Net promoter score

:In this exclusive presentation, Dave Baker, SVP of Field Services at DirecTV, discusses Customer Experience as being at the forefront of business.

Video Transcript

We’re currently sort of worshiping at the altar of net promoters. So for those of you aren’t familiar with that, this is the current thing for a customer experience I guess. Essentially if you’re not familiar with the metric, if you take people, if you ask people how likely are you to recommend this company to your friends and family. One question survey, if they say nine or 10 they’re promoter. They say six or less, they’re detractor. Seven or eight are neutrals. The net promoter score is the percent of promoters minus the percent of detractors less net promoter score. So from that perspective, our new install and upgrade customers can be pretty positive on that. They started very high score and go down.

From a service call perspective, they actually started a little lower, but they’re unhappy because something broke. So they don’t start quite as positive as the others, and so one of the challenges, so a little different situation there. Now of course the key to operations we measure everything. In fact just from the list you say, gees we measure too much, yeah we do. We can’t help ourselves, we measure everything and try to deal with it. Sure no one else has to do deal with that.

So this is what we’re actually trying to do. This is sort of our – although this is our almost our statement of objective. We’re trying to really start the customers’ right, make a mistake with this for life and what they’ll recommend us? That’s what we’re trying to accomplish. So how do we do it? Well we start by trying to say, what’s the customer want? What do they say and what are they telling us? If you kind of go down the left hand side there, what we’re trying to do is redefine normal and in terms of how do we interact with our customers. What should they expect from us in terms of our operations, our field service operations? And actually all the operations, customer care, even sales. So get it right the first time, you’ll peruse the individual, be respectful of you and your time. That’s really a big deal particularly for us.

I thing about appointment success, how long we’re in the home, those kinds of things, and then show you the value. We sure and this is one of the key sort of–the previously I mentioned a wow moment. We’re trying to be sure our technicians take the time to show the customers something about their system they did know or show them all the cool stuff. You know, I have a very up-to-date in-home system, I probably use 5 to 10% of the capabilities. And arguably I should know, I know how all the stuff works, I just don’t use that much. But there’s a lot of stuff I probably forgot and I don’t think about, we try to get our technicians, hey here’s something you probably didn’t know, here’s something will save you all time, make it easier to use your system. Try to make them feel good about the stuff and about the value that we’re providing.

This is a motherhood and apple pie pretty obvious. You have to have a process for identifying and resolving problems and for escalating issues. Things you know, Office of the President and all those, I’m blessed with getting all the e-mails that go to our CEO complaining about our service or anything else. It’s one of the joys of my life. So how do we approach this? The answer is we’ve decided to start sort of learning lab. And this is a place to run experiments because we don’t know really wasn’t most important to the customer. We wanted to be able to test things in a controlled environment where we could measure everything and see what the results were. And so we established San Diego for a number of reasons, was a market that served us for field operations for learning lab. It has both a metro and very rural areas because that market actually extends halfway to Yuma, Arizona which is a whole different look through to marketwise.

So all the calls that are related to that market go to a particular part of the call center in Denver and we’re now trying to backward integrate into the sales operation in Miami. So that any call any sales calls related to that market go to this particular sales center. The objective is to be able to have full end-to-end integration. So anything that happens with the customer we can figure out why. So if there’s a problem with the work order, if the work order is wrong, anything we can trace it all the way back to the original sales call and say what happened, where was the breakage, what went wrong? And then as we start doing experiments we can try different things say, what does this do to the customer? How does it impact different customer touch points? And this is something we set up, we’ve got a couple of pretty good things that come out of it.

So I’ll talk a little more about these things. Continuous improvement management system is something we’ve been, we’re about 50% rolled out with that. This is really lean management stuff, if you’re not familiar with it. And this is one of several things in here that I have to give a lot of credit to McKinsey Company for. We’ve had McKinsey folks who are working with us for the last couple of years and both in terms of thought leadership, designing the experiments measuring the results, and execution. Most of us think that McKinsey probably is a strategy outfit, they have some very good operations people and a lot of what I’m talking about today has been a result of their assistance, so I have to give them credit what creditors do because I would have tortured them if they’ve gone the other way.

Talk about code a little bit, that’s something the technicians actually came up with. And this is, I’ll define that in a little bit. But this is sort of their value some, hear about the customer, own the problem, deliver with confidence, exceed expectations. But this is actually something that the technicians in the learning lab came up with is sort of what their value system is. And we’ve now developed training around it, rolled it out to 100% of the country and it is having an impact. You will see some of the things coming out.

New Normal experience in the home, enhanced customer education, some things like that. And we’ve also provide, we wanted to be sure the technician start off with some things they wanted. So we got them improved handheld and also gave them a whole lot more information about the customer history on their handheld. So when they walk up the door, they know that the customers called before, what they’ve called about, what the history is, what the last guy did in the home, those kinds of things.

