolovratníková
That's what I want to hear, what did we have there that would make you switch?
Martin Hurych
Knowing you professionally, I wouldn't expect you, Katka, to go mushroom picking, and I wouldn't expect Tomáš to play the drums.
Kateřina Kolovratníková
And I still like to read.
Tomas Prikryl
We both have that.
Martin Hurych
So, given the way you put your teams together, how do you have a division of responsibilities in the company, and how does that work for you, how do you complement each other?
Kateřina Kolovratníková
I basically have the more or less business half of the company, which includes the customer center, product team and sales people. And Tomas has purchasing, logistics and marketing, so it's half and half.
Tomas Prikryl
I'm dealing more with operations, and the overall setup so that we're able to deliver what we promise our customers. Katherine is about making sure we have something to deliver.
Strategic partner in the company
Martin Hurych
You said you took over the company from your parents, but today you have a strategic partner in the company. What led you to take on a strategic partner?
Tomas Prikryl
You mean within our shareholders?
Martin Hurych
Yes.
Tomas Prikryl
That's my parents' action back in '98, and back then it was quite simple. It was purely a financial need, because that time was not exactly economically easy. Banks were reluctant to lend to small businesses that didn't have houses to guarantee. So my parents were looking for another way, and they were lucky enough to have a pretty reasonable partner from Germany, who was already supplying us with some goods at that time, and at the same time looking for some way to secure those various European markets in terms of distribution. And the needs came together quite nicely.
Martin Hurych
What's it like to run a company with a partner like that at your back?
Tomas Prikryl
I guess I'm lucky my parents chose wisely. This sidekick works on two levels. Firstly, as a shareholder, where they don't talk to us in the day-to-day business, they want to know our medium-term strategy, they want to know that it makes sense to them, we have to convince them of that. And then of course they want to see results. And then there's the supplier level, where they operate like any other supplier, but of course by being ours, it's actually a family, so those relationships are a little bit shifted from what we have with other suppliers.
Martin Hurych
Okay, you said you supply lab equipment, now I might remember from chemistry, petri dishes... From test tubes to furniture. Who's your typical client?
What is the difference between B2B and B2G (B2I)?
Kateřina Kolovratníková
Anyone who sits in a lab and wears a white coat or pants. So any sampling lab, research lab, college, scientific institution, industry too, of course, private pharmaceutical companies. Basically, even the electrical industry or any kind of manufacturing, like even in adhesive manufacturing you can have a lab where you need our products, also it's a power plant, industry.
Martin Hurych
I'm hearing two completely different environments. How is business with academia different, versus business with traditional commercial B2B?
Kateřina Kolovratníková
It's certainly the way it's funded and the source of that funding, because academia, if it doesn't have any of its own research that it gets money from, is funded by various grants. Or it's subsidies from the European Union or the state. In industry, it can be a private owner, or it can be basically any laboratory, where the money is private. There it's not so much subject to bureaucracy, but it doesn't have to go out to tender. It's not that complicated in terms of procurement. There's been a trend for a few years now where it's progressed from a public contract and a framework contract, and pushed through basically everywhere to have one supplier for most goods. It's the easiest thing for those at the top of the company or institution where they handle billing, but it's the worst thing you can do to those end users. They are used to using their products and may not be comfortable with what they get mandated to have in three years. So unfortunately it's also a lot about how you talk to those people, what you can do for them, and how it's set up overall, but it's not just in this business. It, it's construction, it's whatever.
Martin Hurych
I just wanted to stop there because where I go, clients or potential clients bemoan the fact that they often end up in the tender, they often bemoan the fact that they end up commoditizing what they offer. How do you navigate through that in your business?
