Valerie Mathieu - A Customer-oriented Manager for B2B Services

The core service we have historically offered – transporting goods in maritime containers – can very easily be done by one of our competitors. Hence, for several years, we have witnessed a “commoditization” of our industry. Faced with a plethora of choices, our customers chose their shipping line based on price alone. The industry engaged in an intense price war, which each of the players hoped to compensate with volumes. This logic led to overcapacity and serious difficulties for the sector in 2009 after the subprime crisis. It was at this point that the group completely rethought its approach, seeking to answer the question of how we could get a client to choose our services, even if we were more expensive than the competition.

This was a long-term process that required constant dialogue with our customers and partners. We had to understand what their problems were, what their challenges were and what they expected from their shipping company.

And contrary to what we thought, price was not necessarily the determining factor in their choice. One example of this is the premium service we have implemented on the Transpacific , which has been a huge success. This service makes it possible for an exporter or importer to have guaranteed space on a vessel and offers faster availability thanks to a Fast Lane upon arrival in Los Angeles.

Paradoxically, we know today that the peripheral services related to maritime transport are our best assets to develop customer loyalty and relationships.

An evolving relationship

And we are evolving with them: with the acquisition of CEVA Logistics, the CMA CGM group has changed its nature and is now able to offer end-to-end services, anywhere in the world. We can support our customers throughout their supply chain, with air transport solutions for shipments that do not suffer any delay, or warehousing and storage solutions to delay the pace of imports according to their specific needs.

The group has also started a major digitalization movement, in order to give our customers more autonomy in managing their supply chain.

Finally, we have taken the relationship to the extreme, since, thanks to our global presence and the customer portfolio we have developed over the past 40 years, we have become a true “business provider” for our customers who would like to expand internationally and are looking for reliable suppliers or partners.

We are now seeing that the future of our competitiveness is being played out in areas that were still weak signals in our industry 10 years ago. For example, our group launched studies on the use of liquefied natural gas as a fuel for our container ships, and today, ships capable of carrying 23,000 containers are operating service using this cleaner source of propulsion. In the meantime, environmental issues have become absolutely crucial for our largest customers, who now require their carriers to have a committed environmental approach.

The manager: essential interface for a win–win customer–supplier relationship

In maritime transport, it is absolutely crucial to know how to foresee. This is true for the crews on our ships. It is also true for our employees who are in the field every day, in contact with our customers. At CMA CGM, we have developed a very decentralized organization, where the managers of the agencies in the countries where the group is present (160 worldwide) occupy a central position. They are the ones who can inform the lines about changes in their region, about development projects, about companies that are setting up internationally or that, on the contrary, have growing import needs. Hence, we pay particular attention to their training. We have a training program specially dedicated to them, so that they have all the necessary assets to listen to our customers. It is on the initiative of these field managers that we develop new lines, new offers and new services. It is thanks to them and the special relationship they have with their customers in the field that we can set up pilots that can then be extended to our range of services. This requires them to be in a constant position of observing and actively listening to their clients and to maintain an ongoing dialogue with managers and department heads at headquarters so that they can study, design and deploy tailored and adapted solutions. This requires true teamwork, with each party working hand in hand to create value.

The experience and organization of our group resonate with the book we are holding in our hands. It offers an excellent opportunity to question, learn and progress for B2B companies like the CMA CGM Group that I represent.

Thierry BILLION

General Secretary

CMA CGM Group

November 2021

On August 19, 2019, 181 presidents of the largest companies in the United States, from Apple’s Tim Cook to Amazon’s Jeffrey P. Bezos to Dennis A. Muilenburg of Boeing, gathered at the influential Business Roundtable and signed a manifesto that redefines the mission of business 1 . Believing that maximizing shareholder value should no longer be the company’s primary focus and sole priority, the signatories put stakeholders, first and foremost the customer, at the heart of corporate responsibility: “delivering value to the customer”, “investing in employees”, “dealing fairly and ethically with suppliers”, “supporting the communities in which the company works”, “protecting the environment” and “generating long-term shareholder value”.

Although the most skeptical commentators see it as an obligatory and principled response to the injunctions of investors 2and the most enthusiastic as a revolution, the manifesto nevertheless brings to light principles that are widely debated in management. Stakeholder theory and customer orientation, long discussed in the academic literature and applied to corporate practices, clearly resonate with this new definition of the company.

Since the 1990s, customer orientation has been recognized as a major alternative approach to positioning on price, product or business, in order to better face competitive challenges and keep the company focused on its markets. This customer orientation is seen as a strategic orientation of the company, validated by the general management, and put in priority in the hands of the senior executives of the C-suite such as CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), CCO (Chief Customer Officer) or CXO (Chief Customer Experience Officer). So how do we get this customer orientation down to the field? How can we find the intention of the leaders in the practices, behaviors and interactions, especially with customers, and more broadly with all the stakeholders of the company? How can we also free up energy at all levels of the company, so that customer orientation can be enriched on a daily basis? The key lies in the involvement of managers and field staff in the implementation of customer orientation and in their strong adherence to its principles and values. A customer-oriented manager becomes, on the one hand, the intermediary between an ambition and its realization, and on the other hand, the activator of a continuous renewal of this orientation as close as possible to the market.

B2B 3service is a legitimate, necessary and urgent field of application for customer orientation. First, it is legitimate to focus on it specifically because of its economic dynamism. In an economy dominated by services, business services account for nearly half of the value added of market services and concentrate exports 4. While the field of services is widely covered by a large body of academic and managerial literature, it is essentially focused on B2C. It is, therefore, necessary to deepen our knowledge of B2B services, beyond a simple superposition of the specificities of the service offer on the one hand, and the B2B market on the other hand. As markets inevitably mature, the challenges of increased competition and commoditization of the offer will sooner or later make customer orientation particularly urgent for service providers. A technical or business orientation, in which customers are insufficiently understood in their complexity and taken into account in their needs and expectations, is still dominant. While managers in charge of developing and launching offers are in a strong and lasting relationship with customers, observation of practices too often leads us to the findings that, at best, the players are not aware of their role in this customer orientation, and that, at worst, they reproduce approaches and behaviors that are in conflict with the balance between customer satisfaction and the profitability of their company.