Challenge
What trials have you faced on the road to culture recovery? Can you think back to a time when you saw:
- Increasing demand for your services… but fewer resources to deliver?
- A team struggling to do their best for the customer, but feeling that no one has their back?
- A change in your foundational system and data infrastructure… and a need to retrain all your employees?
Have you ever faced all three at the same time? Imagine the challenges that this client’s Customer Care team had to lean into:
- Orders dramatically increasing and 25% fewer team members to process them
- On-time delivery to customers was less than 50% - yes, missing customer commitments more than half the time
- The launch of a brand-new ERP system (SAP replaced the aging, but well-loved, local order management system)
In this post-SAP world, the Customer Care team faced conflicts of tribal knowledge versus systemic improvement and had to learn new interfaces to contemporary ERP technology. Customer tensions escalated, then boiled over as they faced late deliveries of orders. Team members struggled to maintain key account relationships, with no visibility to customer feedback. Each employee wanted to do their best, but was it making a difference? Their buckets of work were overflowing and culminated in a letter of frustration from team members to management.
Epictetus, the Greek philosopher has been widely quoted as saying, “It’s not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters.” From Chris Avery: Responsibility is the ability to respond, "response-ability". We may not always be in charge of what happens to us, but we can always choose our response.
Solution
- Focus on the fundamentals: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is attributed to famed consultant Peter Drucker, who BusinessWeek called “the man who invented management”.
- Drive culture change. Remember that a key principle of Change Acceleration is that the Effectiveness of a new solution is a product of the Quality of the solution and the organization’s Acceptance of the solution. Top down support of the business culture was in place but we needed to find and resuscitate the heartbeat of the client’s culture in the core of the organization. Five key tenets were: “Empowered to provide an amazing customer experience”, “Innovate the world”, “Win as One Unified Team”, “Trust in yourself and in and others”, and “Bring your best self to work each day.”
- Lead with Data: Employee concerns needed to be understood through active listening and backed up by quantitative measures. The stated concerns we heard about workload were “our buckets are over flowing”, but why? And how much?
- Build competency. Upon the spirited fundamental of culture, employees needed to be equipped for success. Not just hourly workers, but leaders as well. Kaizen teaches “Go to the Gemba”. Here we employed “A Day in the Life”.
- Restore Health & Competency
Delivery
This is where the journey to Health and Competency begins. The Customer Care team was determined not to be torn apart or pass away softly.
- Employees reflected on aspirational culture: “Win as One Unified Team”, “Trust in yourself and in and others”, but how to make it real? They committed to better know one another. Leadership invested in DISC training, behavioral self-assessment tools to understand their own personality traits, and the traits of their teams, learning to meet their colleagues halfway.
- “Empowered to provide an amazing customer experience” - what was the customer feeling? The Customer Care team launched a customer phone survey system – their first view to real-time customer feedback. They were flooded with powerful customer data, made the scores and verbatim feedback available at their fingertips, and learned from the constructive inputs.
- “Innovating the world” SAP was a brand new ERP system to them, how could it make them more efficient and accelerate their daily deliverables? They had to overcome fear of SAP (yes, Hershey’s, Waste Management, Nike and Revlon all had famous SAP launch debacles). They trained on SAP; the tools were powerful, yet at the same time intimidating, certainly not user friendly. Could they break through to a brighter future?
- The team formed self-directed Champion Circle working groups, to identify and drive improvements in flexible work and mobility options, communication, and team capacity. They employed two-week intervals of mobile app digital time stamping to locate the volume and duration of transaction activities, the fundamental data sets that would guide self-prioritization for improvements and bandwidth creation.
- Leadership created a safe, “No Fly Zone” while the team took ownership of their core deliverables in the new post-SAP world.
- Leadership invested in Six Sigma training for select team members to drive operational process improvement and training competency on the business process workflows that surrounded SAP. These self-empowered process leaders, mapped processes, leaned them out and digitized the Standard Operating Procedures.
- The team analyzed, improved, documented and digitized their critical workflows in an on-line hub to improve efficiency; they tested new capabilities like Optical Character Recognition in SAP to increase order entry speed. Instead of audits, the team launched collaborative QCAs (Quality Coaching Assessments) to learn from one another and iteratively increase competency and sustainability.
- Customer Care team members started training their customers on the available digital commerce tools. They worked with their partners in market product management, sales, and supply chain to improve material lead times, forecasts and commitment dates.
- Senior leadership supported the model. Even the President of the company led by example and established a personal practice of sitting at employees’ desks to experience “a day in their life” to better understand and advocate for the team and customers. The corporate Vice President flew in from Europe to provide coaching, to listen and to share company best practices… and to enable improved material availability from the global hub.
Impact
To our friends and colleagues in the Customer Service space, we offer you shared hope and evidence that you too can prevail with a unified team action and an enduring spirit. What was the impact for this client?
- On-time delivery to customers improved from 46% to 91%
- Customer Survey scores improved and stabilized with glowing testimonials:
- Would you hire the last person you spoke to?: 4.85/5.0
- How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?: 4.89/5.0
- How satisfied are you with today’s service?: 4.88/5.0
- With two years of double digit growth, the team was able to process 30% more order lines with a 10X return on investment.
- 20 point improvement on the Great Place to Work Survey
- American Business Awards recognition as Most Improved Tech B2B Customer Service team
Resources and Additional Reading