Customer Service Excellence

Leading through service, reliability and creating a customer-centric culture.

Highlights

  • Greif delivers legendary customer service through a solutions-based approach, earning trust and loyalty and providing easy, transparent technology-enabled service.
  • In 2022, our Net Promoter Score was 65, a 12 percent improvement from last year, highlighting consistent progress in enhancing customer satisfaction and recommendation likelihood.

Why Customer Service Excellence Matters

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Customer service is at the heart of everything we do at Greif. For over 145 years, we have partnered with customers on their business journeys, meeting their expectations to provide exemplary packaging services and solutions. Becoming a partner means understanding our customers’ priorities, needs and impacts along the value chain. Our ability to understand our customers’ urgency and provide accurate information is fundamental to reaching our enhanced standards of providing legendary customer service. All this supports our vision to be the best-performing customer service company in the world.

Governance

The global Marketing function’s Commercial Excellence (ComEx) Team manages our customer service practices and policies. The ComEx Team comprises leaders from each business segment that meet to share best practices, improve communications, drive processes and engage cross-functional leaders. Through cross-functional collaboration, we improve our ability to address each customer’s unique needs. We embed customer service into all Greif roles through a culture of excellence supported by training and other Human Resources programs. The ComEx Team is also responsible for tracking progress on customer satisfaction and customer recommendation likelihood using our Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

We track every plant’s complaints, delivery times and customer response times through our CSI. Managers review the index monthly during performance reviews. We also look at NPS when conducting our annual performance reviews. We view feedback collected from our NPS survey as an opportunity to address our customers’ concerns and remedy issues when necessary. After each NPS survey, we connect with all respondents and focus on engaging each survey detractor – a customer that rates Greif poorly – to understand their perspective and create improvement plans addressing their concerns. We use the feedback from these engagements, along with proactive engagement, to improve our customer communication to become a more effective partner.

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2022 Dempsey Award for Customer Service Excellence

Greif’s 2022 Dempsey Award for Customer Service Excellence was awarded to seven teams across our operations for their work delivering best-in-class customer services as measured by our Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) scores and Net Promoter Scores (NPS). From our GIP business unit, we congratulate our teams from Algeria, Egypt, Sweden and the Shanghai LSD plant. Additionally, from PPS, we commend the CorrChoice Concord team and the Recovered Fiber Group in Tallahassee. We congratulate our Global Finance, Data and Analytics Center of Excellence. All Dempsey Award recipients have led by example in our Build to Last Strategy and went above and beyond in contributing to Greif’s goal of becoming the best customer service company in the world.




We utilize tools to improve our efficiency in responding to customer needs and overall customer experience. In 2022, we continued utilizing our global system to prepare customer offers, allowing us to improve pricing consistency and our customer response time. We also continued using a cloud-based sales enablement platform that helps sales and marketing teams create more consistent messaging and to find and share information more efficiently. This year we worked on developing an online customer platform to further improve customer communications, allowing us to deliver a better customer experience. The platform will be tested at select facilities in North America in 2023.

Greif provides customer service excellence (CSE) training to all our professional colleagues. As each colleague advances in the program, peers provide feedback to each other, reinforcing learning and helping to instill the legendary customer service culture we strive for. We offer CSE training in 19 languages through a blended, facilitated and online program. The training tools equip our colleagues to provide legendary customer service for internal and external customers. Additionally, all new hires complete our nine Greif University CSE modules. We will continue developing CSE training for our manufacturing colleagues in 2023, building on this year’s success and learnings of the professional colleagues’ program.

In 2021, we began conducting in-depth market research to identify business growth opportunities and to be a better resource for our customers. From this research, we identified fast-growing industries and engaged with customers to analyze key trends that may impact packaging needs. The information gathered allows us to tailor our products and sales approach to market trends. We bring together Greif’s subject matter experts from across the globe to discuss challenges, solutions and opportunities and share general industry knowledge to encourage growth regularly.

Additionally, we train our colleagues to support our customers’ sustainability targets. We utilize systems like the Greif Green Tool, a tool designed to assist our customers in making informed decisions about which industrial packaging best fits their needs and supports their sustainability goals. Over the last year, we have seen a 69 percent increase in requests for the use of the Greif Green Tool.

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TotalEnergies Sustainability Award at Suppliers Day Event

In November 2022, Greif was presented the Sustainability Award by TotalEnergies to recognize our exemplary sustainability performance aligned with their values as a key strategic partner. Our ability to provide our customers with customized, detailed packaging solutions through tools such as the Greif Green Tool goes a long way to deliver on our vision of being the best-performing customer service company in the world.

