The Amazon Effect Hits the Steel Mill: Charter Steel's Brian Mekka on Reinventing B2B CX

Table of Contents

• From 60 Million Customers to 300 — and Why the CX Fundamentals Still Apply
• Five Years of Feedback, One Cohesive Roadmap
• Phase One: Three Strategic Enablers in 2026
• CX and EX: Two Sides of the Same Program
• Building for a Generation That Won't Email a Purchase Order

The Gist

• From B2C to B2B: Charter Steel director of CX Brian Mekka spent 15 years at Kohl's managing customer service for 60 million consumers before shifting to a Wisconsin steel manufacturer with roughly 300 high-value commercial accounts.
• Five years of VOC: Charter Steel has run annual voice of the customer surveys and monthly CSAT surveys, using the McKinsey Rewired methodology to turn years of feedback into a cohesive multi-phase roadmap.
• The Compass Program: Phase one targets three strategic enablers in 2026 — a new customer portal, a service transformation initiative and deeper data integration between Salesforce CRM and Charter Steel's ERP system.
• CX meets EX: Mekka sees customer experience and employee experience as inseparable — better internal data visibility and faster workflows directly enable better customer outcomes.
• The Amazon effect is real: B2B buyers now expect the same proactive, self-service digital experience they get from Amazon and consumer apps — and Charter Steel is building toward it, one phase at a time.

From 60 Million Customers to 300 — and Why the CX Fundamentals Still Apply

Brian Mekka's career path doesn't follow a straight line through the steel industry. Before joining Charter Steel as director of customer experience, he spent 15 years at Kohl's department stores — headquartered near his home outside Milwaukee — managing customer service, collections and contact center operations for a retailer with 60 million customers and massive seasonal peaks. The jump to a B2B steel manufacturer serving roughly 300 commercial accounts might look like a sharp left turn. Mekka sees it differently.

"At the end of the day, you are still interacting with people," Mekka said. "Whether it's the person that's using the end product you're selling or the person that's buying the raw material — all those concepts of handling customer experience and providing customer support are true regardless of what exactly the business is."

Charter Steel, a Wisconsin-based specialty steel manufacturer whose products end up in automotive and agricultural components, operates in a world where each customer relationship can span decades and carry millions of dollars in value. That's a different calculus than retail — but the underlying CX discipline, Mekka says, translates.

Five Years of Feedback, One Cohesive Roadmap

The Compass program — Charter Steel's multi-phase CX and employee experience initiative — didn't materialize overnight. It's the product of five years of structured voice of the customer work: annual surveys fielded with a consulting partner, monthly CSAT surveys and targeted VOC outreach from the marketing team to specific customer segments. Each year's survey closed with a short list of actionable proposals. Over time, those lists stacked up into disparate roadmaps across customer service, CRM and process improvement.

The turning point came when Mekka's team applied a methodology from the McKinsey book Rewired — mapping the full customer journey from prospective buyer to long-tenured account, bucketing that experience into domains, then identifying the capabilities, processes and technologies needed within each domain. The exercise unified the scattered roadmaps into a single narrative — and gave Mekka the executive alignment and budget to move.

"That methodology really helped us get to a point where we had a cohesive story to tell to our senior leaders," Mekka said. "We've now got resources, personnel, budget dollars allocated to this effort."

Phase One: Three Strategic Enablers in 2026

The first phase of Compass targets three initiatives Charter Steel is treating as the foundation for everything that follows.

Charter Steel Compass Program: Phase One Initiatives

Editor's note: Charter Steel's Phase One focuses on three strategic enablers launching in 2026, designed to support longer-term CX and EX transformation goals.

The customer portal is the most visible piece. Today, Charter Steel customers email purchase orders, wait for manual entry and follow up by phone or email to track production status. The portal will eventually allow customers to submit orders directly, monitor production milestones, receive proactive notifications and track deliveries in real time. Think Amazon order tracking — applied to a steel shipment.

"The Amazon effect is real," Mekka said, "and it's flowing all the way through to a steel maker."

The data integration initiative is what Mekka calls the enabler for the enablers. Without clean, connected data flowing between Salesforce and Charter Steel's ERP, neither the portal nor internal workflow improvements are possible. In 2026, that integration will start by surfacing order and product data inside Salesforce, reducing manual lookups and pre-filling cases for the CX team. Down the line, it will automate order management tasks that currently require navigating legacy systems screen by screen.

CX and EX: Two Sides of the Same Program

Mekka's scope at Charter Steel extends well beyond customer-facing interactions. Each of the company's roughly 300 accounts is supported by a dedicated three-person commercial team: a customer experience specialist from Mekka's group, a regional account manager in the field and a technical service engineer. Each of those roles connects with different contacts at the customer — buyers, plant managers, quality teams, senior decision-makers — and each generates a different stream of feedback that Charter Steel has to synthesize and act on.

Getting the employee experience right, Mekka argues, is what makes the customer experience possible. When internal data is fragmented and manual processes are slow, even the most tenured and knowledgeable team members are hampered. The Compass program is designed to clear those friction points — giving employees the visibility, tools and responsiveness to serve customers the way Charter Steel's reputation demands.

"If you really solve for the best employee experience you can," Mekka said, "that is going to enable a better customer experience."

Building for a Generation That Won't Email a Purchase Order

Mekka closed with a point that frames the urgency behind the whole initiative. The next generation of buyers — the ones now coming into purchasing and procurement roles at Charter Steel's customer organizations — grew up with Amazon, real-time tracking and on-demand self-service. Asking them to email a purchase order and wait isn't just a friction point. It's a competitive liability.

"We like to think we're ahead of the game in terms of doing this at a B2B manufacturer," Mekka said. "But time will tell as we move forward — how people's expectations change, how technology changes. You put a five-year plan out related to a digital experience right now, chances are we get a year or two down that path and we're going to have to call an audible."

The goal by end of 2026, he said, is a Charter Steel where nothing is reactive — where every interaction, internal and external, is proactive, informed and built for the experience customers now expect everywhere else.