What you need to know:

• Former Meta global exec and Diageo marketer Michelle Klein is nine months in to a sweeping remit and overhaul at IAG with a mandate to put customer experience at the heart of everything.
• She’s heading up a combined function spanning customer experience, relations and complaints, marketing, comms, regulatory, transformation and more.
• Klein is embedding an Agile approach and mindset honed in Silicon Valley and wants teams to move fast, fix things – or pivot.
• She said customer data – such as complaints and friction – is feeding both its transformation agenda and go to market strategy.
• That strategy is pushing way beyond ads and into “hyper local” community action at scale, per Klein. She wants measurement – close to real time – at the heart of everything.
• Next she’s running the rule over digital and social channels with AI in mind.
• Whereas IAG was previously renowned for an upper funnel approach under its former CMO, Klein says the funnel must be “collapsed” because the old comms planning structures are no longer compatible with modern life.

Klein’s remit is vast. Customer experience and relations, marketing, comms, regulatory, transformation and more across a combined operation that last year wrapped together teams from multiple business units and restructured their functions.

She wants all staff within the unit to move fast and fix things across the piste rather than operate in silos, the Agile approach that Klein says “isn’t even talked about” in the Valley, “you just do it.” (She agrees with the likes of ex-Hi Pages customer chief turned Hourigan executive headhunter Stuart Tucker that broader skill-sets trump narrow verticals amid accelerating industry flux.)

“When you work in tech, you just are Agile. You don’t need the training, that’s just how it works. Today, your job might be working on Instagram Stories, tomorrow you're thinking about VR and people just move,” said Klein. “Agility is a way of being and I'm really trying to instil that into this team and how we work. If something's not working, you pivot – it's okay, you change it and you do it in the moment, in real time. So the structure I’ve built is meant to go around in a circle," she said, meaning a flywheel rather than chasing its tail, "and we’re just getting started.”

Complaints as growth fuel

She’s also aiming to put customer complaints at the heart of IAG’s strategy, with newly hired head of customer relations, regulatory and transformation Jacqueline Rush, a former head of complaint transformation at ANZ and ASIC internal dispute resolution advisor, an indication of intent. Complaints and friction, suggests Klein, can be rich insight feeds for both IAG’s transformation and go to market strategies.

“The old playbook would be an agency collecting insights and saying ‘this target is doing X, Y and Z’ and you would build your strategy from there. We have that, but we also have customers, the people who we are talking to every day – and that is powerful,” said Klein.

“If you put customer experience at the centre of your brief, your goal and how you're going to measure success, it can change the go to market outcome.”

And the P&L outcome: Whereas previously the approach might be “we’re going to put an ad out about X based on the customer insight,” Klein says IAG’s approach is shifting on those customer lines and cites Help Nation as an early example.

NRMA Insurance data showed circa 60 per cent of all home claims over the last five years were due to extreme weather damaging houses. But its research showed that three quarters of the population do not have an extreme weather emergency plan, a third don’t understand the risks in their local area and half don’t know what they should do in an emergency. So NRMA struck partnerships with Australian Red Cross to deliver 2,000 community training workshops over the next three years.

“That’s a big change in go to market. It’s not an ad,” said Klein, who also has disaster resilience under her watch. “It's about being in communities, providing people with free education, partnering with non-profits to ensure that they get the best possible training and that we live up to our promise of help.”

Measuring the impact of the initiative will involve “classic pre and post” actions, per Klein, “what actions did they take to prepare themselves, do they know if their insurance policy is up to date. Then from a brand perspective, we’ll also look at whether it changes some of our brand measures on how people see us.”

Hyper local, tech overhaul

Klein suggests brands will increasingly apply a “hyper local” lens to customers.

“One of the things I learned at Meta [in the US] is people lived in a 25 mile radius. Proximity really matters, everything that is right in front of them is really important – and I think you will see that more and more here. Hyper-local is something that Help Nation is trying to do – get into the right communities and the right people. It’s something I’m really interested in, this idea of brands showing up in a way that you put a face to the brand, you create value, you demonstrate your value by providing a community, your audience, your customer, with the things that they really need to hear from you.”

But how do big, national brands scale that kind of hyper-local activity? “It’s about walking the talk … and then you point the camera at it …That builds brand strength, brand trust for sure,” per Klein. A newly inked broadcast deal with Nine for the Paris Olympics may help provide such amplification.

“It's that combination of those real life moments: How we help is when we show up in communities, give them the support they need, be first-in and last to leave in crises. Then you talk about how you did it – and you combine that with tech and digital infrastructure to really scale that support,” she said. “So you do it and then you show it – and that drives authenticity.”

Does IAG have that tech and digital infrastructure in place or is Klein aiming to bring in new kit?

“One thing I'm looking at is all of our social platforms right now and just thinking about the role of each one, thinking about the role of AI from a customer perspective. Sometimes you want to be able to talk to a human, sometimes it’s good to be able to scale messaging in a way that people can get information quickly from a trusted source – so I’m looking at that,” she said.

More broadly – in tandem with digital business EGM Nandor Locher, a former digital chief at Qantas and Jetstar who joined IAG last year from Woolworths Group – Klein is running the rule over “all digital platforms” to ensure all customer and brand experience is consistent.

“Nandor joined a few months before I did. He’s more focused on the stack side. But we’re two sides of a coin, we work really closely together – CX and DX. We crossover a lot and it’s another really good example of Agile. There’s a lot of stuff on the front end of the website that I have to think about, but he does too thinking about the back end as well as the front. So it’s a really important partnership.”

Collapse the funnel, measure everything

While IAG’s previous CMO Brent Smart was all-in on brand building and upper funnel (though Smart now at Telstra admits a new appreciation for pointier performance marketing in the street fight that is telco retail) Klein thinks the world has sped up and moved on.

“You’ve got to collapse the funnel,” per Klein, a view her one-time boss Sheryl Sandberg also held.

“Wherever your customer finds you, or you find them, it needs to be a consistent experience that's measurable and drives the right outcomes.”

Hence Klein also embedding a measurement mindset within her expanded function – and tasking newly promoted channel performance marketing and measurement boss Mark Echo with enabling real-time visibility on results.

“If you start any piece of work without a measurement plan, then you shouldn't start it. So I've been saying to my team, the first slide in any deck should be here's how we're going to measure it. So here are our goals. Here's someone who will be successful – and then you get to the where in the funnel does this live,” said Klein.

“People don't live their lives in the way that the old comms planning structures used to work … it has totally changed … and we should just accept that is the reality. If you think about the future, of VR and AR, how do you think about funnel [in that]? So I think what is the goal and how are you measuring it is a really good practice.”

So how is Klein planning to measure success – NPS, customer satisfaction, core brand health metrics?

“There are a lot [of components] but I would ladder it up to reinventing that world class customer experience. So all of those things you mentioned, but for our teams to understand the higher order and work towards that is really important. Because if you shift the NPS in one place, that’s great. But NPS is dynamic and moves really quickly. So you want to have all of those sort of what I would call second level metrics underpinning the first level metric, and that for us is really about that customer experience.”

Why customer plus marketing wins

Klein said IAG is now building out that measurement plan so that all of the underpinning data “ladders up to that north star of have we moved the needle on customer experience.”

Which is why combining customer and marketing functions makes strategic sense, per Klein. “You get to look at the whole. You get to influence the go to market as much as the understanding the customer insight – and I think that is what is different [versus separate CMO/customer roles].”

Rigorously joining the marketing-customer dots, suggests Klein, also pushes the function upstream while helping shield budgets from the knife.

“Marketers have always been held to account around advertising and promotion on the P&L – and in tough times that’s the first thing that gets cut. So a remit like this, where you can actually look at the customer and understand that deeply – the business, the design bit – and then how we are going to market and measure it, I think creates that credibility in the C-suite,” she said. “And then from a P&L conversation, beyond just becoming a cost centre, you’re becoming a growth centre.”