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The following is a brief overview of the TCC Components:
Customer Listening – Direct customer feedback, ”complaints” or “compliments”, are deemed the most immediate and effective way for us to evaluate our ability to serve our customers. Each employee is empowered to enter data in real-time and assign a Root Cause associated with the transaction. Data entries in our CORE system are captured and saved immediately. This information is then available to the entire organization. Root Cause information is validated at the time, or assigned for further investigation by the individual (or team) associated with the issue.
Measurement – Key to the sustainability of our TCC process, and in turn our business success, is the advanced measurement program we have implemented over the last 14 years. Using a simple, and yet fundamental set of criteria, we keep track of over 50 key measurements as indicators of our ability to provide product on-time/correctly and service beyond customer expectations. Our primary measurements are those with direct impact on the customer:
- Response Time to Customer Requests
- Access to Sales Staff
- On-Time Customer Shipments
Employee Empowerment – TCC tools combined with a strong entrepreneurial environment enable employees to make decisions, initiate projects, speak openly, bring ideas forward and see them through to fruition. Our goal was validated in our May 2005 Employee survey, with a score of 90.6 (which falls into the 80-100 range, meaning Nearly Unanimous Agreement) when asked “Are you empowered to make decisions in your job?”
Recognition – Recognition is one of the most effective ways to reinforce our culture, acknowledge positive practices and retain top performers. We have eight online tools to choose from that are kept evergreen by our Recognition Team. Staff simply launch the Recognition database, select the applicable level of recognition and print out the form (Pat on the Back, “You Are a Lifesaver”, etc.). We also have a monthly Praise Award and three annual awards: Honour Roll, Rookie of the Year and Newly Elected TCC Team members.
On-Going Feedback/Coaching – We have developed a culture where every individual is encouraged to provide feedback to their peers and the management team and provide tools to enable interaction. Everyone understands the coaching is intended to help them improve, facilitate two-way discussions in a non-confrontational format, identify areas where they excel and encourage individuals to stretch outside their “comfort zone” in order to grow as people. This type of open coaching builds confidence and commitment to change. Our online “Feedback Challenge” forms are the most popular method for obtaining objective feedback.
Communicating for Service – Perhaps the most critical of all the TCC components is effective communication. It is absolutely essential to our interactions with customers, as well as fellow employees. It is also extremely important in all aspects of our personal lives. Each employee is trained, over a 2.5 day period, on all aspects of the TCC process. The objectives of Communicating for Service are understanding: the importance of effective communication; our role in effective communication; the various techniques and tools available to improve communication; and our own communication style and practice (role play) communication techniques needed in order to improve. Satisfying customers requires us to be both a good listener and an effective, assertive speaker. In the end, we are responsible for ensuring that the customer’s message is understood and that their needs are being met.
Service Guidelines and Standards – In order to provide a superior level of consistent customer service, products and solutions, we have worked diligently to develop sets of customer standards and over 100 Service Guidelines. This documentation ensures we execute correctly the first time and consistently each subsequent time. Our experience with standardization has benefited the organization during the development of our business system (CORE). We are now able to seamlessly link quotations to orders and any return/ warranty/ repair associated with that transaction. Above and beyond that, we have built a standard set of procedures into the software to ensure efficiency and ownership. The objective is to ensure tight control over the logistics process at any given point.
Analysis, Evaluation and Continuous Improvement – In order to enhance the value we provide and extract critical action from the above processes, we developed a Continuous Improvement Team (CIT) in early 2005. The mandate of the team is to promote, facilitate and manage the NORPAC Customer Listening Processes such that issues are logged, identified, actions taken and resolutions published to ensure continuous improvement of our customer service.
The team has worked diligently to automate the analysis of Root Cause data so as to enable convenient and yet powerful summaries of deficiency sources, and contributing factors at any given time. This has resulted in the identification of key projects to bring about change – with seven currently being pursued.
In summary, we will continue to enhance all components of the TCC process to provide additional value to our customer base, while always relying on training, consistency of service, measured data, customer feedback and a vision of continuous improvement.
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