Eliminating Customer Complaints, written by Mark Bayliss
How we gained compliance with our staff
and eradicated customer complaints.
Written by Mark Bayliss
As a UK Aftersales Manager working The Middle East, I would like to share with you some significant developments that are occurring as a result of enhancing 3 key areas and how by facilitating these areas have lead to a happier and significantly more productive working environment.
We aspire to achieve greater synergy with each other and to do this we have strongly encouraged the sharing of individuals’ knowledge at the same time understanding their interpretations of compliance and how it can be achieved effectively.
During this time we have learnt some incredibly interesting stuff, the most interesting thing is if you ask some-one to comply they will the trouble is they won’t care why.
This is where knowledge comes in and the different interpretations of the knowledge that different people have. Everybody seems to know what they have to do but everybody is thinking about doing it in different ways. If we force people to do it the same then we become robotic, some people enjoy that, and others hate it; this is where synergy comes in to play.
There is nothing new in knowing that “a happy worker is a more productive worker”, in fact I would advocate that a happy worker is the most important thing in any business because this is reflected outwardly onto the customers. So here’s what we’ve achieved:
As like many dealers, we were being set back by customer complaints and negative feedback from all areas. Every week we have feedback from our CRM team detailing customer issues that ranging from dirty cars to being too expensive; along with many negative comments from our colleges in other departments.
I realise that success breeds success in the same way that negativity breeds despondency; I knew we had to find a way of changing this despondency into one of success and this meant that we had to get commitment from our staff and facilitate their involvement.
We decided to introduce what we called a “Quality Improvement Program”. This in itself is nothing new, but the way we choose to operate the program certainly was.
In the After-sales Department we have a staff of 232 people covering six branches, so the task ahead was massive. We decided to roll this by first meeting with all of the Supervisors and assessing their knowledge on why there was so much negative feedback within the group and from our customers. We then shared our combined knowledge as a management team on what we thought the problems were and the results, not surprisingly were the same.
We then agreed that we must take a proactive approach in resolving the issues, we also agreed that we didn’t want a short-term solution to the problems, we wanted a permanent fix. We shared our combined knowledge with all the staff and were starting to create Synergy among the team.
One example of how we resolved an ongoing issue:
We had many customer complains about a vehicles being left dirty. Normal practice was that the Manager would get the complaint and would call the person who had instigated the complaint and there would be a conversation of colourful language without and real resolution.
In our latest initiative, we collate the complaints centrally and have them passed by a quality improvement form to the necessary branch. In the beginning, the supervisors called their staff together and asked them how we should best resolve these complaints and because the information and the problem was now being shared, we now had a team that was willing to share their views openly without fear of criticism.
The results were simply amazingly! Some mechanics who were extremely compliant said “we can wash the vehicles”, this was astounding to us! The branches that do not have cleaning facilities suggested that we outsource the cleaning and we also had suggestions from customer advisors that they also don’t mind cleaning the vehicles. This high level of compliance would never of happened without the integration and ownership of the problems.
Now clearly, to have technicians and customer advisors cleaning vehicles is a complete miss use of resources, but what we have achieved was something very special and as a result we have introduced a washing procedure that everybody has bought into and complaints about vehicles cleanliness have completely stopped.
This is one of many examples we are now following, and to strengthen synergy we are going to roll-out mission statements. Again, this is nothing new but we are going to approach this by asking each employee to right his own mission statement and as a management team we will then review the statements and create a collective departmental mission statement. This will produce common goals that have been created by the people who want to achieve them.
Knowledge + Synergy + Compliance = More Profit.
© Copyright Insight Training & Development Ltd 2008
You have our permission to provide a link to this page, but you are not allowed to copy it.