Case Studies

Driving Operational Excellence at a Large Retailer

The client is a large, nationally recognized company with over 600 locations nationwide. The organization has had an on-going customer satisfaction measurement program in place for many years. The program has become a culturally ingrained tool used by managers at all levels to gauge operational performance and guide the focus of continuous improvement efforts....(more)

Supporting Exponential Growth

Our client, a leading restaurant brand, built their business on catering to a small subset of their most loyal and valuable customers—customers who pay premium prices and expect the highest quality products, exceptional service and a welcoming, warm atmosphere. The strategy has delivered incredible success to their bottom line. In 1993 they had 20 locations......(more)

Using Employee Survey Data to Drive Quality Improvements

A North American manufacturing company needed to dramatically increase its global competitiveness, determining product quality improvement to be the number one priority. Among a number of quality improvement initiatives, using three years’ data from annual employee surveys.....(more)

A US retail group with locations in all 50 states conducted both an on-going customer loyalty tracking study and an annual employee engagement survey.....(more)

Driving Operational Excellence at a Large Retailer

The client is a large, nationally recognized company with over 600 locations nationwide. The organization has had an on-going customer satisfaction measurement program in place for many years. The program has become a culturally ingrained tool used by managers at all levels to gauge operational performance and guide the focus of continuous improvement efforts.

To emphasize the importance of operational improvement, senior leadership tied customer satisfaction metrics to managers’ bonus plans. Whenever compensation is linked to the results of a survey measurement program, there is a heightened risk that a manager might attempt to unfairly influence the results of an operation’s scores for their own personal gain. As a safe-guard against this, the IVR and web data collection programs established by Questar included a number of quality protection controls preventing the most commonly attempted efforts used to inflate customer satisfaction scores. In addition, each month the client received Questar’s Extreme Report highlighting unit-level scores falling outside a statistically expected range on a series of criteria often indicative of unfair survey practices.

THE CHALLENGE

Through monthly review of Questar’s Extreme Report, it became apparent that the results for one particular region were consistently falling outside the range of normal. Recognizing that unfair manipulation of survey data undermines the integrity of the entire program, the client needed to understand how the region in question was achieving such high scores and apparently getting around the established quality protection measures. To determine the necessary steps to be taken internally in addressing this issue, the client enlisted Questar to further investigate the survey records in question.

THE SOLUTION

Questar compared the region’s scores against the company average on a series of criteria and extracted those surveys falling outside of two standard deviations from the company average. All were phone surveys, and based upon location information known about the originating phone number, Questar geographically plotted the location of each suspicious survey.

THE RESULT

Through this investigation, Questar and the client were able to determine the scores were the result of a regional manager inputting false survey data into the customer satisfaction survey system. The geographical mapping brought to light that the locations of the originating calls were correlated with the manager’s travel itinerary. Whenever traveling, the manager had made it a practice of calling the survey line from payphones along the way where ever conveniently accessible (e.g., roadside rests, malls, hotels).  With solid data to back up their suspicions, senior management was able to address the situation with this manager and put an end to the behavior.

Our client, a leading restaurant brand, built their business on catering to a small subset of their most loyal and valuable customers—customers who pay premium prices and expect the highest quality products, exceptional service and a welcoming, warm atmosphere. The strategy has delivered incredible success to their bottom line. In 1993 they had 20 locations. Today, they bake more bread each day than any other bakery-cafe concept in the country. The client understood that the very factors that fuelled their success now challenged the very strategy that made them grow. Maintaining the high level of customer care must be maintained, even though their size threatened the formula.  They engaged Questar to partner with them to develop a strategy for “delivering the love” to their loyal customers.

OUR SOLUTION

The first phase of the client’s customer experience management program focused on eliminating and resolving service issues that occurred in the stores. Questar implemented its Service Alert™ product, which sends a real-time email when a customer reports a service issue.  Rather than waiting days to repair a problem, the client can now respond within a few minutes of the customer outreach. More importantly, Service Alert tracks problem resolution efforts to ensure that any issue ends with resolution and loyalty, not continued irritation.  This automated oversight ensures a high level of accountability that had been lacking prior to the implementation of Service Alert.

The second phase of the Questar project focused on closing the gap in loyalty scores between the top quartile and the bottom quartile of stores. Prior to working with Questar, the client was increasingly concerned about the growing gap between top and laggard performing stores.  Questar identified the key drivers of superior performance and worked with the client to create action plans to make immediate improvements at the lowest performing stores.  Ongoing measurement provided by Questar ensured a high level of accountability that had been previously lacking.

THE RESULT

As a result of the Questar work, the client was able to define a strategy and develop tactical plans based on deep insights into the customer.  They launched a corporate wide effort to reduce the variability of customer experiences from top to bottom. The number of service issues significantly declined. They increased loyalty scores across the whole system.

Success is best measured by business metrics tied to growth, revenue, customer retention, and profitability.  During the eight year tenure of Questar’s work, the client grew it’s retail presence from 300 to 1,300 stores.   While the core strategy of delivering to the needs of loyal customers has remained, their sophistication in measuring customer inputs and directly linking to quick action has changed tremendously through the length of our relationship.  Questar continues to seek new ways to engage with their business to deliver an experience that compels continued loyalty and revenue growth.

A North American manufacturing company needed to dramatically increase its global competitiveness, determining product quality improvement to be the number one priority. Among a number of quality improvement initiatives, using three years’ data from annual employee surveys was suggested to be a good place to look for answers.

Questar designed a study to examine the relationship between employee satisfaction (as determined by the annual employee opinion survey), and two specific measures of business performance: factory quality (i.e., percent of total units not rejected internally for non-compliance to specification), and customer satisfaction (i.e., dollar value of returned material expressed as a percent of sales). Using partial correlations and regression-based path analyses, Questar determined that higher employee satisfaction was linked to both factory quality AND higher customer satisfaction.

With three years of employee survey data, causal patterns across time could be identified and studied. Further, Questar determined that increases in employee satisfaction led to an increase in product quality in the time period following the survey.

The fact that we were able to determine the direction of the relationship between satisfaction and performance was a boon to the organization. Improving product quality (i.e., decreasing the number of rejected units) would lead to substantial cost savings for them. The employee survey data was therefore used to identify the areas in which employees were least satisfied and those that were most important to overall satisfaction. Targeting these areas for improvement helped the organization improve its product quality.

A US retail group with locations in all 50 states conducted both an on-going customer loyalty tracking study and an annual employee engagement survey. The company wanted to more effectively leverage this information to improve customer loyalty, and drive bottom-line results.

Questar examined the relationships between employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and several external measures of business success, such as sales growth. (comp store sales) Using our proprietary Critical Components Analysis^TM and regression-based path analyses, Questar found that higher employee engagement was strongly linked to higher customer satisfaction AND to greater sales growth.

The study also found a negative correlation between advancement and overall customer service scores. In other words, as high performing employees were promoted, less-experienced, less-skilled people took their place, resulting in a drop in satisfaction among customers. However, advancement opportunities were positively correlated with employee engagement, particularly among professional employees.

The company used the findings of this study to implement a number of significant changes to their field and back stage organizations. For one, they substantially increased efforts to improve engagement among employees, particularly in the area of day-to-day work (e.g., increasing challenge, decreasing bureaucracy), which was shown to be a key driver of engagement for them. Another improvement made was to support employee advancement rather than hold people back that perform well in client-facing roles. The company targeted its training and development efforts toward ensuring the knowledge and skill levels of those replacing promoted employees. These efforts proved to be successful in establishing a cultural expectation that high customer service support would be rewarded and promoted across the company.