2018 Sustainability Report

Why Customer Service Excellence Matters

For over 140 years, customers have relied on Greif’s industrial packaging to ship their most important products. They depend on our business acumen and ability to quickly and reliably provide quality packaging. Our value and technical expertise have set us apart from our competitors for over a century. We focus on meeting our customers’ expectations, a key aspect of Greif’s vision of, in industrial packaging, be the best performing customer service company in the world. We are committed to finding the best ways to serve our customers.

Governance

All Greif businesses manage customer service daily. Our practices and policies are managed through our Customer Service Excellence Team, led by our chief administrative officer. The team is comprised of 10 representatives from various business units and regions within Greif. The team meets monthly to discuss customer service initiatives, while tracking progress on Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) and Net Promoter Score (NPS)—our measures of customer satisfaction and likelihood of a customer recommending Greif to others. Our Customer Service Excellence Team partners with all global business units to share best practices, improve communications, drive processes, engage cross-functional leaders and develop a curriculum and training to bolster our employee’s skills and behaviors related to providing exceptional customer service.

In 2018, we continued to build on our customer service culture. With the support of Greif’s executive leadership, we expanded our customer service training globally and to departments serving internal customers and integrated best practices from other industries into our training. We expanded our training services from 10 to 19 languages, helping us reach all 358 global customer service colleagues who interact directly with external customers.

Across Greif, we view feedback collected during our NPS process as an opportunity to address our customers’ concerns and provide corrective action when necessary. Through this approach, we work with our customers to create improvement plans addressing their concerns. As a result of these engagements, we are focusing on improving our communication with our customers, proactively engaging them so they have the time to respond to communications appropriately – one of the seven skills we are teaching our colleagues through training. We are also evaluating the quality of our sales visits through analysis and coaching sessions by sales leaders. Our sales account managers are more prepared than ever to address our customers’ needs and ensure quality visits with our customers. Additionally, we directly engage customers via Product Lunch N’ Learns—informal events to provide training and information about our products, as well as build relationships with our customers.

In 2019, we will begin rolling out facilitated CSE training for all Greif professional colleagues. Every six weeks, these colleagues will focus on one of seven unique Customer Service Excellence skills, each of which is followed by an online knowledge check. As each colleague advances in the program, peers are expected to provide feedback to each other, reinforcing learning on a daily basis and helping to instill the customer service culture we are working to achieve. By the end of 2019, 100 percent of our professional colleagues will have received training on at least half of the material in the program. We will continue to build Customer Service Excellence into our everyday behaviors via development programs and by using NPS and CSI results to inform how we provide service to our customers, including enhancing our understanding of the industries our customers serve.

Performance