Kateřina Kolovratníková
I have never been a fan of participating in public procurement just to participate and have a comma, because it costs me and my colleagues work, and without a positive outcome it is demotivating. So we really do select those tenders well, we look at what's in them, and sometimes we even ask directly if they want it from us, because the specification is obviously written in general terms in terms of competition law, so we don't go where they don't want it from us. I think we're lucky as a company to be able to talk to those people. Sometimes it's things that nobody else has, so we do that contract ourselves, but we don't do it by the numbers, and the filter of those contracts goes through me, and I really only send colleagues what makes sense. Sometimes I make a joke of them, a colleague who's been there a long time understands that. Like I sent them a freezer to pathology for cadavers, and they wanted to do it, the poor junior colleagues. Overall though, I have to say that sometimes there are interesting things that these companies buy.
Martin Hurych
Anything to add, Tomas?
Tomas Prikryl
Well, I would maybe go back to the question about the difference between those institutions, and industrial or private customers. I still see a difference in the nature of the people who work there. The institutional ones, typically universities and research institutes, are extremely conservative customers, so one has to tiptoe a lot when it comes to changing a product that is perhaps no longer in production and you need to offer another one. That's where it's really hard because there's a difference in the science and the fact that these people are typically working on some very long-term project, in years rather than months, and then of course any change in the process can negatively affect that. In the private sector it's more operational, or short-term, and you can see that difference in buying behaviour.
Product and process innovation
Martin Hurych
I was just thinking, you both like innovation. Now we're talking about a conservative environment that doesn't like change. How do you innovate in your business?
Kateřina Kolovratníková
Tomas is the sober one and he sets the boundaries. I always shoot out an idea, and then we discuss the fact that it's not going to be a good fit for our type of customer, and I usually say we can't be afraid, but the company has been around for 30 years, so it has to have some level. Innovation is needed, but it has to be pleasing to both us and our customers so they don't lose their opinion of us. As Tomas said, customers are different, some are conservative and others are more malleable.
But it is also important that we do not have aggressive traders in the sense of impositions. We know what the customer needs in terms of product and we don't force and cajole them at any price just to make a deal. Rather, we accommodate him in that, if the opportunity is there, we get him the product.
Tomas Prikryl
This is mostly product innovation, where we offer the customer a range and they choose. For me, then, these are innovations that are actually generally valid in any industry.
It's making the company work as well as possible internally, we're always looking for some balance in how we communicate with those customers, where we're always trying to be a little bit ahead of our competitors. For example, in terms of the use of modern technology, social media and so on. These are things that are coming much earlier in many businesses than we are, but in our business we are usually the first ones. For us, innovation is really a lot about those company processes, about how they work, and it then translates to those customers. How reliable and easy it is for them to work with us.
The importance of setting up the right company processes
Martin Hurych
I can think of two things right now. One, how do you actually measure the success of the innovation that you bring to those customers, because innovation for innovation's sake is useless. And the second thing that struck me there, processes. You describe yourself as a company with a startup mindset, stitched together by more or less corporate processes. What does that setup bring to running a company at all, or to stick with the processes, around me process is often a dirty word. Companies are failing at this. Companies are afraid of processes even though they know they need them. What do processes bring to you, and why do you think they are important?
Tomas Prikryl
I'll take it from the end, what they bring us is a huge competitive advantage. The fact that we can do things with a relatively small team that require a lot more people and effort from our competitors. And it's precisely because we have those processes set up that we're able to automate them to a large extent. And this falls back to somewhere in the second half of the 1990s, where that's what brought us to survive. And we're still building on that today.
The company had already gone from zero to some twenty-five or twenty-six people quite quickly, and there came a really hard time economically when it was necessary to downsize the company. But at the same time, we didn't want to stop doing what we were doing. And that's when my mom and I actually put together the core process that still works in the company today and programmed it into the system that we were using. We went from twenty-five people to seventeen or eighteen, and we worked our way back up to twenty-five again over the next twenty years. And today there are about thirty of us, but in the last eight years that I've been running the company, for example, our sales have doubled, and we're still able to do that in the operations part of the company with almost the same number of people that we had eight years ago. And that's because it's becoming more and more automated. So the innovation here is really in that automation, and we couldn't do it without those processes.
