Engineer Customer-Centric Processes for Better Service Quality and Growth | What’s Your Edge?

Christina Porter, the President of Stallergenes Greer Canada and Vice President of Strategy for Stallergenes Greer North America. The company provides therapies to help improve life for people who suffer from allergies. In 2017, Stallergenes Greer acquired a successful family-owned Canadian company to create a fully integrated Canadian operation. The company encountered several challenges during the transition that required them to take some steps back and re-engineer customer-centric processes, in order to grow and improve service quality and customer experience. And that’s the focus of this episode of What’s Your Edge?

Christina, we are grateful that you are willing to share the challenges you faced as a result of the acquisition. Every company we’ve ever worked with that has gone through a merger or acquisition has told us that the integration process was anything but a cakewalk. Some of the issues we’ve heard companies have faced post-merger include cultural clashes, talent loss, customer retention issues, integration cost overruns, and integration fatigue. All of these can impact the customer experience and impede growth.

What can you share about the situation you were facing during the transition?

It’s all the things you mentioned and in a predictable pattern (although in our naïve optimism, we didn’t predict it, unfortunately!):

First: culture clashes: we are a global company purchasing a 2nd generation family business- our expectations regarding policies, procedures, documentation, decision making, almost everything were different, and it was a very uncomfortable, tense time for everyone

Second: talent loss: The natural progression of culture clash is talent loss, and when most of the company’s intellectual capital is institutional knowledge, that’s a huge problem. We lost the 2 owners very quickly, despite our expectation of a 2-year transition. And many of the key people followed right behind, taking their institutional knowledge with them.

Third: production/delivery disruption. Without the key players in the company, we rapidly became unable to fulfill orders.

Fourth: customer dissatisfaction – you can imagine how our customers reacted.

Fifth: more disruption and delay caused by managing angry customers, and trying band-aid, reactionary solutions- training new employees, adding shifts, hiring consultants.

Delve Into the Right Data to Pinpoint Service Quality Issues

In my career and as part of our work, we’re big proponents of service quality. In the book, “Delivering Quality Service, “ first published in 1990, based on the authors’ research found that reliability and responsiveness account for over 50% of how customers evaluate service quality. What kind of data was your team seeing that indicated you had a service quality process issue that needed to be addressed?

Well, the first and most obvious source of “data” was the phone lines and voice mailboxes. The phones never stopped ringing with complaints, and as fast as we were answering calls in person, more calls were filling the voice mailbox- to the point there was no physical way to answer everything- and anyway, we couldn’t answer the main question we were being asked – we called it WISMO- where’s my order???

The next was the very visual signal of orders piling up. Our orders mainly came in via fax at that time, and they were literally spilling and piling up on the floor, surrounding desks, and any other flat surface. In fact, our first initiative was to create a filing system just to hold backlogged orders- there were hundreds of them. We called it Bertha!

As we tried to solve problems, it quickly became obvious that we actually didn’t have the data we needed to pinpoint exactly where things were going wrong and therefore where we should prioritize our efforts. It was a sobering time when we came to the realization that we couldn’t just work harder to get out of the situation we were in. Instead, we needed to take a step back and become very analytical to make a sustainable solution.

You’re singing our song about taking a step back and being analytical. As you analyzed the data, what decisions did you make?

We knew we had to carve out time to dissect every part of the business if we were going to improve- to get that time, we had to make the very painful decision to reduce the number of customers we could serve. This led to some difficult, but honest discussions with valued partners to tell them they should go elsewhere because we could not serve them the way they deserved. We counted on the fact that this transparency would serve us well when we were back on our feet and could reach back out for their support.

We also had to purposely part ways with some long-standing but draining customer accounts where we couldn’t negotiate for a solution that worked in the new reality.

Engage Customers in the Process to Regain Forward Momentum

I know you had relationships with many of the clinicians and medical groups you serve. Being a customer-oriented person, I imagine “firing” customers was a very difficult decision for you. We believe that credibility and transparency are critical to maintaining market and customer trust during tough decisions. Beyond lost revenue, what was the impact of the decision on the organization, and what did you do to maintain customer trust?

Yes, this was such a difficult period of time for me and all our employees, especially because the business was built on customer service, and this is a core value for our leaders and all the people we hire.

The truth is, there was a significant loss of trust as we found our footing, and it was frankly embarrassing. But once the decision was made, we focused on being open and transparent about our situation, communicated regularly about the work we were doing to improve things, brought customers along with our vision as we innovated and finally, provided objective metrics to prove that when we asked them to come back, they could be confident in what to expect.

Take Me to Advisory Services

There’s a process for analyzing the process and getting to the root cause. What did you and your team do to analyze the entire process to understand what was creating the service quality problem and close the critical gaps?

We started with pure data collection at each point in the production process so that we could start to get a handle on what was going on and create a baseline. Things like how many calls we are getting, how many orders, how many corrections, what kind of mistakes, how much time every step takes, etc.

Next, we attempted to simply see where the easiest and most obvious places to make improvements would be, we picked the “low-hanging fruit.”

But then we moved on to the detailed work of process mapping using six sigma tools such as value stream mapping, 7 wastes, 5S, etc.

Question Everything to Engineer Customer-Centric Processes and Improve Service Quality

It sounds like you employed the power of process mapping. All businesses run on processes. Process mapping provides a clear roadmap for improvement and optimization. What steps did you take to reengineer the process, and how did you envision the revised process would improve the customer experience?

We reengineered the org chart for role clarity, we re-designed the physical space for efficiency, we instituted a data management system so documents could be found easily and electronically, we standardized the ordering process, we introduced a prioritization protocol for order processing, we questioned the rationale for everything, we deleted and deleted and deleted any redundant steps or touchpoints we documented everything and created training metrics so skills became transferable and are reproducible, we added clear metrics at each stage of the process and instituted a bonus program that paid for performance, we created transparent dashboards and shared access to information with all employees so they could see the progress and we opened a formal process for feedback for continuous improvement.

Today, we are industry leaders in quality, consistency, and speed of delivery. When customers came back, they got what they were promised plus more.

In addition to clarifying gaps, process mapping creates opportunities for operational excellence. Did you find that this exercise helped align your team and streamline decision-making?

This is very true. When we began this transformation, we thought we were just trying to get back to the way things were before the disruptions created by the integration, but what we discovered was that there were multiple ways to surpass good to become excellent by making the right decisions on where to focus our energy.

From a practical standpoint, once our teams could see the quantitative data, we could set ambitious goals to improve. We found that people became very engaged in making suggestions for incremental improvements in their day-to-day work- it’s now a very motivating part of our cultur