❤️Processes: A Haiku
Why build strong systems? 🏋️♀️
Surprise and challenge arrive. ❄️🥶🌨
We flex, never sweat. 💪
-Nadine West
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This month we want to take a moment to celebrate our successes.🥁🥁🥁
Both of which are attributable to having invested in great processes.
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A Case Study: Why We Have No Ego When We Have To Fix Things. And Lots Of Pride When We Methodically, Thoughtfully, Incrementally Re-Build Them
Customer Service has had a major turn around story.
This summer, we had a backlog of 80,000 emails (we receive 15,000-20,000 a week). 🚨🕵️♀️🚨🕵️♀️🚨🕵️♀️🚨
That backlog created delays that made customers not happy.
Customers gave us a happiness score of 66 (out of 100). Not. Happy.😥💔😥💔😥💔
It was clear, our processes had broken down (or were never there).
We spent 2 months digging into every single aspect of Customer Service.
We humbly threw out what didn’t work (lots!), untangled problems to unearth and fix root causes, and improved the good to make it great.
Change didn’t happen overnight. It was methodical, thoughtful, steady progress. Making each day better than the one before.
Thanks to robust processes with maniacal compliance and accountability, we have no backlog, and CUSTOMERS ARE NOW SO HAPPY! 84 now! Huge win!
Enormous shout out to the fearless leadership of Carl, Jaymie, Janelle, Janis, Jirces, KC, Marianne, Zarah!
You can see what our customers think about how well our incredible customer service agents run these processes here. This is just the shouts from ONE. SINGLE. DAY!!!!
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A Case Study: Emergencies Reinforce Why We Invest Obsessively In Great Processes
The problem:
It snowed. A lot. In Texas.
For a whole week in February:
- Associates didn’t have food/water/electricity/gas.
- The warehouse had no power or water.
Time to get things done! And fast!
Thank goodness we have great systems in place, so when it comes time to flex, and grow by 50% overnight, we can!
Capture
- 125 associates need to be fed, hydrated, and warmed.
- 15,000 customers did not get their shipments (that’s 140,000 units).
Clarify
- Get associates safe.
- Catch up on the missed week’s shipments.
- While also keeping up with current shipments.
- Do it in 2 weeks.
- Increase capacity by 50%, overnight.
Organize
- Hire 30 people, churn 10. In 5 days.
Review
- Realized current layout, with covid precautions, has an upper limit of 42,000 outbound units a day.
Engage
- Use the systems to focus on the important stuff (hiring, churning, maniacal process compliance, team work).
- Get it done.
Sidney said he’d be drop-jawed if we caught up in 2 weeks.
Abby, Stephanie, Rachel, Alendy, Christina, Laura, Damarys, Kineta, Benjamin, and Theo heard the challenge. And said, I’ll do you one better.
12 days later we were back to baseline.
#NeverBetAgainstThe(Ware)House
#NeverBetAgainstNW
