Q&A: Martin Green, Chairman, Goodays
The Goodays platform facilitates digital interactions between brands and their customers, so they can deliver a better customer experience and increase customer value.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I have spent most of my career specialising in customer experience software, previously leading periods of global hyper-growth as GM & Vice President of EMEA at both Medallia (5 years) and Satmetrix (10 years). I’ve also more recently been advising and investing in some of Europe’s brightest software startups, and I’m always looking for firms that can positively impact the world! CX is a space that I care deeply about and know extremely well, so I am very pleased to be joining the Goodays team. There’s a huge amount of buzz about the company’s new name, but what’s happening behind the scenes is even more exciting as we move into a dynamic new phase of growth.
What does your company do? What is your USP?
The business was founded over ten years ago around a simple idea: that customers are a company’s greatest opportunity. They’re not targets, statistics or problems to solve, but one of the biggest business growth levers. The Goodays platform facilitates digital interactions between brands and their customers to maximise this opportunity, so they can deliver a better customer experience and increase customer value. It’s one of the few solutions on the market today that effectively solves one of the biggest challenges modern brands face: how to hold warm, personal, omnichannel conversations with customers at scale across the whole business.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
When I met the founders of Goodays, Nicolas Hammer and Thibaut Carlier, I could see that they were passionate about improving business performance for their clients by unleashing the power of the employee/customer relationship. They’ve created a really sophisticated tool to do that, but it’s genius is in how simple it is to use. This is technology that staff want to use every day to perform better, and adoption rates are higher than any I’ve seen in the industry. It motivates teams, enriches relationships at the frontline and shifts company culture towards what we call ‘customer obsession’: where every person in business is responsible for customer satisfaction.
What advantage does it add?
The business world has woken up to the possibilities of customer-driven growth, and the Goodays platform is invaluable in any strategy to achieve it. Instead of piecemeal initiatives that scratch the surface, it transforms how customers are managed throughout the entire organisation. Customers become everyone’s business – and everyone wins in the process. Customers feel valued and better served, employees in the field are more fulfilled, management teams get the insights they need and business owners enjoy the commercial benefits.
How does a product/service implementation actually look like, and how do you measure success?
Our Contact and Connect customer interaction management platforms help clients manage huge volumes of digital interactions without losing the human touch. This is an easy to use, single interface format that’s embedded across the business so that customer facing staff can hold conversations with customers at scale. Real connections are sparked, deeper more frequent interactions are possible, and over 80% of customer issues are solved by staff efficiently and in the moment. We help our clients shift their focus from just financial metrics to customer satisfaction scores such as NPS and its transformative impact on the whole business.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like? Can you share a case study with us?
The successful French menswear brand Jules provides a great example of Goodays in action. With over 500 stores around the country, they have a big focus on creating a fun and engaging customer experience. Before working with us, they had a customer satisfaction measurement tool but it didn’t provide a proper view of the customer journey and there was no way for store teams to actually connect with customers. Since they switched to using Goodays Connect in 2019, an average of three members of staff in every store use the platform to gain greater visibility and understanding of customers, and to become more accountable for CX. As a result in just one year the brand’s NPS score went up by an impressive 5 points. They’ve also used the insights our tool provides to precisely calculate the amount of additional revenue generated by that NPS increase, brilliantly demonstrating the commercial benefits our platform quickly brings to business.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2023 and how will you help to address them?
The cost of living crisis continues to bite and retailers are increasingly competing on price, so new customer acquisition is becoming ever more costly. The opportunity here is for brands to double down on efforts to retain their existing customers, who are of the highest value to their business in turbulent times. Omnichannel is also at the top of every retailer’s mind right now, and finding ways to adapt and create the blended, streamlined experience that customers want. There’s an opportunity here for brands to innovate with technology to bring the best of both the digital and the physical shopping experience to their customers in an exciting new way.
What’s on the horizon for Goodays in the year ahead?
We have a very strong base in Europe, with over a 100 employees across France, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK, as well as in Japan, and there is so much potential for growth. Our ambition is to lead the global field in customer focused technology for commerce. We will also never stop innovating to serve the needs of our client base of over 150 brands and the staff at over 70,000 business locations who are equipped with our technology. This includes some of the biggest names in retail such as Carrefour, Monoprix, E.Leclerc and New Look.
