change management — she’d seen a full
range of marketing and operations challenges and successes.
“I went into retail directly out of col-
lege, working in analytics and buying,”
she says. “Working in retail department
stores, with a large team of people and
the transient nature of the work gave me
my work ethic, and the understanding of
dealing with customers on an everyday
basis.”
Cacchillo says her time with Ac-
centure helped develop her “vision and
strategy skills.” She adds, “I learned the
‘art of the possible’ — how to dream up a
solution and then find comfort in putting
the right pieces together. It was totally
cross-functional, and I got to see the
inner workings of many multinational
Upon joining Safelite, it seemed to
Cacchillo the business provided the per-
fect opportunity to bring those concepts
and strengths — retail work ethic with
leadership vision and strategy — to-
gether.
After all, Safelite is — at its core — a
service business. Led for the past decade
by Thomas Feeney as president and CEO
(a 30-year veteran of the company),
Safelite re-emerged after a Chapter 11
bankruptcy in 2000 and was acquired by
Belron in 2007. Today, the company —
founded in 1947 in Wichita, Kan. — has
more than 7,800 MobileGlassShops TM
and stores in all 50 states, making it the
largest auto glass specialist company in
the United States — serving more than 6
million customers each year.
Safelite Group also operates Safelite
Solutions, which provides complete
claims management solutions for the
nation’s leading fleet and insurance
companies, and Service AutoGlass, a national provider of wholesale vehicle glass
products, as well as installation and repair
materials and tools. Together, the three
businesses employ more than 14,000 people in the U.S.
After holding a variety of leadership
positions in operations, digital marketing,
and advertising for the company, today
Cacchillo leverages the company’s core
competencies in more acutely aligning
the customer experience, marketing efforts, and technical enhancements.
“I’ve long focused on how to better
Safelite’s customer experience, both for
new customers and existing clients,” she
says. “We can bring that to life by leveraging our brand and technology.”
The idea of combining those three
areas — customer, brand, and technology
— was one that Cacchillo was behind
from the get-go. But that’s not to say it
came without challenges.
“By removing the silos, we believed
we could get things done faster,” she says.
“We could prioritize our messaging and
our spending to make sure that all of our
marketing efforts remained customer-focused. Those priorities would then flow
through the entire customer experience.”
But, coming from the customer experience side, Cacchillo adds, “Adding
responsibility for the brand was a change,
but adding our technology team was the
biggest change. Customer expectations
of our technological capabilities have
changed, so getting — and staying — up
to speed with those desires has been crucial to our success.”
Channel Repair, Segment
Replace
In the current era of multichannel,
performance-based campaigns, the idea
of bringing together customer, brand,
and technology under a single banner
shouldn’t seem so novel. However, to
see it in action — not only that, to see
it in action at a business that has been
somewhat old school in its marketing tactics until the past half-decade or so — is
revelatory.
Cacchillo says, though, it makes perfect sense given where Safelite was coming from in the past five-to-seven years.
“The majority of Safelite’s customers file through their providers,” she
says. “But for many insured auto drivers,
maybe the cost of that replacement glass
Safelite’s You Tube channel is an active one,
but Renee Cacchillo believes there’s still work
to be done for the company to call itself an
expert in online video.
