Customer focus

[Music] Hi and welcome to V Conversations, the podcast from V about the way the company is changing and the work colleagues are doing right across the company to put V at the forefront of innovation in ship management. I'm Sam Shaw and in this episode I speak to James Neur and Jesper Bohanson on what customer focus a key behaviour for V means for all colleagues. James, I'm going to start with you if I may. Can you please just tell us a little bit about yourself including your current role please? Yeah, my name is James Neur and I've been working with V Group for just over 21 years now. I joined the company as a chartered accountant working in the marine services division. Prior to that I had worked in health utilities, property investment, current V ships as I said working with the marine services and Ctech as a finance manager, I had various sort of commercial financial financial rules for the first 10 years and moved across into the ship management sphere of the business for the last 10 years focusing on business development commercial growth. In the last 18 months the very specific focus around existing customers and looking at how we can build better performance outcomes, strengthening relationships, just to basically to ensure customer staying grow with us to greater extent than we've had in the recent past. That does involve a lot of careful planning listening to customer needs, then to find where we can be more proactive. Yeah, basically tiny exceed expectations. So yeah, this current role has got a lot of challenges, but a lot of fun. Perfect, thank you. And yes, for how about you your career to date and also the current role that you're doing for V Group? Thank you very much, friends. Yes, but we'll answer and I've been with V Group for the past 11 months only, but I've been in the maritime industry for 34 years in various capacities, mostly within the commercial space. I've been a ship broker, I've worked for a large tanker ship owner, I've invested on behalf of private equity and I have been working in tanker pools and I've been working in maritime technology and within the green transformation space before I joined the group in November of 2024 to head up the carbonization as a business unit. As part of the organizational change in V-ships, I followed Robert into V-ships and joined V-ships on the commercial site where my responsibility today is to grow the business for new customers and to basically expand our footprint and find new people and new customers that want to join V. Great, thank you both. So I'm glad that we've got representation across both existing and new customer perspectives on this podcast. So customer focus is one of the new behaviors at V Group. What does it mean to you personally? James, I'll ask you that one first, if I may. Yeah, sure, Sam. I wouldn't say customer focus is a new behavior as such, but certainly one of where we've recognised that the customer focus, we can do better. I always can do better at everything and I think but it's something where we're really challenging ourselves. For me, we've got to look through the eyes of the mind of the customer. What are they thinking every day? What do they expect from us? How do we see our own service? A lot of self-reflection I think is something where for me personally, it's really important to think about that all the time in your day job. For me, it's about personalising the experience, genuinely believing care to the customers believe that that is true focus in terms of want to make sure that we get and give them the outcomes that they need. And recently for me, a lot of the things for me is being proactive. I think a lot of the times with the customers and we are in the ship manager industry, it can be transactional. But for me, it's more than that. We've got to be relationship based focus. How does a customer see us truly as a partner? How do we work together? Have a similar culture and mindset? We've got some fantastic case studies where culturally we're aligned with a customer. Then it flows. How do we work and sink and believe that there are what are the right things to do in terms of behaviours with crew, with onshore staff? So that's customer focus for me, truly being a partner. And finally, at that point, it's continuously improving and important. And the customer needs to see a genuine commitment. And for me, it's about making the person successful in the business as much as the business itself. So that's how I treat customer focus and a real personal level of success together. Perfect, thank you. And yes, but how about you? What does customer focus mean to you from your perspective? Thank you very much Sam. Luckily, not something very different from what James is saying because I think that would be something we would need to then consider internally if we were not aligned. So equally so, I think partnerships are very important. We want to create our customer relationships to become partnerships. We think about it as partnerships. We think about having transparency with our clients and customers in a way that they become partners, that we are listening to their need and understand what our service delivery means to their business, that we proactively solve the issues that may be whether they are problems or whether they are opportunities that arise to improve the fleet or the relationship that we have. So I think James framed it that this is about quality and consistency and putting the customer obviously at the center of all of what we do. Great, thank you. And just going into a little bit more detail around that then when we're talking about what that means on a day to day basis and what that means in practice. James, I'll put this one to you for me. Can you think of perhaps an example maybe across these ships and indeed these services as to how that manifests itself, what it looks like on a day to day basis? Well, for me, really, it's that yeah, it is day to day. You wake up and have a show in the morning. You think what am I doing today? It has to be about the customer. What am I doing internally versus talking to the customer externally? That's the real balance that you've got to make sure you people are assets, but absolutely that makes our company. But those people need to be the right people with the right mindset and the right culture and the right behaviors to speak to the customers every day. It's really for me, it's about having a very clear plan with the customer day to day looking at what our relationships are. It's not vessel performance for us is where we focus on, but it's a bit customer performance as well. How is our relationships with our customers? I mentioned earlier about being proactive rather than reactive. Have we got the right structure in our meetings to yes, listen to the customer, but advise the customer. We are there to make a difference for the customer. So every day, what is our communications like? Of course, there's going to be reactive situations, but are we thinking ahead of the next week, the following week, the following month, how we can manage their all pegs, how we can manage the various performance levels within the KPIs that we have with the customer. So for me, day to day, it really is about building a very clear picture of what we need to do to to over perform in terms of what a customer would expect from us and moving away from reacting, not just reacting. And I think one of the things that we're doing a number of things that we're doing here and when I say it's not just a bit vessel performance, but customer performance. Every day means to make sure we're onboarding a customer. If it's a new customer, how are we onboarding the person, the company, how are we talking to them in terms of what their expectations want? Every customer is different about what they need. And we've got to make sure that we onboard them the right way, what type of reports do the need? Maybe we have after a certain paid workshops, how are we working today, but what do we need to do going forward? And that then brings relationships and it brings trust and it brings a lot more around how we