Improving operational performance at the Customer Support Centre of a global furniture retailer

Part of the delivery strategy involved understanding the potential impact and changes required to drive significant operational improvements in its Customer Support Centres (CSCs). Initially the company was experiencing:

• An inability to deliver key customer service levels.
• A lack of investment in customer service tools, processes and resources.
• Little on-site capability and expertise.

The core objective was to improve customer and employee satisfaction and increase operational efficiency. Cultural change was a key element to ensure sustainable improvement.

The Solution

By placing the customer at the heart of the organisation’s vision and strategy we modelled the changes required to deliver the vision, using our ‘Hothousing’ methodology. Hothousing has four distinct phases devised to identify, develop, test and transition into business as usual operationally focused solutions. Our team collaborated closely with the client over an intensive 16-week period to identify improvements as well as developing and enhancing the client’s capability to deliver them.

The Result

In addition to improving capabilities and fostering a new and ongoing culture of continuous improvement within the CSC we delivered the following:

• Achieved capacity savings of 26,000 hours via tested solutions.
• Increased employee satisfaction scores by 9% incrementally.
• Improved customer satisfaction scores by 3% month on month.
• Potential cost savings of £2 million identified by the Analysis & Design Phase.
• A further 13 operational approved solutions were identified ready for testing.

The lasting success of our collaboration led to the application of the same approach at several of the client’s other CSCs across the globe. At each location we continued to successfully embed ourselves with the client teams to identify benefits, develop capability and ultimately drive sustainable improvement.