Success Story: Improving Operations & Building a Unified Corporate Culture
Business Challenge:
To improve operational efficiencies and service quality to over 100 branches of a national real estate organization
A large national residential real estate company had acquired approximately 80 new offices within a 6-month time frame. The acquisitions had strained the existing infrastructure, resulting in reduced service responsiveness and low morale. Senior management retained Robinson & Associates to assist them in improving operational efficiencies and building a unified corporate culture and identity.
Our Approach: Mobilize management and employees to work together to improve communication and service to the branches by creating a structure that distributes decision making and accountability throughout the organization
We facilitated a task force of internal cross-functional managers and external branch managers to identify high impact service improvement recommendations. Once senior management approved the recommendations we created implementation teams whose charters are to implement the recommendations throughout the organization. Team leaders were provided individual and peer coaching throughout the implementation phase to ensure the accomplishment of desired team results.
We also provided ongoing consultative support to senior management to assist them in making needed organizational changes, which included:
Defining service performance standards
Developing a performance management system that links every employee's role to achieving service standards
Clarifying new decision making roles and responsibilities for managers
Providing customer service skill building for all employees
Redesigning key business processes
Developing new corporate communication vehicles and processes
The Results: Redefined decision making responsibility of managers, enabling departments to provide more responsive service
Branch managers began to report significantly improved service to the branches within the first 4 months of this initiative.
Ten months after launching this service improvement initiative, an internal service evaluation task force surveyed all of the office managers and office administrators to assess their satisfaction with recent service improvements. Each department received a satisfaction score for the key services they provide to the branch offices. Satisfaction scores for each department showed overall improvement ranging from 25% to 71%.
Business Challenge: