Jenny Craig and Curves came together as part of a private equity buy-out in late 2013. The businesses complement each other in that one (Jenny Craig) focuses on nutrition and diet, and the other (Curves) focuses on exercise. Tying the value proposition together requires leaders who develop enterprise-wide perspectives on customers and how to serve them better.
From his post as chief information officer, Abe Lietz has proven to be one such leader. He joined Jenny Craig three years ago. As he explains in my interview with him, as an IT leader, he has pushed to be more customer-facing and cognizant of customer experience than the average CIO. By thinking about business and customer outcomes first, he has pursued technology investments always in support of those needs. In so doing, IT (along with Operations and Marketing) has become a primary driver of customer experience.
By demonstrating that he is an executive who can apply glue across this diverse enterprise, Lietz’s responsibilities have grown. He was asked to take on Service Operations, which provides service to customers and to colleagues. In so doing, Lietz and his team are delivering higher value to the combined company and its customers.
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Peter High: Jenny Craig and Curves are two organizations that came together under your watch while you have been in the organization. Could you take a minute to describe those two businesses and the synergies they have drawn from coming together? What are your thoughts on IT's role in these organizations.
Abe Lietz: The thesis behind bringing these two companies together is that they both serve very similar customer demographics. They both ultimately have one goal of driving a healthy lifestyle and getting our customers fitter and healthier. They do it in different ways, but a truly healthy lifestyle is a mixture of diet and fitness. Jenny Craig is a 30 plus year old business, historically with a distributed retail model. We have over 500 locations throughout the US and Australia and we are a food based diet program. Curves has a different model of a 100% franchised business throughout the world. We have Curves locations in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America.
The goal of bringing those two businesses together was first to synergize the back-end and the administrative components of the business like finance. The second goal was to drive some of that synergy around a healthy lifestyle and to bring both the diet and weight-loss component of a healthy lifestyle and fitness together.
High: What role does IT play in an organization like this one?
Lietz: IT in both businesses has played a pretty important role in not only day-to-day operations but also as we think about bringing these two companies together. IT, and the technology that supports our businesses, is critical to allowing these two companies to communicate, to be on one network, and to collaborate with employees across the brands. Also, IT is able to take some of the common elements that both businesses need to deliver customer experiences and use common platforms across the board to drive that experience from a front-end point of view. Where there is an overlap in technology capabilities that both businesses had historically built, we bring one platform together to give a similar experience across brands.
In this particular case, in the process of bringing two brands together it was also very important that as we look to open up locations that they are dual-branded. Ideally, a Jenny Craig location or a Curves location can offer complementary services. IT's role is to be able to deliver that experience in as seamless a way as possible without having to completely disrupt the business and spend an exorbitant amount of time to bring these two businesses together. So, we have been working feverishly since we have been together to build an IT capability that does just that. We have a handful of locations throughout the US now that are actually dual branded locations and offer both sets of services so a customer can come in and be on the Jenny Craig diet and get food delivered to their home and also workout in a Curves fitness circuit. That customer is interacting with multiple systems and processes underneath the hood, but the experience for the customer is relatively seamless.
High: Chief Information Officer is a role you have had for multiple years now, and more recently you have taken on the additional responsibilities as Vice President of Service Operations. What are the responsibilities of each of these roles?
Lietz: The CIO role is relatively traditional. I was brought on board to transform IT and get it healthy and to modernize the technological capability for both brands, first when I started with Jenny Craig, and again when Curves and Jenny came together to lead IT for both organizations. One of my passions is being customer focused, so when I joined and began to take a look at the IT capability, I started conversations by focusing on the business and the customer and not necessarily the technology. I am very deliberate in bringing the customer facing roles and teams directly onto my staff. By doing that, we really transformed IT service capability and turned it into something that is pretty significant in terms of delivering service back to the customer. We can measure that now pretty autonomously.
