How We Applied a Currency Exchange into OPS
A method to apply experience techniques inside a company
From small startups to big companies, an Operations team (as the name suggests) focuses its activities on making sure the business is working out. Usually this department is where you can find all of the customer service via a team focused on offering the best experience to all of the company’s customers.
This is what happens here at BeeTech, a startup dedicated to simplify the way people transfer money from Brazil to other countries and vice versa. Everyday each one of us from OPS puts in our full effort to guarantee a good and satisfactory experience and the result shows: our customer success net promoter score is 89 with a bunch of positive feedback praising our service.
This is really gratifying!
But what’s the meaning of such a hard working team that provides great customer service if they don’t feel they’re receiving the same treatment from the workplace?
This is the question our COO, Rubens Yoshida, made in a weekly management meeting in order to know what is going on at the Operations team, ongoing projects, what is working out, and what needs to improve.
In this meeting, the insight came from a suggestion proposed by Yoshida and we saw the opportunity to create concepts that define the Operations department:
- What we do
- How we do it
- Where we want to get to
All of these have the main objective to unite everyone with a clear goal regardless of the job they are doing.
Dynamics
In one of these weekly meetings the other OPS Managers and I came up with the ideas for the concepts. We came together in a meeting room and each one wrote down ten ideas and concepts they believe are indispensable and the definition of OPS.
Continuing this process, we put together the results and using another dynamic we found common ground that was used for the final definition of the concepts.
We put similar ideas together to get to the ideal model and by doing so we got a nice surprise:
There was only one idea discarded from the whole bunch because it was not approved from most of the managers.
This makes clear to me that we are on the right track; our ideas are in tune.
And finally here are the final concepts:
- Commitment — The team that makes it happen. Any task for us is guaranteed to be completed.
- Ownership — We act and think like the owners of the business.
- Collaboration — We work together and build a strong and diverse team. We help others to grow as one.
- Transparency — We are honest, transparent, and we make it right in our actions. To us, trust breeds trust.
- Excellence — We are anxious to defy the status quo every day. We search tirelessly for the efficiency in the ongoing growth of our operation.
- Customer focus — Because our customers love us and we love them. If it is to clarify a doubt or to solve a problem the objective is simple: delight them.
This initiative made a great and positive impact in our routine. These six key concepts started to guide all of the team’s actions from job interviews until our daily tasks. In spite of the good results, we felt there was still something missing…
We needed to let people be able to recognize these guiding concepts in each other’s actions.
Tokens
The solution we came to is an internal activity which involves a frequent dynamic between the members of OPS.
Bee deals with currency, sending and receiving money, so we had an idea: Why not develop our own currency with tokens for this activity?
Karen Veiga, Customer Success, made the token’s design with the OPS concepts and Verônica Kim, CS Manager, did the rest of the production.
This is how Represent #OPS started!
Each member got six tokens, one for each concept, and for a fifteen day period we encouraged them to trade it.
Every one had the opportunity to give a token to somebody they believe represents a certain concept, always taking into account actions, work, attitude, and anything that can be translated as the concept of that very token. In a live document we provided, they wrote why they were giving a token to that person as a way to keep track of the transactions.
Fifteen days later we counted all of it and who got the most tokens for a specific subject was recognized as ambassador of that concept.
All of this was just the starting point, the main idea, but as close as we got to the final results I had some great surprises.
Among the feedback on that document there was a lot of really positive ones to one another and, recognizing that, I knew we could use it and not keep it hidden from the managers. It was clear a improvement in the engagement of the team, way more than I anticipated.
Presentation
On the day of the results disclosure, everyone got together in our space called prainha where usually some gatherings with the whole company happens, hold some events, and casual meetings and this presentation was made there. We went through all of our concepts again and we showed all of the new ambassadors who got most tokens of a certain subject.
We got some nice feedback and used it to highlight the prizing, the author read it to everyone and handed a chocolate prize to the concept ambassador.
Everyone got a small chocolate prize as well with a motivational note.
This whole experience provided us a really positive dynamic, I saw a lot of participation that all of this provided and the best part is it happened naturally.
An important note:
Everyone got tokens, no one was left hanging, with this I can understand that not only we have good synergy and engagement but everyone is focused on their actions and they know their colleagues can see that as well.
We will keep this activity going and now with more tokens and it will be monthly from now on.
After all, it’s clear we’re achieving the results we aimed at, the key concepts are being used every day and most important, they are guiding all the department’s actions.
The team is getting stronger as everyone gets closer to grow as one.
BeeTech not only offers the opportunity to make money exchange easier for our customers, now we have our own currency and its value is given on commitment!
#GoBee
And you can be part of this culture, our team is always growing and you can check out our career options:
