Headliner | Andrea Jung
CCW Main Stage Wednesday, June 5, 2024 | 4:30 PM
PRESIDENT & CEO
Grameen America
Innovating at the Intersection: Redefining Customer Relationships in the Digital Era
Andrea Jung’s extraordinary career, marked by her tenure as the longest-serving female CEO in the Fortune 500 at Avon and her transformative leadership at Grameen America, reflects her profound impact on customer engagement and women’s empowerment. Beyond leading major global companies, Andrea has also shaped corporate strategies from the boardrooms of General Electric, Apple, and Unilever, bringing a diverse perspective and wealth of experience to these roles. Her strategic insights have reshaped these companies and propelled transformative initiatives across different industries.
In conversation with Rebecca Jarvis, ABC News Chief Business, Technology, and Economics Correspondent, Andrea will share her approaches to modernizing how companies interact with their customers. She’ll share valuable lessons from her tenure at Avon, where she pioneered a shift towards a dynamic, inclusive brand, and harnessed digital technology for expansive customer reach. At Grameen America, Andrea has championed high-touch, community-centered customer engagement, showcasing its effectiveness even in our digital world.
This is a can’t-miss opportunity to learn from a visionary leader whose influence extends from the helm of corporate giants to the boardrooms of some of the world’s most influential companies.
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Q&A with Andrea Jung
Andrea Jung is the President and CEO of Grameen America, the fastest growing microfinance organization microfinance organization in the US, whose mission is to provide loans, financial education, and credit establishment to women in poverty. Andrea previously served for 13 years as the CEO of Avon—the first woman to do so in the company’s history—and is still the longest-serving female CEO within the Fortune 500. At CCW Las Vegas Andrea will share the many insights and lessons learned over the course of her storied career, and show attendees the unique mix of work ethic and passion that drives her to continue to break boundaries and empower other female entrepreneurs.
Q: To start, we’d love it if you’d share with us your journey to becoming one of the most influential business leaders in the country, from your time at Avon up to now. What were some pivotal moments in this journey?
A: When I graduated from college and started my career, I thought that I had to make a choice between business and purpose. I grew up in a traditional Chinese household and throughout my childhood, my parents instilled a work ethic and pride in our heritage that carries through for me to this day. My parents always encouraged me to have pride in who I am, and not to forget my culture, no matter what I think business demands of me.
I am fortunate to have found careers at both Avon (for profit) and Grameen (non-profit) where I was able to combine both business and purpose. Most people think of Avon as a company that sells lipsticks and skin creams. In fact, the company first and foremost sold economic independence for women when it wasn’t popular to do so. It was certainly an incredible privilege to be at the helm of a company where the commitment to women was there from the beginning. After twenty years and an extraordinary opportunity to work in women’s empowerment at Avon, I made the decision to move full time into driving social change. I turned my passion for women’s entrepreneurship to low-income women living in financially underserved communities in the United States at Grameen America. While the cosmetics business may seem worlds away from microfinance, in fact, there are many similarities: At Avon and Grameen America, I have seen firsthand the powerful impact entrepreneurship and the opportunity to earn a living can make in a woman’s life.
Q: During your tenure as CEO, how did you prioritize customer engagement and service in your business strategy? What impact did this have on the organization?
A: Nothing has been more important than customer engagement/customer service in terms of driving growth and profitability over the course of my tenure as CEO.
At Avon, over 6 million independent sales representatives in 144 countries served millions of customers (1 out of 2 women had used an Avon Product in their lifetimes in many of the countries where we did business).
At Grameen, in the US, in many of the successful cities where we do business, anywhere from 25%-50% of underbanked women entrepreneurs in the communities have been served with a Grameen loan.
Customer engagement has been the number one reason at Grameen that we have achieved our goals, including achieving our program’s mission and being operationally self-sustainable—meaning that we cover at least 100% of our operating costs with interest from our microloan portfolio. Grameen America first achieved operational self-sufficiency in 2021 and is on track to do so for the third year in a row. Self-sustainability allows Grameen America to use grants, donations, and net earned income to invest in opening new branches and programs that strengthen the member experience.
Q: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced managing customer engagements at a global level, and how did you address them?
A: Throughout my career, I’ve accumulated a lot of learnings about how to scale a model that has impact on people’s lives. During my time at Avon, there were consumer preference nuances in each city and country, but the need for economic opportunities in emerging markets was very similar and became replicable. Replicability is a seed of scale, and we’re doing this at Grameen America today city by city.
Grameen America expands on a model originally from Bangladesh that is replicated in the U.S., one of the richest countries in the world. There was an expectation that the U.S. is so different, but we can see that inequality persists here as well, and Grameen America could be a scaled solution in communities across the country. Today, Grameen America has disbursed $3.8 billion in affordable capital to more than 188,000 women across 27 U.S. cities. Finding global similarities but adapting them for local preferences has been a challenging but rewarding aspect of managing customer engagement strategies.
