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Case Study: Creating World Class Customer Service Capabilities

A margin sensitive company embarked upon a journey to world class customer service to differentiate themselves from the competition.

"We have a philosophy to deliver Customer Delight with every customer interaction, and we recognized that we were not consistently meeting that goal. We needed to quickly determine how to close our performance gap and do it in a well thought out manner."
CEO, Kitchen and Bath Fixtures Manufacturer

Business Issue
The company started by providing customer service and technical support for its original private label business but added significant complexity with the introduction of its branded lines. Recent feedback received from customers indicated that their customer service needed improvement. Management's vision is to revitalize the entire customer support function to address existing performance issues and begin the evolution toward providing world class customer support in an increasingly margin sensitive industry. Further investigation revealed:

• Limited use of pooled resources dramatically limited efficiency and increased dependencies on specific individuals.
• Unnecessary complexity in process and infrastructure added to cost and resource needs.
• Numerous legacy systems, processes, and groups executed similar tasks across business segments.
• Many manual tasks exist that are commonly automated today.
• Limited reporting within existing functional groups and no aggregated reporting across groups for holistic service view.
• They trail many of their competitors and other vendors regarding infrastructure capabilities, performance, or commitment to service levels.

Adroit's Role

• Definition of a new organizational structure providing a pooling of resources performing similar activities to increase overall efficiency and effectiveness, simplify processes and improve first call resolution.
• Simplifying the telephone contact entry points for customers by streamlining the variety of toll free and direct dial numbers in use and ultimately improving phone support coverage.
• Indentifying opportunities to enhance self service capabilities to dramatically reduce call and email volumes.
• Defining internal and external performance metrics to start tracking customer satisfaction, and provided quality monitoring and coaching guidelines for management.
• Developed a talent management review process to revive the current recruitment, training, team scheduling and incentive programs.

Outcome
The results of Adroit's recommendations led to:

• Significant quick win and long term cost savings by cross-training and pooling resources while increasing the quality of customer support.
• Creation and execution of a future state design of a world class customer management operation.
• Adoption of a key foundational program to institute a monitoring program, new evaluation program linked to desired behaviors, and performance based incentive program designed to reinforce desired behaviors.