Does the Org Chart change the customer experience?
The Problem
The problem is; With many levels of leadership it takes too long to get communications to the front line staff which has deteriorated the customer experience.
Who is Involved?
Customers, front line staff, branch leaders, middle management leaders, and senior management are all stakeholders.
What is the environment?
Currently there is high anxiety in front line staff trying to meet customer needs with out success.
Customers are frustrated at the lack of service and inability to talk to all lines of business in the branch locations.
Leadership of all lines of business are frustrated that messaging is not being adhered to.
Messaging to location front lines staff differs between departments and lines of business.
Animosity prevalent between teams, departments, and leadership groups.
A reduction of front line people due to staffing shortages.
Reframing the problem
What will change if a solution is successful?
Messaging will be consistent to front line staff.
A more direct line of communication to front line staff will exist.
Employee engagement would increase.
What 3 things would guarantee failure?
Forgetting about the customer completely would ensure failure.
Resorting to no communication at all would guarantee failure.
Closing the doors to branch locations entirely would guarantee failure.
How might questions?
How might we change the communication path to the front line staff?
How might we reduce the levels of leadership?
How might we create a consistent messaging?
How might we improve the employee engagement?
How might we exceed the customer experience?
How might we empower our front line staff?
How might we meet or exceed the customer expectations on visiting the local branch?
How might we utilize in branch leaders
How might we improve the line of business collaboration?
How might we improve the specialization?
How might we meet the customers expectations of timely service?
The best question to address this situation is “How might we reduce the levels of Leadership? First we need to have a view of the organizational chart so understand what the flow consists of.
Look at the Org Chart
Personal lines –
· CEO — Head of PL — VP — Director — Sales & Service Leader (multiple locations) — location Leader — Front line
Commercial Lines
· CEO — Head of CL — VP — Director(Service) & Director (Sales)- Manager (Sales) & Manager (Service) — Team lead (Service) — Frontline Staff.
Human Centered Design — Empathy — End Users/Customers
The human centered design empathy mapping was done from both the customer and front line staff perspective to see, feel and hear what they are experiencing as a result of the messaging from leaders to the front-line staff.
Empathy mapping — Customers
Customers want to deal locally with their brokers that they have always dealt with and are unable to see their farm (WEB) or Commercial broker as they no longer are in the office.
Clients are being redirected to call a 1–800 number for service and are not able to deal with us the way they want to.
Customers are frustrated, upset and angry about new way of doing business that doesn’t support their needs.
Customers are not getting called back or are having to call 3- 4 times.
Service times are longer than before specialization was put in place and they no longer get to talk to the brokers that they want to.
Customers visit local branches to talk to their broker who may or may not be in the locations due to specialization restructure only to find that there is no one there to help them.
Customers redirected to call center, another branch location via phone or email with an unsatisfactory end result.
Customers are being told by tenure front-line staff that with the new specialization they can no longer attend to all their needs.
Customers feel that they no longer matter and that no one wants to do their job.
Empathy mapping — Front-Line Staff
Front line staff are trying to assist clients from all lines of business in branch locations but not all lines of business are in the branch. Commercial lines works from home or are in locations but unavailable to the customer.
Front line staff that are in branch locations have been given messaging from many different leaders who are not necessarily their direct leader on how to deal with customers wanting to talk a department unavailable.
The processes put in place or being messaged to the front line are not working well leaving them feeling frustrated.
Front line staff are frustrated with different protocols and processes to help the client.
Front line Commercial staff that worked directly with their clients needs are now told that they are only to service clients from behind the scenes and are not give the customer experience that they were used to providing.
Front line staff that were cross trained to work all lines of business are now told that they can no longer assist the customer with all their needs and must stay in their own line of business.
Front line staff don’t know who or where to send customer calls as each leader gives them different directions.
Front line staff are not clearly informed of new processes or the processes don’t always work.
The COVID pandemic sent all sales people home to mitigate numbers in locations — now those sales people aren’t in the branches to support customer needs and there is no plan to bring them back.
Specialized business is not all in the office; staff in the office are either personal lines staff with no commercial presence or with limited commercial presence.
Leadership doesn’t want the sales people in the branches as they want to see them out selling and not servicing existing clients.
Newly hired staff are not trained in both commercial lines and personal lines.
Their NPS scores and reviews are low and negative due to poor customer experience.
Empathy mapping — Leadership
CEO gives direction to the heads of the departments to be driven down to the front-line however it either takes way too long to get there or is never delivered.
Heads of the department task their VP’s and Directors to deliver the message to their direct reports.
Leadership from director level to location manager give direction mapping messaging to align with their department — Executive leadership believes the messaging should be the same.
Executive leadership (VP & Above) gives messaging on how to support the customers but what customers are telling them isn’t the same as what the direction was given.
Executive leadership (VP and above) feel that due to the many layers of leadership it takes too long to be delivered or is not delivered in a timely fashion.
Revisit the problem
Through the empathy mapping I revisited the problem and have found the problem is that the org chart for the company needs to be narrowed.
Who is Involved?
Customers, front line staff, branch leaders, middle management leaders, and senior management are all stakeholders.
What is the environment?
Currently there is anxiety in the leadership level.
All levels of leadership are trying to validate their role and positions.
Their uncertainty as to what the correct messaging should be.
Animosity between lines of business teams exists creating a tense environment in locations.
COVID and the great resignation era has created staffing shortages in most locations.
Clusters (group of locations) work as one team in Personal Lines supporting locations where staffing is minimal
Messaging to location front lines staff from the leaders in Personal Lines differs from messaging in Commercial Lines.
What would Change if a solution was successful?
Communication would have a more direct consistent route to the frontline.
What 3 things would guarantee failure?
Breaking down the departments to smaller units with more leaders would break the communication down even further guaranteeing failure.
Removing all communication would guarantee failure.
Making no changes at all to support the end users would guarantee failure.
Additional -How might we questions
How might we change the current structure?
Summary
This is not a small problem that could be resolved in a short amount of time. There are several similar but different problems that should be considered, worked on simultaneously, revisited, and overlapped to ensure that the customer end user is being kept in mind. Simply eliminating, or reducing a level of leadership is not the only problem that is affecting the messaging to the front-line and ultimately the customer.
References:
Kris Hans. What’s your problem worksheet & reframe your problem worksheet
Cheryl Robinson, Corporate Organization chart, created June 15, 2022. Retrieved June 17, 2022
Unveiling an Underappreciated Key to Creativity: Using detail stepping to power
new insights. Posted Apr 02, 2016.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-innovating-minds/201604/unveiling-underappreciated-key-creativity
Inside Creativity: Charting innovation as it happens. Posted Dec 02, 2015.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-innovating-minds/201512/inside-creativity
Girling, Rob, and Emilia Palaveeva. 2017. “Beyond The Cult Of Human-Centered Design.” Fast Company. November 3. https://www.fastcompany.com/90149212/beyond-the-cult-of-human-centered-design.
Gray, Dave. 2018. “Updated Empathy Map Canvas.” Medium. The XPLANE Collection. July 21. https://medium.com/the-xplane-collection/updated-empathy-map-canvas-46df22df3c8a.