As these two brands came together, it was very clear that there was a pretty healthy amount of overlap between the activities that an IT service does and our Customer Service teams across both brands. So the Service Operations component of my role is pretty broad. It can cover anything from somebody in the corporate office whose mouse has broken all the way to a customer that is having an issue with a delivery or has a question about our product or programs across brands.
That Service Operations team allows us to get some synergy between these teams. For example, prior to having these two teams together, if a customer called in and had an issue with their password on our website, that particular issue would get shepherded to multiple resources. It might be taken by a customer service resource and then passed to somebody in IT, and then escalated in IT, and then passed back to the customer service resource. Now that we have synergized these teams, that issue is handled by one person. So we have come together in roles and brought skill sets and training together in order to deliver the best service experience to the customer on that very first call. We have been able to really bring these two teams together, not only on an organization chart, but also operationally and through the activities that we are delivering.
High: Perhaps unlike almost anyone that I have interviewed as part of this series before, you are very different from your customer set in a very fundamental way. Namely, your customers are women and you, of course, are a man. Can you talk a bit about some of the ways in which you can empathize with your customers despite this fundamental difference?
Lietz: My approach is knowing that, in many ways, the journey that our customers go on is one that can be challenging and is one that is emotionally charged. I have my own family members, my wife and others, who have needed very similar support in their own lives, so I can empathize with those needs and use that as a guide when we interact with customers. Even personally when I interact with customers, I keep that in mind and know that this service and the product that we are offering, although it is needed and we are delivering great results to our customers, is one that is fraught with challenges.
Our job as a company is to help our customers get through those moments so they can have a healthy relationship with their lifestyle both in terms of the food that they are eating and their fitness.
In my role and certainly in customer service that when you are on the other end, often, that call is not one that is positive. It is often something that someone is having an issue with. That service experience is something that we have tuned and honed to make sure that not only are we solving a customer’s challenge, but we are doing it in a way that delivers a great experience and a very high quality interaction – one that sympathizes with their needs. We embed those behavioral traits into our training, which is something I helped put together and it is something I live by.
High: How do you think about customer experience through technology?
Lietz: Certainly any business needs to understand their customer demographic and what their needs are. If you look across the weight-loss and fitness space, various competitors use technology in different ways. Our theme here at Jenny Craig is technology is necessary, but we do not want it to be in the way. We want it to complement our service because at the end of the day, both Jenny Craig and Curves thematically are grounded in having a great coach and a great consultation experience in our centers, in our retail locations, and in the case of Jenny Craig, in our At-Home program. Each of those experiences are complemented by technology. The best technology uses for our business is that those capabilities do not appear to get in the way or sidestep that experience with our consultants. An example of that is the consultation experience. We are having a conversation with our customers every week asking, "How it is going? What challenges are you having? How can we help?" We are not doing that with both people sitting in front of a computer; we are doing that in a one-on-one conversation. But we do capture that later because those are important details for a consultant to understand and to analyze down the road. The technology ensures that each interaction is more productive and reflective of past interactions.
High: You led the deployment of e-business and mobile channels solutions for the organization. In what ways did you develop those avenues for the organization?
Lietz: I will be specific to Jenny Craig because that was the majority of my involvement in the digital transformation. When I joined, historically our web and e-business and mobile capability was fairly limited and aimed at driving lead generation and marketing. We heard feedback from our customers that we needed to evolve and the industry in general is moving quickly and starving for that mobile, social, online interaction. Jenny Craig as a business is not immune from that.
When I joined, I was chartered with developing how to deliver that technology capability, which was something that was pretty common in my background, but the change management within the company was also a priority. Prior to deploying these technologies, we had never taken an order through the web or understood the operational and logistical processes behind all that. Those things by themselves are not necessarily IT related, but it was my charter to help walk through how we navigated those changes inside the company. So in fewer than 12 months, we went from having no capability to a full e-commerce capability deployed. Now we are taking a pretty healthy amount of orders and it is a good part of our business.
