Our client was the Customer Services Director of a national wireless carrier. The customer services operation comprised over 4000 people located in a Head Office and across Contact Centres including additional Outsourcing Centres. Customer Services (CS) had consistently lifted its performance over the previous few years to exceed quality and cost objectives during a period of rapid business growth.

The situation changed rapidly during our tenure including significant manpower reductions and a major re-organisation that TRIMENTIS assisted with, plus the national organisation became part of an International provider over the course of our work.

The rate of new product introduction and the associated complexity of operations was increasing dramatically and the business needed to deliver a more differentiated service to its customers, enabling it to maximise revenues and minimise costs.

Challenges facing the business required new, smarter ways of collaborative working and the operating environment was rapidly becoming too complex to rely on individual and team heroics. The CS Director set a good leadership example in motivating people, but the management environment had insufficient emphasis on systematic approaches nor on cross-team involvement outside of the operations group. There was also insufficient linkage between the overall Division’s goals and team activities with inadequate data to plan and review activities effectively.

The Director recognised these shortcomings and set priorities to establish a more systematic and evidence based management and leadership environment to help better lead and direct the rapidly evolving business.

TRIMENTIS were invited to lead the implementation of an enterprise wide performance management system for the Director and Senior Management Team (SMT) to use in leading and managing the customer services operation.

• A top-down systematic approach was implemented which demonstrated that Customer Service programmes continued to support the Company and Divisional strategy and financial objectives and provided an overview of the Division’s performance.

• The approach provided more clarity, visibility and focus; helping the team identify that programmes were on track, choose the most important things to do and make decisions based on these insights at the right time.

• Effective integration of the process across the Division was achieved, clarifying roles, providing structure to planning and review meetings and enabling people to deliver their accountabilities

• More productive negotiations for the scarce resources in terms of budgets, people and technical developments were enabled, creating an interdependent approach and relieving much of the internal competition that had grown up previously.

• The team experienced faster decision making with more relevant and reliable data made available to users, driving an increased speed of execution through shortened lines of command.

• Relationships with other parts of the business became closer and more aligned, with the process of building a CS Strategy requiring input from other Directorates seen as a first in terms of the pro-active involvement of a wider group of stakeholders.