Project Excellence
Reconomy implements Project Excellence bringing company-wide improvements
Reconomy has seen many changes in the last decade “ mainly involving acquisitions and mergers in a bid to grow and expand the service offering. Paul Cox, Managing Director, explains:
“The last ten years have seen Reconomy make a number of takeovers followed by rationalisation in a bid to increase efficiency. Ultimately, we’ve added to our product offerings and strengthened the business to the benefit of the customer. But while the changes have been mostly positive, certain issues have arisen which have had to be addressed.”
With this realisation, Reconomy commissioned an independent survey to establish where improvements were needed “ and it set the company on a journey of customer service improvement encompassing every aspect of its operation.
Operations Manager Warren Bird and the Reconomy operations team
The result has been to establish Project Excellence “ a better way of thinking, focusing on the customer buying experience.
Debbie Teckoe, Reconomy’s Customer Service Manager, comments: “As the business grew, customer service evolved into a single UK-wide team of representatives dedicated to giving fast and reliable service to all customers, regardless of their size or requirements.
“While this meant customers were being looked after on a linear level, the degree of customer enjoyment “ the buying experience itself “ had diminished somewhat due to a simple lack of personal involvement. The customer survey thus highlighted the basic but important point that customers like to get to know the people they’re dealing with.”
It was clear that the personal touch had to be regained. “We did this by reorganising the customer service team into smaller, regional, groups,” said Debbie, “and it has proved very effective.”
Project Excellence has been adopted throughout the company bringing many unexpected benefits. Paul Cox continues: Project Excellence addresses every aspect of the business. Even our account managers, compliance team and back office operations have been brought into line with our new ethos. It’s been a process of understanding where we were as a business and what changes were needed to achieve our business development objectives “ all the while improving front-line customer services.”
Project Excellence went live at the beginning of March, and is a continuous process.
“Customer feedback has been highly positive thus far “ and we shall continue to monitor our performance in this way for the foreseeable future,” said Mr Cox.