Sometimes I ponder over life and who things are moving. Its a Sunday and I am in deep thought about my company, where are we moving and how are we placed.
The question(s) which I want to get answered is: as a services company, are you defining productivity the right way as your clients deliverable(s) require? Do your employees really understand your business?
Thanks for Calling Yellow, Have a Nice Day
Case Study: Yellow Corp, a Fortune 500 company in the trucking business was going in a deep nose dive, which was found by Bill Zollars, who became the CEO of Yellow Corp at that time.
Problem Statement:
- What he found was that the company had no account-abilities and statistics for customer satisfaction.
- Employees did not understand the value and were just acting on the given orders
Current State of YRC:
This is the link to the amazing turn of events that have turned the fortunes of YRC
How did it happen?
Bill, understood one thing clearly, that the company is nosediving and competition was building up. People used to ask him, if the company will be around another couple of years? Bill had a strong look at the business and finally came out with the solution which had him telling the employees that they are no more competing with the competition in the trucking business, they are not a LTL/ trucking company.
We are a services company and need to strive to create systems to reach to what Starbucks does for its customers
Confused?
Well, Yes, Bill changed the entire positioning of the company for the employees, for them they had become a services company and hence the entire conversation with the customer changed. The entire focus shifted to the customer. People started listening to the customer and hence the products evolved there from.
Eg: On one of the occasions Bill went to a customer care centre of the company to hear the calls and he heard one of the agents answer a customer who wanted to truck his shipment from place A to B in 2 days. And the agent answered “We can do it in three days”. The customer again said but I want it to be done in two days. The agent had the same answer again. The customer finally remarked, I’ll call up someone else to which the agent said: Okay, thanks for calling yellow and letting us serve you. Have a nice day”
Well, if this is what you call serving, sure you are nose diving!
Being part of the Internet industry (read: social media) in India today and connecting with the leading players, I think, the flood of small companies which are creating ruckus in the market by introducing cheap services and setting wrong expectations with the client, will consume such companies itself.
The leading companies which have already set the Social Media ball rolling with the creme de la creme of the clientle would create an entry barrier for the smaller companies, strong enough which would take a good time to surpass and in such a time if these smaller companies dont scale up, with the right HR mix, I see them failing.
Thus the Social Media companies need to position themselves right in the market and itnernally with their employees aligned towards achieving the same goal seeing the same BIG picture!
