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Summary
Customers today are quick to take their business elsewhere at any hint of poor service standards. While businesses recognise the need to provide exceptional customer service, just simply telling employees what should be done may prove to be ineffective. What businesses should focus on instead is guiding employees on how to improve on serving customers. Thus, the company embarked on an LEA project under the NACE@IAL initiative in 2021.At a Glance
In every industry, the provision of exceptional customer service standards has always been an integral part of an organisation given that meeting your customers' satisfaction is paramount to growing your business.Recognising that consumers today are increasingly particular about service standards, Acestes Pte Ltd (Acestes), an enterprise providing one-stop services and solutions in investigation, insurance claims adjusting and security to customers, sought a solution to address potential performance gaps within the workplace, and to raise its customer service standards.
Diagnosis of Performance Issues
Often, procedures put in place at the workplace detail ‘ what’ employees should be doing, but not ‘ how’ to go about doing so. Similarly, for Acestes, current SOPs for its security staff merely describe the procedures, and not how they could interact with customers.Furthermore, there has been no formal training put in place to address performance gaps of security staff. A review of the CCTV footage at the sites manned by Acestes showed that staff were not able to respond appropriately to problems which could potentially lead to unnecessary conflict between security staff and residents. In the long run, if staff do not uphold the image and reputation of the company, it will ultimately impact the ability of Acestes to expand or retain current sites.
"It is tough to be an SME in Singapore, where competition is intense. I thought that it is very important for our company to distinguish ourselves from our competitors through excellent customer service, which is very hard to build, and therefore, difficult for competitors to imitate. I feel excited that this project will help us achieve that and is therefore an important project for all of our staff to be onboard."
- Mr. Louis Amalorpavanathan, Managing Director
Solutions
However, as improving customer service across the board is a longterm outcome it cannot be a onetime project, but a continuous effort to build a customer-centric culture. We will be introducing a reward system to continuously identify, recognise, and reward staff for delivering good customer service. With the primary aim of attracting and retaining both new and existing customers, upskilling of of staff were needed to help improve work processes, and the quality of service delivered.To determine where the existing performance gaps were at, it was vital to first identify the various customer service touchpoints, and the operational processes that required effective handling of customers. From there, the following interventions were implemented:
- Developed customer service blueprints for processes that required effective handling of customers
- Co-created relevant training materials, such as a facilitator guide, slides, and an assessment plan based on the Skills Framework for Security Industry to train staff
- Conducted workshops for selected corporate and operational staff
- Execution of a Communications strategy, where a series of messages were disseminated to inculcate customer service standards among the operational staff
- Developed a customer feedback form for residents living in condominiums
Challenges
Inevitably, due to the nature of job for security officers where their work revolves around shift duty, it was difficult to schedule them for training workshops. There was also difficulty in obtaining footages recorded by staff on scenarios where effective customer service skills were needed which would have been beneficial for learners during the workshop.In addition, the lack of manpower in terms of developing course materials was evident for Acestes, as there was only one staff who had the necessary certifications (i.e., DACE and ACLP) and had to juggle between work duties and developing the materials. To add on, obtaining responses from the residents living in condominiums proved to be a challenge as well.
Achievements
At the end of the workplace transformation project with NACE@IAL, Acestes achieved the following:- At least 20% of the staff trained at the end of the project 12 out of 50 staff were trained
- Developed blueprints for 4 processes incorporating customer service: Handling parking violation, handling suspicious persons, handing suspicious vehicles, and handling internal staff corporate
- Zero complaints for rude behavior were received during the course of the project
When asked about the critical areas that led to the success of the project, Acestes shared that support from the Management was extremely vital, aside from instilling a customer-centric mindset in staff. In addition, ensuring that staff had the capacity to attend training was essential as well, particularly because they were on shift duty hence, more effort was needed in terms of coordinating a perfect time slot for them to attend the training workshop.