A New Customer Service Department.

The discussion started one day when the company just completed a circle of payments to all creditors after a very difficult financial situation, We were celebrating. This financial situation had caused many problems, lay offs, unhappy employees and board of director. More importantly we lost the trust of our customers and consequently they were buying from our competitors. Above all, the company thrived and finished paying their obligations.

We had big decisions to make, not only because this meant a new "era" for the company but we needed to be smart to recover the market we had lost. From the top 2 paint factories we were down to the bottom and barely remembered. Did I already mentioned that most of the retailers that sold our brand were completely mad at us? We had to win that trust back. (Not easy)

I had been working for the company for the past year, and now I was humbly feeling it was my time to shine. The directors of the company asked me: what do you think it should be our first priority with the sales the department? An I said the name. I started explaining them what our customers had talked to me about this past year. An therefore they gave me the responsibility to form a new department.

I was so excited!!!! and at the same time I have to admit scared, my new title was Marketing and Customer Service Coordinator, and my responsibilities were:

1)Support the operations of marketing activities such as: merchandising purchasing, design and allocation; media purchasing, budget allocation among others.

2) Creation of customer service department: hire, train and supervise daily operations of the customer service department, making sure the clients have update information about products orders, product specifications, on-time delivery, order status and others.

Oh my, did I know how challenging this was going to be, I think I never slept for the first 6 months. Although I have to say I had a bunch of people supporting me, the Logistics Manager, Accounts Receivable, without them, things would had been harder to accomplish (I will write about this in a later post)

The process of building a New Customer Service Department (Can work for improving)

Wait! before you start making a big fancy plan you MUST PERFORM a Situation analysis: 

Some people find it unnecessary, sometimes costly, timely and so on. But the truth is that knowing the current situation is vital for future success. When I say situation analysis, is just learn about what is going on in the company and why. The what is as important as the why? Don't you hate when somebody just comes and criticize a process without even knowing why it is done that way. Never and I mean NEVER make that mistake, you will only win some enemies, trust me. So, my advise number one is: 

1) Learn the processes: you do not have to become an expert, but learn how things work. This is important because later you will be able to have an opinion and people will respect it, because they know you invested some time investigating and getting involved. Moreover in the process you can learn more about the past, what they did that did not work, what did work, be careful thought, always keep in mid that some of those seems might not how work as a result of bad policies or applications, so learn about that too. 

2) Talk to people: ask them why they do things the way they do it, what do they do, what makes the problem successful. I specifically remember one opportunity I was dealing with some Logistics problems and I went to talk to the Delivery Coordinator, he gave a class of how could things be done better, how we could improve and what do we needed. He had 20 years working in logistics! Of course his opinion is valuable!

3) Get Involved with other departments: Ok so we all know that any other department mistake it end up being the customer department mistake. That is why it is important that you know what is going on with other departments, therefore you will able to understand their threats and be able to help, support and so on, hey! I went to talk to the logistics coordinator for a reason. 

4)... Last but know least... Talk to your clients!!!! I know, this most be the most intricate, painful and difficult part, but somebody's got to do it. this is for the case of a B2B company. We had approximately 250 clients/stores. All the stores of course had district managers, 30 in total. I started speaking to them, when talking to them I asked them who from the stores I could talk and so on. It is important to have an objective when you make this call, in this case I wanted to know specifically what they lacked more from our services, therefore I wrote some questions down and as the conversation flowed we discussed them. I also told them what I was hoping from the conversation, and why I needed this information: to build as new department fit to your expectations, I made them part of the process. I also did a small survey, in order to able to measure results at the end of the year. 

Finally you have to write down your findings, study them, and take them into consideration to develop your plan.

The Plan

SMART Objective:  specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time, for example:

Create a Customer Service Department that will help the company to win back the trust showing a decrease of complaints of 50% and an increase of sales of 15% by the end of the year.

1) Start hiring Customer Service Representatives
The basic conclusions of the situation analysis to start where:

• They felt that our processes were not updated, old, from dinosaur era (as one client once said to me).
• The work is so routine  that they keep making the same mistake once and again. 
• Most of our clients saw us as unreliable, they felt that most of the time we were not saying the complete truth about order status.
• Didn't care for our service at all. 
• Long waits on the phone.

As they say in Venezuela: "Tenemos mas rayas que un tigre" "We have more lines than a tiger" referring that we had a lot of backlash. 

Based on this I decided the following

• Hire 4 people, this way we could cover all our clients, and be focused on serving them promptly as they expected. 
• Just graduating from a diploma, starting their career. New young faces would help us to show that we were a "new" department, starting to do things differently.
• No experience, this was a particular petition from the president. One day he explained me that it would be easier to hire people and trained them to do things our way. I agreed because it would also help with the routine problems. 

2) Training: 

My plan was to hire companies to help with the training. Unfortunately the budget was not big enough. Therefore I did it my self, always with help, (I do not want to make myself the star of the movie). Anyways, the first thing I told them and repeated every day was: we are here to resolve our clients concerns in a happy and diligent way, bring solutions!!! always!!!. It was almost like a anthem or something (hehehe). And why those words?, you may ask, that was the way I found to explain better what we needed to do in order to deliver the result we all wanted, and what our customers expected from us, solutions, solutions, solutions. 

On the order hand I made them sympathized with the client, I tried my best to make them understand their frustrations when we do not perform well, when we take to long to process an order or to find an information they need, pronto! Thats one thing about this job, clients (with good reason) normally "quieren cosas para ayer", want things for yesterday, meaning for now is already late. 

Well there are a million other things that what I would love to extend, but for the moment lets talk about the results, and in other posts we will talk about more deeply. 

Results: By the end of the year we achieved a reduction of complaints of 80% and incremented sales a total of 20%. I want to make clear that this was an effort done with clients that had already bought products to the company, no new customers, that came after. But yes! we did an excellent job for the first year and of course we needed to keep improving! 

Please share your comments, let me know if you need me to be more specific in a special subject, that way I will make sure to write about it.