are a true partner together. So very much day to day is really a bit focused on relationships and achieving that collaborative, bit friendship and trusted we have working forward. And that brings results. And really does. And I'm guessing that's not just in how you serve customers and clients, but also the partners with whom you work as well. It's a mindset from your cultural mindset that you behave this way to make the whole ecosystem around a customer. It would be its suppliers, charters, oil majors. Are we talking to everybody the right way, the proactive way and other mutual those relationships, support us in the good times and in the bad? Can you think of an example a time in the past maybe where a customer's feedback or a particular request has really made you stop and think or rethink the way that you might be approaching something. And that's led to a better outcome for them. That's really interesting. And again, in the back, we've had customers which is fantastic. We're very proud that we get customers for decades. But during that cycle from how we work and operate, there is a, there is sometimes a case where we continually meet the requests. And for example, if we had a performance report and I've got one example, one of our larger customers, where they wanted to perform a report 10 years ago. That actually we've never stopped to look to say, do you still need that same report? What we've done is we've added on, I'd like more information like that. But we actually then again, been challenging with the customer we tend to insist, well, this is now a 30-piece report every month. It takes us two weeks to produce really and including the meeting and all that sort of. It isn't really value add in the customer. We try to translate that into what we could do with those hours is help with with pre-rataation, it could help with looking at all our KPI within our ship's system and it helps the boat go faster as our analogy is. So when we sat down with a customer, it is about saying, well, I know you want this, but we need to be confident in our own skin to say, you may think you need that, but if we did this a different way, we could then add more value by focusing on the ship performance. And after that, we reduced it dramatically. They really appreciate it. And then it opened up another discussion about what more do we need to do in that space? That was just one area of performance. We really get we for this culture of over reporting because you trust us now. So that's one thing. So it's at the beginning, there's always a lot of you need to give us overload of information as a ship manager outsourcing. And then you need to treat the customer so that trust does you only need this and then we can take it forward. So there was a lot of added value back for both us and for the customer, in that example. That's great. Thank you. And it probably sets up my next question quite nicely. So yes, but you've got a really fast moving industry and digital tools and data becoming more and more important, not just in your space, but across the board. And also sustainability to your point when you're opening and where you've come from is becoming a key part of any conversation really. So what innovations are helping you to anticipate and meet changing customer needs more effectively? I think obviously the whole industry is changing very fast. And especially around digital tools and data is becoming increasingly important. Together with of course, the sustainability agenda, we at V group have been on the forefront of digital solutions for decades actually in the management industry. And we have operated with a very transparent governance around how people can monitor and use digital tools. That is part of our DNA. It's embedded in the way that we think of it when we approach new customers, when we work with existing customers. James gave examples of how we built these service deliveries and used data to improve relationship. But we also do that in the process of trying to acquire new clients and new customers. Our system today is elaborate and it's based on data that's been collected over more than 20 years from numerous and thousands of vessels and data points, which allow for us in the process of talking to new customers to be very well educated about the different risk scenarios that place out and the different opportunities that we can offer as a company to new customers. So we obviously layer that with the sort of newer technologies of AI that have become important for everyone, but is also important in how we manage and provide data to our clients. So we do use those digital tools and I think it's quite important that the way the world is developing, we must not forget that while we work a lot with digital tools, while we work a lot with data, the service that we provide to our clients is performed by human beings on board ships and it's relying on personal relationships to build the partnerships that we've been talking about in the past. We're not forgetting that, but we are utilizing data and digital tools in the process of acquiring new customers because increasingly what we have to deliver is not only an exceptional service, but we also have to deliver outcomes. So we have to be able to demonstrate to our clients that we create an additional level of value. That value can be many things. It can be monetary, it can be in terms of safety, it can be in terms of commercial uptime, it could be all sorts of different key indicators which are part of the process of selling what we do as a business. And then of course, lastly, sustainability which is technology and a whole different sort of mind game to digital. Sustainability also comes in a way of digital when you think about how we can use digital to improve the vessels performance and therefore lower the sea or two emission, etc. But we obviously also look at what other tools in the toolbox within sustainability and other technologies of energy saving devices, etc. That we can add to the platform. But I think most importantly, our role is to find a blend of all of this and be able to demonstrate to any new clients but certainly also to existing clients. But in the context of my response here mostly to new clients, what are the outcomes that we can sell to them? Because there's a lot of big areas of focus there and they all seem very, very important. So just looking ahead and again, this very fast moving maritime sector, moving very quickly evolving, where would you say is one of the biggest opportunities for attracting new customers in future in terms of where you might like to focus? I think we continue to focus on delivering a very solid performance in the way we deliver the service to our clients that we remain transparent, that we are on the forefront of all regulatory and all compliance issues. The future of maritime is complicated. It's a complex industry. It's always been a complex industry but it's becoming increasingly more complex. It's complex in terms of regulatory environment, it's complex in terms of environmental requirements, complex in how you scale and deal with new technologies. And we obviously in V have the opportunity to expand that for the client because we do that at scale. The focus for us really is to ensure that all these complexities that are added to the industry today become a one-stop shop for our clients going forward. I think that at large is one of the areas. And then of course, as I mentioned before, our ability to demonstrate that we can deliver different outcomes of what they want to accomplish or what they accomplish today that joining V or becoming a partner to V or becoming a customer to V that will deliver a different outcome. And in this particular context, of course, a better outcome which very often is a more either efficient or safe outcome. James and Jesper, thank you very much for your time. It's been really nice chatting to you. Thanks for listening. We'd love to know what you think of the show. If you've got any feedback or questions, send them to [email protected]. Speak to you on another episode of V Conversations Soon. [BLANK_AUDIO]