Measuring Service Performance

Measuring Service Performance

ISSUE:
A leading distribution and logistics provider wanted to measure the health of the relationship it had with its largest customer, and to identify the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to improve this relationship.

They had been running a customer feedback programme in-house, but this had proved to be onerous, with significant delays to any action-planning and follow-ups arising from the data and feedback that they collected.

Our client had also started to question the validity of the research because of some critical service performance issues that had occurred, that they should have been able to anticipate.

PROCESS:
We aimed to build a measurement and feedback programme for our client that captured the relationship performance attributes that were of most importance to their customer. To achieve this, we conducted a series of in-depth telephone interviews with their customer, speaking to Franchise Owners, Business Managers, Supervisors and Operations Consultants across the UK and Ireland. We presented our findings and recommendations to our client, to gain their buy-in and approval for a more comprehensive survey of their customer, which we did via an online survey.

OUTCOME:
Our research firstly demonstrated that our client had not been capturing critical elements of the relationship which were crucial to their customer. We presented our findings to our client and their customer at the same time, helping our client to promote a more open and proactive culture to acknowledge issues arising and implement actions. This led to a closer collaboration between our client and the customer, in which they have been more able to address the problems around the Ordering, Delivery, and Reverse Logistics experience quickly. They have also introduced much-needed improvements to the technology platform provided to their customer, which has resulted in more accurate and effective communication, and tracking of day-to-day issues raised.