So let’s talk about the journey. Here’s one of the things you look to, try to say okay, what do we actually do and this is you start talking about the huddles and those are all CIMS or continuous improvement management system stuff. Huddles and huddle boards, so we’ve essentially taken the technician meeting which is typically about two days a week where we’ve meet – we have the technician meet with our supervisor or the site manager. Meetings were 30-45 minutes of the site managers talking an hour and it’s a 15-minute stand-up meeting now. If it’s a bad meeting, it might go 17 minutes. There’s a white board with all the facts and data on it, they cover metrics, they cover recognition, and there’s a place there for any issues that have come up in the field. So it’s actually a process for the technicians say, here’s a problem, I’m delegating it to you management, you guys go figure this out and help me solve it.

One of the things we learned is about 80% of the issues that are raised in these things can be solved locally. There is less than 5% of them to get to my level. But it’s an empowerment thing for the technicians. They don’t just have to deal with the problem, they could say, Mr. Supervisor, please help me with this and we put it on and post it on the white board on the huddle board and stays up until they get solved. And so the first real victory is the day when those postage comes off. But as you look on the front line filling, you realized there’s like, just say if you like sausage, you don’t want to see it being made, this is not a beautiful process, okay. This is not flawless, this is not linear, this is not everything sunshine and ponies. It is a process and you have to believe to actually get through it. You go through that, fall line through, not sure what’s going on, frustrated, who are these people, what the hell is a McKinsey, all those kinds of things.

Some of the things that came out, you’ll see the word frontline leadership, field leadership over and over again. Fortunately if you’ve heard me speak here before, we’ve invested a lot in our frontline leadership for the last couple of years on different things. Actually did a couple of sure, almost touchy filly talks here the last couple of years. We’ve invest in a lot of it, turns I was a good plan because that was absolutely essential. One of the things that we did do differently in terms of trying to roll the stuff out, because a lot of change management stuff. The traditional way of doing this is you have a change agent who you flicks in, sprinkles change fairy dust on things, tells everyone how it should be done, and then goes away and then everyone looks confused and says what the hell just happened, what do I do now?

I’m a big believer in that having been through it a few times. And so I decided to actually use my line management as the change agents. So the people actually teaching these classes, teaching how do we do this now, what’s the new method, what are these things, or actually my site managers, and my supervisors, and my regional directors of operations. Now the challenge there is we have to give them some training on facilitation and leadership skills to be able to actually stand in front of a bunch of technicians and actually have these kinds of discussions. That was a risky part but the part that’s not risky is I might worry about the changes ticking because the same people that taught them purely guys are dealing with every day. So the permanence of the changes is the risk that I got rid of, the questions could these guys pull it off? The answer is yeah, they could and they have. Been really proud of them but fortunately, we had a couple of years of investment then before we’re willing to take that chance but it’s worked out for me against the advice of our consultants on that particular point by the way.

So this is the continuous improvement management system. That’s what we were speaking about. So a couple of things, we define what we wanted a week in the life of a supervisor be. So we want them out in the field more, we want them to do or actually show up and do some coaching season. We want them to stick with the job from beginning to the end with the tech a few times a week. So we’re actually defining what their day looks like and we didn’t just tell them, we work this out with them. What do you think your day should look like? So we’re trying to, you know most of our supervisors spend a lot of time trying to deal with dispatch stuff and customer issues, basically running a laptop from Starbucks. That was not my ideal of what a field supervisor should be.

So we’d redefine that, the huddles, these are the standup 15-minute meetings. Show you an example in a few minutes. The coaching sessions, again this is not critique, this is more literally coaching in terms of, you know how can I help you get better. Not so much criticism as, hey I was with you, here’s the stuff in terms of your interaction with the customer, and all that. Let’s try this the next time but the supervisors are actually out there trying to be a positive influence. In the past, you’ll have your sup show up on the job was like a bad day. It isn’t a bad day now, that’s one of the big changes. And issue identification problem resolution again there’s a process for the technicians to raise issues, for them to say hey, here’s problems and we have a well-defined process now so either assign a project team to go work on it or to elevate it to higher level huddles or work groups. So if it can’t be resolved at the supervisor level, it goes up to the site level, to the regional level, to my level to get resolved.

And then process confirmation, this is just being sure that we write down what things we’re supposed to be doing, what this is supposed to look like, and then have people including. I do a lot of site visits, I’ve done 54 so far this year. When I would go to a site visit, you’ll watch the meetings, and they’re doing with the way they’re supposed to. So we be sure that we sort of stick through to the formula we laid out. Now we’ll need to start deviating for that soon just be sure the process evolves over time. But right now we’re trying to be sure, we don’t sort of lose the formula in translation.

And by the way CIMS is the one of the things again, I would never have done that without the influence of McKinsey folks. I was very cynical, I was very skeptical, I was like I’m going to use the parts I like and order the rest when all is said and done I conclude I liked all of it, so just for the record. So obviously, all the parts were intended to reinforce each other. But it comes down to you have a very efficient meeting that the technicians don’t mind. By the way my text were mostly on piece rate, so every meant they spent the meeting is a minute they’re not making money, so that’s why they really, really hated the 30-45 minute, hour long site meetings in the mornings.

