LEAN review to deliver £1.95M in benefits

Ross Bern - 01/12/2023

Cash is King for all Utility companies and increasing Revenue is the fastest way to improve your cash position.

We identified £1.95m of benefits opportunity within the Domestic Sales function of a UK wide fuel distributor as part of a revenue growth programme. Without the need for any technology investment, we delivered:

• Improved call abandonment rate by 13%


• Reduced failure demand by 20%


• Improved FCR by 15% without adding to AHT


• Equivalent of 8 FTE released through capacity creation

Background

We were engaged by a UK wide fuel distributor to support their Domestic Sales function to assess their readiness for winter. Cold temperatures historically increased customer contact volumes for our client across all channels, voice and digital. Managing the demand had proven difficult in previous years with a high call abandonment rate leading to poor customer experience, missed sales opportunities and a challenging working environment for the team.

What did we do?

We completed an initial deep-dive into the operation and designed data and people workstreams to deliver improved customer experience and to mitigate the factors that were leading to missed sales opportunities. Within the data workstream, we redesigned the call prioritisation and routing strategy, which significantly increased call answer rate without requiring additional headcount. The operational reporting was overhauled to focus on the key metrics to drive quality and conversions.

As our team is born from operations, the focus of the people workstream was to deliver the operational toolkit to enable the team to self-manage. Our consultancy approach is always to upskill and we operate with full transparency in terms of our toolkit and analysis. We worked closely with all the People Managers to ensure they were proficient in the toolkit.

We also designed and delivered bespoke Sales training using our Commitment based training approach that is grounded in the theories of Speech Acts, Language Action and commitment based management. This was delivered to the full function over 3 sites and 100% of the employees trained confirmed that the new approach would result in an improved customer experience, leading to better sales conversations.

The Clyde Ventures Approach

Our approach is to move with pace and to take the team on the journey with us. We delivered the full scope of the Data and People workstreams within an 8 week period with measurable benefits delivered from week 3 onwards.

The Sales function has a full toolkit delivered to support them to manage peak demand with a better customer experience this year to support the delivery of the sales targets and margins.

The client recognised that not only did we deliver the full scope on time and within budget, that everyone we came into contact with benefited from our decades of operational experience.

If you want to discuss how our approach can help you, please contact Graham Mathie or Ross Bern.