34 CASESTUDY
CARPHONE WAREHOUSE IMPROVES BUSINESS PROCESS EFFICIENCY
The mobile phone retailer has been rolling out an award-winning Operational Excellence programme across retail, call centres and back-offi ce functions since 2009 using BPM software
We recognised that while the customer’s journey often starts instore it often doesn’t end instore. To improve customer service further we needed to take an end-to- end approach, and look at all customer journey.
he Carphone Warehouse (CPW) branded its Operational Excellence programme initiative “How2”. Its use of Nimbus Control business process management (BPM) software has been such a success, the retailer recently won a prestigious award, “BPM Excellence – Leveraging BPM Technology,” from IT research and advisory fi rm Gartner. The project started in January 2009 when CPW decided that store operating procedures had to be standardised. The ultimate goal was to enable continuous improvement of customer service in response to massive competition with multiple High Street phone retailers and the increasing complexity of product mix and store types. Chris Jones, Carphone Warehouse head of business
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operations, said: “The changes we needed to make were not just about process. It was about behaviour, measurement and compensation structure. We needed to move from incentives based on sales, to rewarding customer service excellence, which we measure via Net Promoter Score (NPS).” The company assembled a team of store managers and regional managers and set about a rapid series of process capture workshops. Within six months 1,800 best practice processes, containing 4,800 diagrams, were ready for deployment. Jones explained: “We captured basically everything
you needed to run a successful store. Because Nimbus Control is web-based, the moment we fi nished a process capture workshop, the content was available online for the process improvement team to review and propose adjustments. “This ensured we had one source of the truth and
that every process had been approved before anything got deployed to retail staff. Strong executive support
and high-profi le launch communication to all staff was really important, because the success of this depended entirely on employees not just using How2, but adopting the new ways of working as well.” Deployed to all 7,000 staff across 815 stores in the
UK, How2 had an immediate positive impact. CPW was able to obtain measurable results within three months of deployment. These included the ability for staff able to serve customers faster and more consistently and to conduct staff induction training faster and more easily. Store managers can now also spend less time on reconciliation and reporting and more time on staff leadership.
There has also been a signifi cant reduction of
support calls from stores to head offi ce, which in turn, has released call centre staff for customer-facing duties. And the company’s customer satisfaction NPS increased by 25% in three months. CPW “Pulse” staff surveys showed improved morale was attributable to How2. Moreover, the programme helped contribute £55-million per annum toincreasing revenues. And the fi rst-year return on investment 1,100%. The results were so compelling that Best Buy Europe Group (CPW’s parent company) decided to establish its own centre of excellence and long-term programme called “How2 – Operational Excellence”. Jones concluded: “We recognised that while the customer’s journey often starts instore it often doesn’t end
instore.To improve customer service further we needed to take an end-to- end approach, and look at all customer journeys. So in addition to retail, this covers call centres, supply chain and tech support. During 2010 we’ve adopted exactly the same approach across Best Buy Europe and Geek Squad.” He added: “As we move ahead the existence of standardised processes is enabling the use of more formal approaches like Lean SixSigma [development methodologies] to identify the highest priorities for process improvement at a more granular level. So our ongoing process improvement initiatives are directly targeted at the performance hotspots we identify through our voice of the customer
initiative.Is it working? Yes – we’ve just reported our best fi gures ever – not bad in this market – and our NPS is continuing to climb. “We can correlate this to the usage statistics we’ve
got for How2 – not just page hits but change requests and improvements issued. It’s an ongoing effort – not a project – but that’s to be expected as this is continuous improvement, not a one-time fi x.”
RETAIL TECHNOLOGY JULY/AUGUST 2011
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