We have also deployed a mobile capability. For those moments when one of our customers wants to use technology to plan or to track their food and their meals to align to the Jenny Craig program in between the consultation experiences, we now have that ability through mobile. Where someone has taken it upon themselves to use that mobile capability to track and interact, we can use that data as part of the consultation. That really helps our consultants better understand what the customer is going through and how we can help. These journeys, whether it is fitness or weight-loss, are complicated and they are hard. We are here to help with that. Both our e-business platform and our mobile capabilities went live about 18 months ago and both of those have seen pretty great success and are growing in terms of usage and download on the mobile side every day.
High: Are their aspects of your newer set of responsibilities as a Service Operations executive that have impacted or improved your abilities as CIO?
Lietz: As I talk to my traditional IT staff, it has amplified the focus around what we are delivering, whether they are projects or service related activities. We ground ourselves in the customer's expectations first. If you roll the clock back five or ten years, it was very common for a technologist to put the technology first, and I am oriented with the reverse mentality. I think about the business success and the customer success first. As I entered this job and prior to taking on Service Operations, I would always lead with that, but it is more amplified now.
Also, as I sit down with my peers, IT obviously is here to help transform the business and use technology for growth and all the other aspects, but I know I also have a unique perspective on how technology is directly affecting the customer experience in a good way or in a bad way. For either new capability like e-business or mobile or internal capabilities that have second degree effects on customer, the time between those things rolling out and knowing their effects on the customer is very short. In fact, it is clarified for myself and my team because when we roll something out, we are also the ones taking the phone call about whether it is working right and whether the customer understands what we attempt to deliver. That has really helped accelerate solving issues for the customer and understanding how to address an issue pretty quickly when something is wrong.
IT is grounded in operational excellence and is cross functional. To solve issues and get things done, you need to span across the entire organization, which is somewhat unique to IT. In fact, in our organization, customer service is very similar: it spans Operations, IT, and Marketing. So those things have made the strength of IT and IT's seat at the table even stronger and forged a much deeper and stronger relationship across functions, especially in those functions that have a deep interest in customer service like our Retail Operations team at both Jenny Craig and Curves.
High: As you look a few years out, what are technology trends excite you?
Lietz: Something that we are always interested in is data and analytics. In our business as a retailer, I find how much we are able to capture about the interactions we have with customers to be unique. I see analytics capability not only in the "big data" domain where we are able to look at a much broader set of data and make sense of it. We strive to make the analysis more visual and clearer to an end user so that they can make informed decisions more rapidly. Particularly in our businesses where we are able to get deeper insights into the data that we are collecting on our customers, we aim to use that data to better the experience, and at the end of the day to drive greater success for customers.
Along the same lines, I carry a mantra that the more IT can get its head out of the engine room, the more we can focus on delivering value and being more customer focused. Cloud technology is nothing new, but it is maturing and becoming more stable. Traditional issues like security are certainly of concern but getting better. There are also broader domains that are now served under a lot of these cloud technologies, so I feel more confident that much more of my infrastructure will move to the cloud. When that happens, it increases business velocity. I will keep a constant pulse on the SaaS space and what applications over time we can replace and put in the hands of someone else so we are just getting straight value out of it. We are doing some of this now with infrastructure, and I think over time we are going to do more and more.
Lastly, in the fitness and weight-loss industries, it is pretty commonplace in the press and in general trends, that technology is playing a deeper role, especially when it comes to ambient trackers like wearables and bands being integrated with our smartphone devices. Although at Jenny Craig and Curves we do not see that as being something we are going to lead with, that technology is going to get better. As it gets more accurate over time, we will keep our fingers on the pulse of what will be most relevant for our customers to use. As these technologies modernize and become more tightly integrated with our consumers’ lives, we are looking at how and if we would integrate those technologies to complement the core of our business to improve that service experience and ultimately make our customers’ journeys more successful.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy, has just been released by Wiley Press/Jossey-Bass. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. Follow him on Twitter @WorldClassIT.