Left to right: Philippe Marty – VP Strategic Marketing and ComEx Greif, Daniel Korb - TotalEnergies Global Category Manager Packaging, Aysu Katun – VP of Sustainability, Anna Raibaldi – Global Account Manager Greif, Nicolas Payer – President of TotalEnergies Global Procurement

Sales leaders continually evaluate the quality of our sales visits through analysis and coaching sessions. We prepare our sales account managers to address customer needs and provide quality visits with our customers. In 2022, we continued to hold virtual meetings and virtual plant tours worldwide, contributing to our strategy’s goal of providing the best service to our customers, informing them about the latest developments and identifying new opportunities. Our webinars covered topics such as sustainability, product deep dives and innovation. Recently, we expanded these tours to our Paper Packaging & Services businesses. Through this virtual approach, we conducted more plant visits in 2022 than ever. In 2022 alone, we hosted seven webinars with a total number of attendees exceeding 700, including 300 first-time attendees. We received positive feedback from those involved, with over 50 percent of attendees participating in more than one webinar.

Goals, Progress & Performance

Our cumulative CSI calculation allows Greif to assess our ability to deliver legendary customer service. To calculate this metric, we utilize the following data: total number of customer complaints, number of complaints open longer than 30 days, number of customer credits, number of late deliveries and number of total deliveries. In 2022, our CSI score was 93.2, the same as in 2021. This steady score shows our success in achieving a high rate of customer satisfaction and places us in a position to soon accomplish our long-term objective for each business segment to achieve a CSI score of 95 or greater.

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION INDEX

In 2022, our annual NPS survey had more than 4,200 respondents, with 71 percent recommending Greif as a supplier. Our NPS score was 65, a 12 percent improvement from last year. NPS also allows customers to provide feedback on specific statements regarding Greif’s offerings and measures customers’ agreements with those statements. Customers recognized our high-performing employees, high-quality products and ability to deliver on specifications as key success factors. We utilize this information to reach back out to customers to begin a dialogue on how we can better serve them in the future. This tool is crucial in strengthening customer relationships and turning detractors into promoters.

NET PROMOTER SCORE*

*In 2020 Greif transitioned to conducting our NPS survey once annually.

Highlight Stories

Working with Vendor-Customers to Provide Circular Solutions

Greif’s Dalton, Georgia, PPS Recycling facility works closely with local flooring manufacturing plants to provide recycling services for tubes and cores, a significant waste stream produced by the industry. These same flooring manufacturers are also customers of Greif’s recycled paperboard tubes and cores. When the price for old corrugated cardboard (OCC) dropped in 2019, it became uneconomical to recycle these tubes and cores at market price. Greif engaged with the flooring manufacturers to develop a sustainable, circular solution that keeps waste out of landfills and allows Greif to continue providing our customers with excellent service and 100 percent recycled paperboard. Under the new business model, Greif receives payment for managing recyclable waste streams allowing us to process these materials and then send to our paper mills to manufacture 100 percent recycled paperboard.

Circular Solutions
Highlight Stories

CorrChoice Paper Coatings

CorrChoice GreenGuard provides customers a recyclable, repulpable and FDA compliant coated paper solution. A key customer was purchasing a triple wall corrugated container to maintain food quality. Greif worked with the customer to replace the plastic liner with our GreenGuard 200 paper coating. This change eliminated the need for the plastic liner – saving the customer time and labor costs – and made the shipping container 100 percent recyclable and repulpable.

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Highlight Stories

PerforMAXXI

In LATAM, we introduced PerforMAXXI, a web solution used for tracking deliveries to customers and monitoring real-time performance. PerforMAXXI is a mobile app on the delivery driver’s phone that provides customers updates on where their package is in the delivery process. The app utilizes Waze or Google Maps to assist the driver and will be updated to include digital road toll payments in the second phase. The app also enables communication with the driver throughout the trip, accurate measurement of on time delivery, and electronic proof of delivery via photo of the invoice signed by the customer. The app significantly streamlines the communication and delivery process.

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Highlight Stories

Nouryon Supplier of the Year Award

Greif is pleased to be awarded the 2021 Supplier of the Year award from Nouryon for providing excellent support during the pandemic. We were recognized for our proactive business continuity planning for the Ekabox, a customized plastic container only produced in Falkenberg, Sweden. We experienced an equipment failure, however due to our risk management and business continuity planning we were able to move Ekabox production to a third-party manufacturer. As a result, we safeguarded Nouryon and their end customers’ business without any disruptions. Photo: Hans Vanwynsberghe (left), Greif’s Director of Global Key Accounts and Philippe Marty (right), Greif’s Vice President Global Commercial Excellence receive the award from Nouryon’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Charlie Shaver (middle).

Nouryon Supplier of the Year Award
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