At the Vested Bar with Lynn Kier: VP of Corporate Communications at Diebold Nixdorf - Vested

Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested

Hi, I’m Keren. I’m Head of Marketing here at Vested.

Lynn Kier, VP Corporate Comms, Diebold Nixdorf

Hi, I’m Lynn Kier. I’m responsible for corporate communications at Diebold Nixdorf. Thank you for having me here today.

Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested

Thank you so much for being here. Diebold Nixdorf is a technology and software company for retail and financial brands. Obviously, your products are quite complex, which I’m sure makes your job very challenging. What are some things you do to make sure that your mission and your brand values are expressed in your messaging?

Lynn Kier, VP Corporate Comms, Diebold Nixdorf

One of the things I really love about communications is the aspect of storytelling, and when you tell a story, it really resonates with the customer, it resonates with the consumer, and it simplifies the messaging. I try to incorporate storytelling into everything we do. An example of that may be cash recycling on ATMs. So automatic teller machines give us money, right? You go and you get money, but there is a cash recycling component where the money that goes in can then come back out. Cash recycling reduces cash-in-transit costs for banks. Let’s say, for example, you service an ATM with cash three times a week, but if you add cash recycling, you may only need to service twice a week. You’re saving a visit every week, times 50 weeks, and let’s say they have a thousand ATMs. That’s significant savings. You can also expand that to emissions and by using cash recycling, you can cut emissions by one third for your entire ATM fleet. So rather than talking all about the technology of cash recycling, you can really boil it down to saving money, making sure you have cash for your customers, which is critically important, and saving the environment through cutting down emissions.

Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested

Diebold Nixdorf is a global company with employees and customers in over 40 countries internationally. That can make your messaging quite difficult, trying to figure out the local context and cultural nuances. How does that figure into your messaging?

Lynn Kier, VP Corporate Comms, Diebold Nixdorf

So I love working for a global company because we have business everywhere. But as you said, it adds complexity for the messaging. I’m located in the United States. I’m really in tune with what’s happening here, but in India, Singapore, China, Brazil, I may not be as on top of what’s happening. I have a small but mighty team located in North America and Europe, but what I do is I extend my reach to our global field marketing team. I consider our field marketing team an extension of my corporate comms team. They are in the regions, they know the local customs, they know what’s happening locally and regionally. They know the local leaders. They know all of the right subject matter experts to talk to, so I engage with them. We have a meeting every two weeks where the entire team comes together and we just talk about what’s happening in our areas of the world. And I’ll give you an example of how incredible this is. So we have a woman in France who was putting together a presentation and a social media campaign for Earth Day. She was talking about it, giving us a heads up that it was coming, and our gentleman in Spain said, “I would love that.” Our woman in Brazil said, “I would love that.” My team said, “We could use that for corporate comms.” So just a quick conversation exposes you to all the different initiatives that people are working on. There can be overlap, there’s synergy. Sometimes they bubble things up that the corporate comms team wouldn’t have otherwise known that we need to know. So it’s a really powerful alliance to have a global network of people that are on the ground doing what they need to do and informing all of us of what’s happening.

Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested

The past two years have been very challenging for everyone. Can you give me an example of some of the challenges that your customers have faced during the pandemic and even now?

Lynn Kier, VP Corporate Comms, Diebold Nixdorf

Well, one of the things is when the when the pandemic hit, none of us really knew what that meant and how we were going to handle it. Customers had a lot of questions about of all of their suppliers, including Diebold Nixdorf. Do you have a workforce? Are you healthy? What safety protocols are you putting in place? As a corporate comms team, we were able to address that by making sure we had robust communications that addressed all of our customers needs. If we’re servicing an ATM, is our field service technician vaccinated? Is he or she following safety protocols? Is she masking? Does he wash his hands? Is she doing six foot distancing? We really needed to make sure we were in tune with their concerns, which they shared with us, and that we had the right practices in place and we properly communicated that to our customers. We all learned together and I think that was one of the most powerful parts of the whole process was that we were going through it together. We learned together and we got our acts together quickly to make sure we were being safe and still servicing our customers in a timely manner.

Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested

As the head of corporate communications for a global company, how do you help your employees, especially women, make their voices heard in an industry that is typically male dominated?

Lynn Kier, VP Corporate Comms, Diebold Nixdorf

I love my job and I love being in this role. One of the things that I brought to the table when I joined Diebold Nixdorf is Women in Manufacturing Association. I’m the former board chairman of the board and a past board member of Women in Manufacturing. We help support, promote, inspire women in manufacturing. And while we are a financial technology company, we also manufacture our ATMs and other things. Women in Manufacturing is just one small example of how I try to promote, support and inspire women in my company and in our industry as a whole by helping them see what’s available, believing in themselves and providing networking opportunities and training to really help women grow and develop and know what’s possible. I think the key is making sure that women have the support they need to know that they can grow and develop and that they’re not alone in the industry. Another wonderful thing that Diebold Nixdorf has is employee resource groups, and one of our employee resource groups happens to be called Women at DN. So it’s women and the men that are our allies in a group where we meet every month and we talk about issues that are important to women. It’s just been a very empowering and wonderful experience to be able to touch the lives of women, and I just try to be out there via social media, make myself available, attend certain events so I can just be a mentor and a coach and a confidante to the women that are coming up the ranks.

Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested

It’s so wonderful that you’re so involved in the industry.

Lynn Kier, VP Corporate Comms, Diebold Nixdorf

Thank you. I love it.

Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested

Oh, that’s great. That’s great. Thank you so much, Lynn. This was so educational and I really appreciate your time.

Lynn Kier, VP Corporate Comms, Diebold Nixdorf

Keren, thank you so much for having me.

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