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Case Study: Driving Performance in Customer Service

An Industrial Manufacturing Company wanted to evaluate the efficiency and performance of their Customer Service organization to be prepared to support planned growth.

"We do not have an understanding of what "Best in Class" Customer Service is, and do not know how to get there."
VP of Sales, Global Lighting Manufacturer

Business Issue
A lighting manufacturer was seeking to evaluate the performance and measurement of its Customer Service team, and to identify performance improvement opportunities.

The team was under new management, team lead roles were undefined, and coaching was non existent. While there was advanced technology in place, team metrics were not showing the complete performance picture and customer satisfaction measures were not being tracked. Many unique customer tasks were being performed that could be streamlined and automated and there was a high percentage of manually placed orders. Overall basic Customer Service skills were inconsistently utilized. The majority of the customer orders were being placed manually.

Adroit's Role
Adroit was hired to provide a Customer Service Operational Assessment to improve performance.
Stages in the engagement included:

• An assessment of the people, process, and technology of the current operation.
• Design of a new team organizational structure to enable the Group Manager to coach and develop direct reports.
• Redefinition of Manager and Team Lead roles and responsibilities with emphasis on the appropriate metrics, coaching and hands-on management.
• Creation of a team transaction volume scorecard to track the various transaction volumes to raise awareness of team productivity and the high percentage of manual transactions performed by the group.
• A series of recommendations to reduce manual order volumes with technology.
• Identification of key team and individual scorecard metrics to drive customer satisfaction.
• Analysis and simplification of phone menu options to create a streamlined customer experience.
• Documented process flows of unique customer processes for cross training and procedure development.

Outcome
The results of Adroit's recommendations led to:

• A significantly re-engineered management approach for Group Managers and Team Leads, emphasizing coaching and performance management.
• A commitment to Customer Service skills training and quality monitoring.
• A holistic approach to metrics and measures to manage frontline resources to increase performance and customer satisfaction.
• Attention given to documenting, automating, and training on unique customer processes.
• Shift in focus to move customers towards electronic order entry and away from predominantly manual order entry activities, utilizing an existing and underused customer portal and EDI.
• Increased employee morale as more open communication channels evolved through the institution of regular team meetings and side-by-side quality monitoring sessions with management.