Culture change

‘From lethargy to high energy’

Challenge

A prestigious retail group encompassing several bluechip global brands, operating 12 premium brand outlets. Their CEO felt they had: “become lethargic”, and approached us for assistance.

Approach

We identified strong areas of the business in order to improve their weaknesses. We looked at why their good processes worked and rolled them out across the business, then we researched the things they didn’t do so well, which involved:

  • A one-week exercise starting with a ‘broadbrush look’ at the company, followed by a deep dive into key areas:
    • Look and feel
    • Staff attitude
    • Sales and after sales process
    • Communication
    • Customer relationship management
    • Best practice thinking
  • Production of a report on each retail outlet revealing strengths and weaknesses
  • Designing a bespoke coaching and process map for staff in each outlet
  • Working for three days at each outlet to demonstrate areas of opportunity to branch managers.

Five key areas for change

After the week-long exercise we identified five key areas for change:

  1. Communication between head office and outlets
  2. Training and coaching for workshop controllers and service advisors including “soft skills training” and “How to get the best from a team”
  3. The need for a Customer Relations Management strategy and standardisation across all outlets
  4. Better marketing and point-of-sale to ensure offers and stock issues were given priority
  5. A fragmented IT infrastructure that wasn’t supporting the business or the customer journey
  6. There was no RLI (Review. Learn. Improve) culture in place.

Each area had become more complex over the years at each retail outlet as individual branch managers had added to the complexity. This made it virtually impossible for team members to work at a different outlet and “hit the ground running”.

Impact

To bring about culture change with the group, we introduced standardisation across all 12 retail outlets in stock ordering, branch look and feel. We also brought in YTT meetings (see below), and vital KPI business measures began to be recorded. Standardisation meant that staff could work in a different branch when required, working efficiently from the moment they arrived. Despite standardising work practices, each outlet retained its uniqueness by reflecting the branch manager’s personality.

Introduction of YTT (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow) Meetings

Each day, before the store opened, ten-minute staff meetings were led by the team and the team leader (not the branch manager) to:

  • Review the “highs and lows” of the last working day
  • Look at the impact on customer service and how to hit objectives
  • Consider “What do we need to do tomorrow?”
  • Ensure everyone was up-to-speed and aware of their roles and responsibilities on a daily basis.

Some stores even held these meetings twice a day.

Major areas for change addressed

Having started with the bigger picture, we narrowed the major issues down to five key focus areas.

  1. Customer Relations Management – database cleansed and sorted out
  2. All four IT systems were brought together
  3. An online diary system was introduced allowing anyone to see what was happening across all seven sites
  4. 1-2-1 coaching and training of staff
  5. Introduction of a culture of continuous improvement and RLI.

KPIs achieved

  • Maximised sales opportunities
  • Maximised add-on sales opportunities
  • Better engagement and staff attrition
  • Bottomline improvement via customer satisfaction
  • Improved business-wide communication and staff morale.

We received regular progress reports from a project manager via phone and email.

Outcome

In order to compare visits and  measure improvements we set up scoring matrices using our dashboard analysis tool basing them on indicators the CEO wanted to assess:

  • Brand standard
  • Communication
  • Best practice
  • Looking at competition

All key measurements made a real difference to the organisation and helped everyone to focus on improvement.

Since our involvement all CSI (Customer Satisfaction Indicator) scores and indices on our dashboard analysis tool have increased.