Q: Can you share any innovative strategies that you introduced at Avon or Grameen that you introduced to enhance customer engagement and loyalty?
A: At the start of COVID-19, Grameen pivoted our high-touch group-lending model to operate with remote systems and procedures so that women could continue to access loan capital and keep their businesses running. This has been a true innovation born from a time of need.
After years of engaging with our customers at weekly meetings in one of our customer’s businesses, the pandemic required that we move from in-person operations and gatherings to a completely new virtual way of engaging through technology and zoom, including weekly meetings, digital loan disbursements, digital loan repayments, and virtual recruitment. This complete digital transition allowed our members to embrace their own technology transformation and move from a cash to a digital economy, as well as survive and thrive during the crisis. This led to our highest recruitment and customer engagement levels post-pandemic, with over 99.8% repayment and over 90% engagement. As part of our ongoing innovation of technology foundations, Grameen America launched a new mobile app for members to streamline access to membership information, loan repayments, and educational resources, while automating operational and administrative processes that allow Grameen America staff to focus on relationship-building and mentoring.
We at Grameen America know that credit- and asset-building are also important factors in building financial identities and economic mobility. We piloted a brand-new, in-house savings program for Grameen America members to encourage positive money-saving habits and help generate wealth.
Q: Is there a particular instance where customer feedback influenced a major decision or change? How did it shape your approach to customer care?
A: Our data and findings showed that Black women entrepreneurs were not as engaged with our program and were leaving more quickly than their Latina counterparts. Feedback showed us that due to of the systemic barriers they face when accessing traditional financial systems, these women often had more debt because they rely on personal credit cards or savings to fund their businesses.
In 2021, we made the decision to launch a bold new initiative in response to this feedback and created the Elevating Black Women Entrepreneurs initiative—a dedicated racial equity program to reach Black women business owners with loan capital, business training, and peer support. To improve the Elevate initiative’s member experience and meet them where they are on their financial journeys, we used customer feedback to finetune the structure and design of the program, eventually developing a comprehensive plan of integrated business support, financial coaching, and education that accounts for differential learning. We relied heavily on survey feedback from members to determine the most relevant business training topics, and succeeded in increasing both weekly Center meeting attendance and program satisfaction levels. We are also focusing on enhancing membership and program credibility for Black entrepreneurs through local partnerships.
Q: As someone who has led across multiple levels of an organization, what advice would you give to customer contact executives about driving customer-focused change within their organizations?
A: Blending high-touch and high-tech strategies to maximize customer engagement has been a key theme of my experience in leadership. You can't have one without the other going forward. In a world where AI will surely have great impact in all industries, having the human element is critical in ensuring customer engagement and loyalty. As much as the simple user interface, or ease of purchase, or any experience created through technology, it's the person you speak to on the phone or meet with every week that customers remember and that keeps them engaged with the brand.
We have always made every policy or strategy change considering the customer first. While the customer is not always right, it is always right to respect customer feedback, and it is always worth listening to and acknowledging their concerns. The customer will find the solution if the company doesn't.
Q: Grameen America is a mission-driven organization—how does that mission influence your approach to customer engagement and service?
A: Grameen America is dedicated to helping low-income entrepreneurial women build businesses to enable financial mobility. We have chosen to empower women that are historically excluded from the financial mainstream by other lenders due to lack of credit and financial history. Because women face a gap in business funding—women entrepreneurs receive a paltry 4% of commercial loan dollars, which is just $1 out of every $23—our program is designed carefully to meet the specific needs of the women we serve by providing affordable loan capital, financial and business education, credit- and asset-building, and peer support. Unlike traditional lenders, we do not require collateral, business plans, or credit history. Grameen America recognizes the creditworthiness of low-income women entrepreneurs that the formal banking system often overlooks, demonstrated by the program’s high repayment rate of 99%. We also hire staff directly from the communities we serve to ensure we have a localized approach while bringing the resources and expertise of a national organization.
Microfinancing, particularly Grameen America’s model, has now proven to be a viable solution for economic stability by an MDRC study. The results found women in our program experienced a decrease in material hardships and increase in business earnings, credit, and savings. Now, we are focusing on expanding our services in new geographies and deepening our impact to move our members from financial stability to upward economic mobility with wrap-around services.
Q: From your perspective, what are the emerging trends and techniques that customer engagement leaders should be aware of in the coming year?
A: I am a huge believer that technology is one of the greatest enablers for good if used properly, but it must be coupled with a high-touch model. Both my experiences at Avon and Grameen America have continued to reinforce that idea. With the advent of Chat GPT and all the potential opportunities and challenges that come with AI technology in the changing world of customer engagement, trust and social capital are key to brand loyalty and true engagement. At Grameen, we would not have the 99% repayment rate and massive growth rate that we do without the trust and peer network of a high-touch social capital model. The organization’s technological advancements will never replace the alchemy of Grameen America, which is the community network of thousands of other entrepreneurs who are facing the same challenges and want to support each other. Human relationships and trust in people, in the end, are at the heart of engagement.