Then there was the question at the beginning about how we measure it. We don't really measure it systematically. I'm quite personally biased against measuring just to measure something. I see it as there are a lot of things that go into running a company well. I may have the bar set a little bit differently than others in terms of the process and in terms of the automation, but I didn't go into this to measure or to get rich, I went into it because I enjoy this way of working. P-LAB was and is very much my baby, not just my parents' baby, and I enjoy finding ways to do these things better, and if I believe that some things should be done, then we'll do them. I believe that the result will come afterwards. It's not that I set the business or clearly measurable goal first and then look for how to get there, I have it the other way around.
Kateřina Kolovratníková
I'm the opposite of Tomas.
Martin Hurych
So how are you doing?
Kateřina Kolovratníková
I'll put the amount first, and then I'll figure out how to fight my way to it. But once I've got that amount or that goal, then it's easier for me to look for that way to get there than to say to myself: Now I can do this, and this, and maybe I can achieve this and this. And just like Tomas said that sentence, I didn't start this to get rich. That's not a businessman, that's not a business executive.
Tomas Prikryl
Maybe that's why we're such a diverse duo, why I have Kate there. I'm aware that as long as I'm only dealing with the running of the company, my approach can work well. The moment it's about moving the company somewhere commercially, in some fundamental, and more importantly predictable or manageable way, then you need someone who will work on a system of setting a financial target and now looking for a way to do it. Plus, I'm not an aggressive trader, quite the opposite, and I knew I needed someone there to take care of that side of things. Then it's a constant search for the right balance between those two approaches, and it's fun.
P-LAB's recipe for success
Martin Hurych
If I simplified the 30-year recipe for P-LAB's success to Catherine's job being to make a lot of money and you to save a lot of money, would I be too wrong?
Tomas Prikryl
Katherine is more thrifty than I am.
Kateřina Kolovratníková
You'd be wrong, I'm a thrifty person.
Tomas Prikryl
Otherwise, the success. I think that success is about me and my parents always going headfirst into what made sense to us at the time. We're generally not afraid to try something in our family, even at the risk of it failing, and then just bare the responsibility of it failing. But when a person is laced with how things are supposed to be done, the way everyone else does them, they are not the master of their life.
Kateřina Kolovratníková
I would say that I am not laced either, but then it takes me longer not to learn from the mistake, but then I feel bad about myself because of the failure. I think Tomas will shake it off and walk away. And I'm still gnawing at it, wondering how I could have done it differently. That's where we're different. Tomas is an analyst. I lack that. But it always seems like he's the good guy in meetings, and I'm the bad guy.
Martin Hurych
And the reality is how?
Kateřina Kolovratníková
I think it is.
Tomas Prikryl
I'm comfortable with the role of the good guy, but it's not that I want to be good. I guess I generally have a very high tolerance for the foibles and mistakes of others, so when someone makes a mistake and learns from it, I have no reason to be angry. I don't show those emotions that much, so then it comes across as me being nice.
That's the interesting thing about the corporation I went through, by the way. What I learned or confirmed there that it can really work is an incredible tolerance for just mistakes. It was an American bank and the corporate culture there was that if someone messed up, they just found a solution. He had to be involved, of course, but as long as the mistakes weren't repeated, it was a natural part of the way the company worked, which led to things moving forward very quickly because nobody was afraid of making a mistake. And that's basically what I'm trying to do at P-LAB.
The group of employees we have there is really very diverse. Kate and I are really opposites to a large extent, but the other people are all different too. And that diversity gives it energy, but if we were all comfortable with each other and all set up the same, we wouldn't get anywhere.
Martin Hurych
I agree. I grew up in a British-American corporation and I think a lot of it is due to the Anglo-American culture. And in my experience, those people enjoy it a lot more afterwards.
Tomas Prikryl
Absolutely.
Martin Hurych
And they can take responsibility for correcting their own mistakes.
Kateřina Kolovratníková
As for tolerance, I'm not completely intolerant either. Thomas might just give these people more time. It's also good if the person makes a mistake, because they can learn from it. But I have a problem with the fact that if the mistake is repeated, if it's been three times, then I'm not tolerant anymore, unlike Tomas. Then I wonder what kind of person he is.
