A country president’s perspective: how we foster a Customer First culture

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Kyung Rog (KR) has been in Schneider Electric for about 20 years. He started in sales and spent half of his Schneider life (10 years) in various commercial roles. In 2010, he took the role of Customer Satisfaction and Quality VP for the Asia Pacific (APAC). In 2013, he became the Country President for Korea and Mongolia. Now he’s the Cluster President for Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan.

Jenny Nguyen had the fantastic opportunity to interview and chat with KR about his journey as part of her cross-team collaboration project at Schneider Electric. She heard about his experience in Customer Satisfaction and Quality (CSQ) and what he thinks helped him progress to his current role.

Moving from commercial roles to Customer Satisfaction & Quality

After 10 years in Schneider Electric, my manager Eric Leger encouraged me to join Customer Satisfaction and Quality (CSQ). It was for my professional development as I needed to gain new experience and perspectives out of what I had done in my previous commercial roles. Given the trust of the company’s leaders that my background and work from various commercial roles would help me succeed, I took the role. There were a lot of transformations at that time in the team, and seeing that would be a great learning opportunity for me, I moved from Korea to Beijing in three weeks.

The first year was a stiff learning curve. Every Key Performance Indicator, process, people, and even the language the Customer Satisfaction and Quality team used were completely new to me. On top of that, I had teams to manage in different countries and time zones, but I took that as good challenges to learn and overcome. After about one year of immersing myself, I was then able to start bringing my insights and ideas to the work and drive it from there onwards.

Thanks to my experience from the commercial roles, I had an overall understanding of our business processes and policies. With that understanding, I could help translate that knowledge to customer experiences so the team could provide better communications and service to the customers. I also helped reflect the customers’ perceptions in the way we work and design our policies in order to improve our customers’ experience and satisfaction.

Problem Solvers for Customers

Schneider Electric is a rare company in our industry that has dedicated Customer Satisfaction & Quality teams in each function from R&D, Supply Chain, Business Units to Front Offices. The team is seriously committed to creating meaningful experiences for the customers at every touchpoint through constantly improving competencies and going extra miles to achieve customer satisfaction.

CSQ is a strong global team with a community of about 8,000 people worldwide. We worked with all functions throughout the organisations and across different countries to improve the commercial quality as well as processes. Due to the size and complexity of our business, sometimes the voice of the customers got diluted amongst multiple programmes and initiatives. But the team had the leadership and tenacity that helped us stick to putting customers back to the heart of the business.

Customer Satisfaction & Quality bridges the gap between internal perspectives and customers’ expectations. It requires problem-solving skills and strong teamwork. During the recent Covid-19 crisis, our Customer First culture became even stronger across different teams in order to keep mission-critical facilities like hospitals and utilities running without any failure.

Applying the experience gained from Customer Satisfaction & Quality to become Country President

My role in Customer Satisfaction & Quality provided me with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to harness my leadership skills as well as build my profile within a network of leaders from all functions across the company. Without the CSQ role, I probably would just have been a local commercial guy who didn’t get much global exposure and end-to-end perspective. The CSQ mindset of never staying with the status quo and always pushing for better results for our customers also prepared me to lead a country’s operations.

So when the company presented the country president role as one of the options for my career development, I was well-equipped to take on the challenge. I feel proud of having been part of the Customer Satisfaction & Quality community, and ‘Customer First’ value will be always my top driver for decision making.

For latest openings in Customer Satisfaction and Quality, visits se.com/careers

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