What the heck!
I promised to explain how we Rally the Re-Engineering RE-Revolution back in October.
A few detours—work, family, and some pretty compelling ERP events commanded my attention.
But back to the promised topic: describing a successful implementation of Meridian’s unique approach to growing Service Value.
The concept of Service Value was described in earlier posts.
“The majority of service organizations we’ve measured have mildly positive to negative Service Value, meaning they spend more time on their mistakes than they spend with their customers.”
“The best route to growing the value of your service organization is to pin down your Mission and to relentlessly grow the time and effort you devote to delivering your Mission-specified services to your customers.”
Sounds good: here’s how.
Our client is a global services organization comprising over 1,000 customer support outlets.
This initiative began by gauging our client’s Service Value, calculated by netting the proportion of time devoted to directly supporting the organization’s mission against the energy and effort devoted to fixing mistakes and errors.
We quickly determined that this organization’s Service Value was -14%: bad, but not the worst we’ve seen.
The core problem was this organization spent almost one-third of their time finding and fixing mistakes—far too much time away from serving customers.
A team comprising client and Meridian personnel immediately captured $1.5 million in savings by making Quick Hit changes to current processes and procedures.
The team then measurably increased the time this organization devoted to its customers by eliminating non-value added work. For example we stopped non-value added business practices such as Manual Proof of Delivery of shipped goods; started new, cost-effective business practices like the consolidation of service purchases into master contracts; and re-wrote roles and responsibilities for all customer-facing jobs.
It’s important to note that over 85% of the ideas for improvement came from client personnel. In fact we averaged just over two ideas per employee.
It’s equally important to recognize that Service Value Improvement is a political process. Failure to build a true consensus supporting process and work changes would spell doom for this initiative.
In this case we deliberately created consensus at top levels that process and job changes were needed and could be accomplished by this organization. We broadened our base of support by engaging a wide sample of client personnel in the development and validation of process and job changes. Our program culminated in a final ‘endorsement’ meeting during which managers and supervisors explicitly endorsed the process and job changes that would be made in their area.
In the final analysis process and role changes allowed this client to increase the number of personnel directly supporting clients by 25%. Reallocating resources measurably increased this organization’s Service Value from -14%--a relatively low score—to almost +21%(well above average).
