A few years ago, one of the Service Department Operations I was responsible for was a chronic under-performer. Our customer satisfaction ratings were deplorable, technician turnover was at seventy percent, technician efficiency was below forty percent, and our service manager and service writer turnover were three hundred percent in one year. On top of that, our warranty recovery was disastrous, and profitability was nowhere to be found<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After several quarters\nof deep challenging discussions with the branch manager and his team, I decided\nthey only way to get this problem figured out was to step into the department\nand see the operations for myself. With\nthe help of a few of my key senior operations team we interviewed, watched, and\nlisted to all the employees, managers and several key customers<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It became very\napparent that the only system present was \u201cChaos\u201d. None of the team members really understood\nwhat was wrong or how to fix it. No one\nunderstood that we needed systems and processes that we all understood, could\nlearn and practice to become good at what we do. It was very easy to see how without strong\nprocess thinking and strong leadership every new hire very quickly became\nfrustrated and overwhelmed by the \u201cChaos\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Having a strong background\nin process discipline training, I knew we needed to go right back to basics and\nbuild a winning set of process that we could teach, coach and measure, to bring\ndiscipline, accountability and success to the team. Our first step was to recruit a strong\nprocess thinker who could work with the team to design and map the correct\nprocesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With the successful\nrecruitment of our process manager we started the slow but very necessary\nreview, design and test program. We\nwanted all our employees to be a part of and contribute to the new \u201cExcellence\nin Service Operations\u201d project and we ensured that happened. On a daily basis the project team leads met\nand reviewed all the activates for the day, good or bad and discussed how the\nsystem and processes worked or did not and why. \nBeing able to review and test in real time was a very high value add to\nthe experience for everyone. Over the\nnext several months our senior operations team met with the project team,\nemployees from other interacting departments, customers and the OEM to solicit\ntheir feedback and to ensure we were building into the outcomes what was\nimportant to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One year later we felt\nwe had the strong foundation for a winning formula. We hired a new service manager and he walked\ninto a system that was working well. He\nwas able to quickly learn the processes and add additional value based on his\nexperience. Our service writer who was\nwith the project from the start was operating very efficiently and wasn\u2019t\nfeeling the workload chaos from before. \nTechnician turn over dropped to twenty percent, and our employee and\ncustomer satisfaction scores where steadily climbing. The other big wins for us, improvements in\nfinancial performance we had never seen and Service Operations KPIs that were\n\u201cBest in Class\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The following year we\nimplemented the systems, processes and discipline into the other division\u2019s branches\nwith the same positive results. We also\nlaunched a project to test the idea in two other operating divisions with the\nsame trends emerging. Two years later a\nnew company wide initiative called \u201cService Optimization\u201d was launched as a key\nstrategic driver. The goal was to\ninstall the systems, processes and discipline so all service departments could\nenjoy the positive outcomes. This effort\nhas continued across the organization and still continues to improve in all\nareas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once again it was proven out that developing good systems, processes, and ensuring strong discipline around execution will deliver the results we are looking for.\u00a0 Having the ability to teach existing and new employees a system we know works is a game changer for \u201cService Department Operations\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you\u2019d like to discuss how we can assist you and your business, get in touch with John Higgins, the author of this article, at jhiggins@scpg.ca<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few years ago, one of the Service Department Operations I was responsible for was a chronic under-performer. Our customer satisfaction ratings were deplorable, technician turnover was at seventy percent, technician efficiency was below forty percent, and our service manager and service writer turnover were three hundred percent in oneContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,7,9,19],"tags":[25,46,56,96,97,104,109,125,132,142,147],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scpg.ca\/worthreading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scpg.ca\/worthreading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scpg.ca\/worthreading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scpg.ca\/worthreading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scpg.ca\/worthreading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scpg.ca\/worthreading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313,"href":"https:\/\/scpg.ca\/worthreading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions\/313"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scpg.ca\/worthreading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scpg.ca\/worthreading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scpg.ca\/worthreading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scpg.ca\/worthreading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}