Task

The Black Lives Matter movement and subsequent highlighting of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) caught several US companies off guard.  Some leaders acknowledged the expectation from employees and broader society, the importance for businesses to reflect the progressive values of society at large and the need to act thoughtfully with purpose.

Our client, established in direct-to-consumer home delivery, presented an opportunity to flip a traditional business structure into something that empowered its workforce.  After a series of recent acquisitions, a global distributor of drinking water was left with a highly diverse customer service and delivery network reflective of the breadth of the communities it served. The same could not be said for its senior leadership team which had to be careful not to hijack the highly charged public DEI conversation that was omnipresent.

Pilot

To do this purposefully, company business leaders had to look within and identify critical areas of the organisation where their purpose would resonate most. The workforce was far from unified and cohesive at this point, serving independent communities and locations with specific and isolated missions.

Post-acquisitions, employees were now responsible for national fulfilment, with more pressure to achieve efficiencies of scale. The personal and community touch that built its reputation was at risk of being lost to chasing volume and margin targets.

The net promoter scores and similar demographics between delivery teams and consumers helped FastMora make a robust case for transforming this group into Trusted Advisors.  These Trusted Advisors were now more than delivery personnel; they were experts advising on new products and identifying cross-selling opportunities. Most importantly, this team leads the assessment and support of community initiatives aligned with the organisation’s purpose around safe access to water. This engrained strategy delivers on three essential tenets: 1) a higher perception of flexible service, 2) personal touch, and 3) a bottom-up contribution to ESG scores, fundamentally transforming the DEI dialogue into a conversation about empowerment and value creation.

Transformation

Investment into new technologies facilitated a highly personalised user experience for every order. The decision to transform the traditional delivery mechanism into a more robust and purposeful platform for communication led to vastly improved business results.

Alongside critical qualitative research, FastMora commissioned an internal-use video to reintroduce the team as advisors and to promote internal comprehension.

Compounding these successes, our client announced a new mission: Improving the health of the communities served; a purposeful statement grounded in data from daily interactions between advisors and customers.

Turning panic into opportunity created a thoughtful and authentic response to a DEI conversation and became the focal point for a new ESG strategy, corporate purpose, and portfolio design.