Assignment: Mutually beneficial relationships with suppliers

Client Issue
A major African Bank was experiencing customer dissatisfaction with their current household claims
process and wanted to understand how this could be avoided and service improved.
One of the main causes of dissatisfaction was linked to service contractors who dictated when the problem
would be fixed in accordance with their internal schedule. Customer requirement were not taken into
consideration.

Delays in fixing water leaks led to further preventable damage to the customers’ homes and unnecessarily
increased indemnity spend. The average time to close a claim was 37 days.

Our Approach
The focus of the transformational work was based on understanding when and how the customer wanted
the rectification undertaken and then source a service contractor to meet the specific need.
The manual effort to bring these two together led the Bank to seek an IT solution. The IT solution was
based on the ‘UBER’ concept and worked to the principles of mutual benefit. Under our guidance the IT
contractor worked closely with the Bank and service contractors to create an ‘app’.
This was trialled by the Bank and a number of service contractors.

Results
The customer was now able to get the fix when they wanted it, which was confirmed on the first call. The
service contractor operatives were given the work via their mobile phones with job details and routing
information.

They had the capability to take before and after fix photo’s, inventory management and immediate digital
invoicing. The time it took service contractors to administrate the work was reduced by 90%.

The average time to fix the customers’ problems was reduced to 13 days and the ‘app’ is in the process of
being rolled out to 600 service providers nationwide. The projected reduction in Operating Costs for the
financial year was 33%.

Assignment: Challenging long held beliefs and assumptions

Client Issue
A study was carried out in the Repair Contact Centres of a large UK telecom organisation. The purpose of
which was to understand why the volume of fault reports had increased over a period. The assumption
was that customers who contacted this part of the organisation did so to report a fault with their telephone
service.
As a result, all contacts were put through the ‘fault report’ process. This entailed testing the line and
possibly ending with an engineer visiting the customer’s property to fix the perceived problem.
Our Approach by guiding the management team in understanding the problem to be solved from the customers’ points of view they discovered that:
 Only 27% of incoming calls were from customers who believed they may have a fault on their line.
 52% of calls were about problems that customers wanted help to solve, such as how to divert their
calls.
 The remaining 21% were customers articulating their dissatisfaction with the service they were
experiencing leading from previous contacts.
 The capability to resolve the customer’s problem at the first point of contact by the people who
worked in the centres was only 9%.
 The IT systems and processes were designed to raise and despatch faults on all calls. There was
no capability to deal with ‘I need advice’ calls.

Results
This organisation learned that their existing belief that customers contacting Repair wanted to report a fault
was fundamentally flawed. As a direct result of the knowledge gained by the management team, they
proceeded to redesign their organisation and processes.
This resulted in:
 32% reduction in incoming call volume.
 26% reduction in fault reports despatched to engineers.
 Capability to resolve customer’s problem at the first point of contact increased from 9% to 55%.
 £26m cost saving realisation across the ‘end to end’ process.

Assignment: Re-aligning ‘purpose’ to invigorate performance

Client Issue
A building contracting organisation wanted to improve their bid winning process as to increase the number
of bids won. A vast majority of work in bid winning takes place in their estimating team.
Our Approach

By studying and following this process revealed a large amount of waste i.e. duplication of effort for every
bid tender that was undertaken. Due to the amount of work to build a bid tender the organisation is only
able to bid on a limited number of tenders.

Here are some of the key issues:
 Tender documents from customer are incomplete and have to be chased up.
 Typically for every tender 400 enquiry letters are sent to sub-contracting companies asking for a
quote response.
 Only a 40% response from sub-contractors to the enquiry letter.
 By chasing the other 60% provides an additional 15% responses.
 Only 10% of the quotes are used to build a tender estimate.
 100% of the bid tender estimates are changed at board level dependant on their need to win the
business.
 Rarely are those sub-contractors who send responses (quotes) get the work if the bid should be
won.
 25% of bids are won.
When we first arrived, we asked the estimating team to define their purpose. Their response was ‘to obtain
sub-contractor estimates to build a tender settlement figure’ because they saw themselves as the
estimating team therefore ‘we do estimates’.

By working with senior management and those who work in the estimating team a different approach was
taken. Firstly, by revisiting their ‘purpose’ they had a realisation that their role wasn’t about obtaining
estimates but ‘building an accurate and competitive bid to win work’.
By re-aligning their ‘purpose’ freed up their thinking to solve the problem in a different way. Crucially they
had a vast data base of actual costs from past work won and completed which wasn’t being utilised.
By using that data and putting it into (SPC) control charts over the last two years revealed that actual costs
for 80% of all the work they sub-contract was predictable. So, there was only a need to estimate on 20% of
the work for each tender.

Results
By taking out the waste work (duplication of estimates on all tenders) increased capacity and efficiency of
the estimating team. This allowed the building contractor organisation opportunity to bid for more tenders
and therefore win more business.