Executive Summary
This is my take on how our 5-day trip to Panama delivered learnings I can leverage in my client projects. During our time, we had a chance to tour Panama City and visited several organizations including the Verba Odrec pineapple farm, Copa Airlines, AmCham/KPMG, Felipe Motta distributors, DHL Global Forwarding, Dell Technologies and Robert Melo’s Scale Up Panama collaborative event with Capital Bank.
My corporate background is in technology, design and customer experience strategy. Customer experience (CX) strategy seeks to understand how customers interact with businesses across the customer lifecycle, and where we can strategically design and enhance those touchpoints to create experiences that are positive, useful and delightful. In what I do, design thinking provides a common framework we can step through to dissect customer experiences and design solutions that are customer centric and ultimately valuable to the business.
While promotion and delivery of product is something that plays greatly into the CX solutions I’ve worked on, the Panama trip took that a step further into the logistical, economical and environmental considerations that affect our clients’ decision making process behind the scenes. A few key takeaways for me were gaining an appreciation for environmental impact of global freight, product cost drivers within the supply chain and logistics considerations for multinationals looking to do business outside of their home country.
Product Distribution Locally and Globally
DHL and Felipe Motta were probably the largest working warehouses I’ve had the privilege to see in action. There was the unique concern around third-party delivery partners that multinationals must factor in — even when working with a well known shipper like DHL. Giving up full logistics management that likely includes synchronization between ERP systems adds a layer of cost, complexity and uncertainty that I suspect is easy to overlook when thinking about the total rollout cost of digital implementations. It would be easy to assume DHL has its own fleet in every country and can offer similar delivery processes and timeframes on the ground versus what they can offer in a corporation’s home territory.
From Startup to Maturity
Thinking from an entrepreneurial perspective, Felipe Motta and Copa Airlines were still relatively new firms, and we were able to see how expansion and growth strategies of the past few years or decades have impacted their businesses positively. In our world of startups and Silicon Valley here in California, I feel it brought a new perspective for me when working with small businesses and startups on CX strategy projects moving forward. How do you want to get from where you are today to a firm like Copa Airlines? What products and services will have to evolve, and how will you successfully market the business to gain customers?
Supply Chain and Diversification
Expanding on the idea of successful marketing, the story of Verba Odrec’s La Dona of Panama pineapples was an interesting case study in the challenges of diversifying your product mix while still maintaining control and quality standards across a growing range of suppliers. I would be curious to see a CX journey map for the high-end customer segment they are growing. How do people feel when receiving an exclusive product that’s been air shipped for freshness and signed by the original farm family? How do you market the product to address environmental concerns over air freight and promote the value proposition of exclusivity and freshness?
Often clients come to us with concerns that don’t always make sense and are typically outside the scope of the web redesign project but, if not properly accounted for, can silently derail said project.
Edna, as a female business founder and highly respected agricultural expert, has a story many would love to hear. This along with her team’s drive towards sustainability are the types of CSR stories CX teams often want to expand upon and weave heavily into corporate website redesigns and retail ‘About Us’ sections. Sustainability and the drive to support small businesses gives Verba Odrec a unique story to tell to eco-conscious consumers as well as those interested in small batch, craft products.
The Economics of Trade
Starting off with the pre-elective trip to the Panama Canal was a good primer for the more detailed economic conversation with KPMG at AmCham. We left Panama unable to visit the much anticipated Colon Free Trade Zone, but it was certainly a first hand experience with the ongoing disruption of new industries, like Uber, who may not be trade related but can have a ripple effect through an economy’s operations. We returned from Central America to news of a fast spreading novel coronavirus. There are fears that goods from China will be impacted in a prolonged crisis, along with China’s ability to sustain production levels for current demand. How will a billion dollar enterprise like the Panama Canal be impacted by long-term social disruption elsewhere?
Technology Infrastructure
A few other interesting points were around Google building networking infrastructure to connect the US and Panama, and the shift in banking and corporate entity regulations. Both of these often factor into where our technical teams for CX projects are based. Having teams closer to your time zone has a positive effect on collaboration and responsiveness. Central America is an attractive option with reasonable flight times from the West and Southwest versus technical teams based in Eastern Europe or India. While the free trade zones are attractive, we learned it’s good to factor in the greater transparency required in setting up a multinational operation in Panama, which adds time to an expansion effort and cost.
Having lower costs over the long term but not as much access to financing for smaller startup firms might make Panama less attractive than it could be for budding tech firms looking to take advantage of better infrastructure being implemented by Google and others. Still, some great opportunities were highlighted when considering technical and product support touchpoints for a CX redesign.
Culture and Strategy
Finally as we heard from Roberto Melo — culture will kill your strategy. It was great to see how Dell is responding to that fact in the way it attracts and retains local talent for its global support center including regional transportation and affinity groups. It was my first time to visit an offshore operation and fascinating to see how they’ve expanded to support a global firm across multiple disciplines, while responding to the unique needs of their local talent.
The Takeaway
For me, the trip to Panama added a layer of understanding that I want to bring into how I address those hidden concerns driving business decisions, and what a firm can and will do for its customers. Often clients come to us with concerns that don’t always make sense and are typically outside the scope of the web redesign project but, if not properly accounted for, can silently derail said project.
Having a better understanding of the logistics considerations driving decisions on how products and services are priced and delivered will help me to better practice the first step in design thinking — empathy. Being able to empathize means being able to ask the right questions and understand how CX and design decisions could impact, and be impacted by, the logistics of products and services for a business. It was especially valuable to see those logistics considerations in play outside of the US for both US multinationals and firms based in Panama.
The visit to Panama City was a great way to start off the new year — and a new decade.
