Case Study: aligning your business strategy with a focus on people; employees & customers

Rock the Boat consultant, Niall Foster, has just completed a 10 week pilot project in Saudi Arabia.

Niall has worked in the Middle East and North Africa since 2000 and has delivered more than 15 projects in the region mostly in the oil and gas sector.  His latest project was with one of Saudi Arabia’s largest medical services organisations which in September 2007 had a customer base of 350,000 patients throughout the Kingdom.

The project objective was to implement the organisation’s vision of being identified as the best medical provider in the Emergency Room and in Primary Care.

This project was about how to establish in the mind of staff best practice customer care standards and behaviours. Additional project aims included:

• Inspire all staff to deliver customer care vision that creates shared meaning and understanding
• Set organisational direction and establish customer care performance improvement strategies into unit/individual action plans
• Shape and strengthen the competence of staff to create long-term sustainability

How was this realised?

This was done by defining a new corporate Standard for customer care. The Standard was designed with staff. It clarified to staff the customer care service the organisation aims to provide its patients and their dependents.

A customer care ‘Toolkit’ was then created. The toolkit serves as a model to drive consistent behaviours in all customer care initiatives. The toolkit is a concrete guide that explains to staff how the Standard should be delivered.

To embed the standard, policies and procedures were altered. This was done by impacting the following policies and procedures as detailed in the diagram below.

A Customer Care Committee, of senior managers, was established to recommend decisions and to implement the project. Terms of reference was prepared for this committee as a guide to the way they should work.Customer care behaviours were clarified at each hierarchical level. This details what customer care ‘is’ and ‘is not’. This is aligned with the organisation’s appraisal system, job descriptions, orientation programme and departmental goals.

Customer care, as a competence, was added into the appraisal process.

A Service Level Agreement was prepared to identify internal responsibilities and behaviours of staff. This defined acceptable levels of service between staff and the methods used to monitor and report performance that benefited staff themselves and customers alike.

A project communications plan was prepared to inform managers and staff to make them aware of the Standard and explain what they must do to align individual, team and departmental performance with it.

A newly devised staff reward scheme included a customer care element.

Future elements will include transforming the toolkit into an eLearning module using a
modern interactive format.

How is the project measured?
The project is measured monthly against an agreed baseline:

• % of customers satisfied with the overall service provided
• % of those making complaints satisfied with the handling of those complaints
• % of office calls answered within 3 rings or 15 seconds
• % of call center calls that are abandoned
• % of call center calls that are answered within 5 minutes of being held in a queue
• % of score attained against the ‘mystery shopping’ criteria
• % of cases (complaints) resolved within 2, 3 and 7 working days
• % change in each clinic of the top 10 actionable complaints
• % increase in number of staff compliments
• % improvement in staff morale
• % improvement in visitor survey response
• % improvement in wait time for appointments
• % improvement in wait time in facility
• Number of front line staff trained in implementing the Customer Care Standard
• Number of managers trained in implementing the Customer Care Standard
• Number of facilitators trained to deliver the Customer Care Standard
• Roll out of Customer Care Program Kingdom wide

To learn more about this project please contact Niall Foster at niallf@rocktheboatconsulting.com