Customer Experience Management
Martin Hurych
We were here before the shoot talking about one thing I honestly wouldn't have expected in a company of thirty people. I was very interested in it because we also thought we had it down from our corporate careers. You both told me you were planning, and now I'm going to tell it like you told me: Drive the customer experience. That's something I'd be willing to bet most small businesses in the country don't do at all. What does that mean for you guys, what does that bring to the business, why, and how are you thinking about it? What's actually behind the next step here for maybe the next few months?
Tomas Prikryl
For the next few years. And I think we're going to need at least a year to say that we're driving that customer experience. But I'll take a little bit of a detour on what that's going to bring.
We are, I think in our industry, one of the most customer-friendly and welcoming companies, if not the most welcoming and friendly company, and it comes from the personality setup of me and my parents and the fact that we do business in a way that makes us comfortable.
Kateřina Kolovratníková
Mostly it's not something we think, it's customer reactions.
Tomas Prikryl
They are really telling us, even unsolicited, and it shows that they are really capitalizing on it. But we do it kind of intuitively. And as the company grows, I think certain things that are done intuitively are worth formalizing to some extent. And this belief of mine was combined with the fact that for the last two and a half years in that bank I was doing, there it was called in English, customer experience management. So I got quite a glimpse of what it can do in terms of emotional engagement with customers.
And what it's going to do for us is to take that edge and that differentiation in the marketplace even further, because it really can be done in this area. It's quite broad and everybody's idea of it is different. Some people just measure customer satisfaction, they have a number and they try to make that number better. I'm really more interested in the emotion than the number. We've been working with that for a long time, so that those customers have some sort of emotional relationship with us, we're building almost I would say a lovebrand, which is strange for this industry and maybe a little presumptuous to say that, but again, I'm more reproducing that as what we hear from those customers. And if we drive that, we're going to move faster on that than if we just leave it in that intuitive level.
Martin Hurych
I'm simply wondering how to actually manage it? Because the more familiar method is the single number. I understand that's probably not quite where you're going, so how are you going to measure the customer experience first and then drive it?
Tomas Prikryl
I'd say drive first and measure later, in our case. I guess it's based on my personal setup, it's not that complicated.
Anyone who gets serious about it will find that at the beginning they have to define their customers in terms of expectations and functioning, define what is called personas, a set of personas and map out the customer journey. What can make it different then is what to do with it after that. But that customer journey is a powerful tool where you can choose from all the interactions that you have with that customer. Whether maybe we ourselves perceive that we could do it better, or we have some feedback from customers, it's something where you can make a very big impact for very little money.
What we do is we really map out the journey, and then we look at each stop along the way. From there, I'm then able to tell myself depending on what I want to address at that point, how I'm going to find out if I've succeeded or not. When I measure overall customer satisfaction, it doesn't tell me much. While we have the advantage of customers liking us, the fact that they like us doesn't really move us anywhere.
When we have a new customer, and after the first order that we handle, I'll call or write to them and ask them specific questions about particular areas within the handling of that order or order, how satisfied they were, and if there's anything they'd like to comment on, then I'll learn a lot more specific things. I can then pick out maybe one part of the process where I know I'm not quite sure what those customers really expect, and that way I can find out. Or I know that we've put some effort into it and I want to know that we haven't shot completely off the mark. But my setup is unconventional, if I believe it makes sense, I'll do it without necessarily wanting to know the number it's going to bring me.
Martin Hurych
What does the sales department have to say about this?
Kateřina Kolovratníková
As Tomas said that we are building a lovebrand, the way I see it is that not only to sell, but also after-sales care is important. It's all about making the customer feel good about it. I'm definitely in favour, although I'm probably in favour of the more expressive stuff, to make it look like wow, to make an impression and shock a little bit. Tomas will brush it up again so we don't step out of the zone of being a really reliable partner, but overall I would say it's more along the lines of what was said here, that the customers like us, that's great. And I guess what I'm most pleased about with my competitiveness is that the competition doesn't like us. That's kind of the driving force for me.