Now on the piece rate here, they’ll come in for a 15-minute meeting. They are structured in a way they can have fun with it which we will see here in just a minute. But the ability to raise issues and say hey boss, this is driving me nuts this particular piece of hard work isn’t working right. Put on the board and stays up there until you solve it. It’s now your problem boss, I’m going back to work. The feedback process the empowerment of the technicians, that’s really a pretty big deal. It’s a big deal to them and that’s why they’re willing to buy some of the other parts of it.

Thor Huddle Board

[Music]

Team name is The Avengers. The guy with a Thor Hammer, he runs the meeting. But you’d say, how this has happened? We simply, it’s not that we cause this, we simply allow this. We let them design their team, we let them design their huddle board, have to have a certain data, elements, and so on. But other than that, they could do what they want and they could pick their own team name, their own theme. These guys show The Avengers and so they run their meetings in garb. I’ve attended the meetings, they’re nuts but they enjoy it which is different than anything, I’ve never seen anything like this before. But if you tell me, five years ago when I took this job, oh yeah your technicians will be dressing like The Avengers and having fun on their meetings and say, there’s no way, this is not going to happen. But it has happened and I am really pleased with it and we’ve got engagement for the technicians like not that I’ve seen before. And again this is you know, if on the board you’ll see all the stuff about code, all the metrics, the quality metrics, they have the recognition, the attaboy letters from customers, all those kinds of things in this 15-minute meeting two mornings a week.

So here’s code, again spelled out. Hear about the customer, own the problem, deliver with confidence, exceed expectations. We’ve got a two-day training build around this that we’ve run everybody pretty much everybody in the country through. Again the technicians of the San Diego Learning Lab came up with the stuff themselves. They came up with the acronym, actually somebody said I think we finally, is they did a bunch of stuff. We fiddled around this learning lab for six or eight months before we got any results at all. We’re trying to measure results based on net promoter score. We were flat line, we did nothing for six or eight months. And then started finding some things that had an impact, and one of the guys I think we finally broken the code. They said hey, let’s see if we can make an acronym out of that, that’s where this came from.

Of course you have the reinforcement, recognition, all those kinds of things. Other tools that we provide, you know we do provide the technician’s truck, safety equipment, a complete toolset to be able to do everything, they should have to do in the home. We do provide the Direct TV service for them so they actually understand the product because they get to use it at home, handheld advanced pretty exotic, advanced installation meter, uniforms, those kinds of things. The other thing that I didn’t really focus on the learning lab, so we’re really trying to do the backward integration. Our customer experience team is a corporate team setup to broadcast which words. It’s more of a project management team and their real focus is on the things or cross functional initiatives.

So as we try to integrate across customer care, field service, and sales, they are the ones who are really trying to be sure that we keep all of it woven together. And you know, it’s not hopefully I don’t think it’ll be a permanent part of the organization. Hope not, because they sure do sub-GNA. Oh, sorry, it’s – but they’re the integration of these different projects and different functional areas to be sure that we’re getting the right leverage for the overall customer experience.

And finally, what’s this doing force? All good touchy feeling stuff, sales, fund, what we got for results? Well, the rollout is going pretty well. Technician churn is down. Our customer experience, the net promoter score is going, we’re doing better on repeat services especially the learning lab stuff is leading edge of all the stuff.

But as we roll it, the parts of the country where we’re fully rolled out, we have better scores and the parts we haven’t completely rolled out. So all those kinds of things are looking good and then of course, we’re operations right? You got to have numbers. So there’s a sort of numbers and the trends. So we started this journey in 2012, but you can see we’ve got some pretty good things. But service calls percentage based, there’s a one number on there, it doesn’t look good 2012-2013, you all may recall we had an exceptionally mild winner in 2012. So I actually got to let – that’s probably an unnaturally good number in 2012. The trend is consistent but the – I got a real break in 2012. We didn’t get quite that break this year. But otherwise you know the net promoter score is going up, post calls going up, the productivity is improving, I’m doing a lot more, I’m doing about those same number work orders with a lot fewer technicians.

So things are going pretty well so far. So I guess I’ll say we’re not done yet. We got a lot of work yet to do. So one of my VP says, always more wood to chop, but so far the results of the stuff – the stuff actually seems to be working. I guess we’ll–

[Video Clip]

[All Hands Meeting, Southern California.]

[Technician Safety Meeting, Camarillo, CA]

[Off-Site Supervisor Meeting, El Segundo, CA]

These guys wouldn’t have done this with a gun to their heads. But they’re doing it because they came up with, they like it. This is their way of expressing themselves and they’re enjoying it. So I’m certainly loathed to stop them from doing that. I think I’m on a path with morale and engagement like that I’ve ever seen. So I said I was very cynical going in the CIMS stuff and all that kind of thing, but this is what came out of it and none of us expected that but we’re pretty excited about where we are and I guess where we’re going. So let me open up for questions. All right. Thank you very much.