Martin Hurych
Would your competitors say you're a lovebrand in their market?
Kateřina Kolovratníková
Definitely not. But if you look at the amazing T-shirts we have and all these things, I think it's something that's really fancy, and the proof of that is that people buy it themselves, they give their own money for it. They don't get it as a gift from us when the salesman comes in. They like it. I would do everything from underwear to bedding, that's my idea. These scientists are into it, if someone is really a scientist and they're interested in chemistry, biology, medicine, those things around them, they're into it, like jewelry design for women, guys might have a tie. And that's how we have it, my kids wear company t-shirts at home too, and now they're going to have a company clock in their room.
Martin Hurych
Are you telling me, and this is again one of the few things I remember from chemistry, that you're going to offer me a tie with a benzene core?
Kateřina Kolovratníková
And why with benzene? What about a structured formula for the happiness hormone?
Martin Hurych
Let me ask you, we always end here with some kind of summary and recommendation for those who listen to us or watch us on YouTube. I guess every company tries to have the highest level of customer care. However, I would guess it's more of a feeling thing. Managing the customer experience means that it's some sort of conscious process. That said, now that I've realised this, I'd like to move from ad hoc care to something that I give some sort of structured process, long-term care, I'd like to move. How and what to start with?
Tomas Prikryl
I'll repeat your question here: Ask myself what I expect from this. What has not been said here, I will try to make it short: For us it is not only the management as such, for me personally it is also a tool in the management of the company, because the whole company is involved in this activity. We have a concept for it, which I probably won't elaborate on here, but it's an activity that has been going on in our company for three years back, when we looked at our processes a lot from the inside. And I needed to take that look somewhere and turn it around, and customer experience management is a beautiful tool that forces everyone involved to start looking at it through the eyes of the customer.
Martin Hurych
That's great.
Tomas Prikryl
So for me, the change of perspective is yet another reason why we do this, and this is a great tool for that. But in another company, someone may want a specific business shift from this, and it may make sense. So definitely start by asking myself what I expect from this and why I want to do it. And of course, what I said here before, if every company maps out that customer journey and defines those typical customers in some way, that's going to come in handy, even if they don't drive the customer experience. Great for marketing at least, and great for a lot of other areas too, so this is useful for everyone.
Martin Hurych
Just a little question: How did these people react to the fact that everyone from the warehouse clerk to the store clerk is, and now I don't mean this in a bad way, I can't think of another word, a minion of the customer? That they all provide service to the customer? Because that's not usually in the blood of these people, other than salespeople.
Tomas Prikryl
I didn't surprise them. In our company, that's the attitude that's been there for a long time, and we've been talking to those people for a long time about how every last warehouseman has an impact on how happy those customers are, and how happy they are to buy from us. It's not a change for us. Some of those things are more named, and the fact that we have our process for that, where we involve everybody on a regular and iterative basis, that obviously reinforces that perception, but the principle, it's always been that way.
Martin Hurych
Okay, I think that's it for today, if anyone wants to get in touch, discuss anything, buy petri dishes, where can we find you?
Kateřina Kolovratníková
In Hostivař or on our website P-LAB.cz, LinkedIn, Facebook. And Martin's website.
Tomas Prikryl
I think that if someone wanted to contact us personally, LinkedIn is optimal for that, and I think it works surprisingly well in that people who wouldn't have found us otherwise can find us.
Martin Hurych
Okay, thank you for coming.
Kateřina Kolovratníková
We thank you too.
Tomas Prikryl
Thank you for the invitation.
Martin Hurych
So, it was Katherine and Tomas. If this episode intrigued you and sparked you for maybe customer experience management, then be sure to reach out to Katka and Tomas, and don't forget to tune in for future episodes, whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, check out my website www.martinhurych.com where you can find other free accelerator tools in addition to this episode. Thanks for your attention, and fingers crossed and best wishes for success.
(edited and shortened, automatically translated DeepL)