Differentiating Ford Retail in a congested marketplace through driving positive employee behaviours

Our award-winning behaviour change programme delivered customer experience excellence for Ford Retail >

OUTCOMES

Ford Retail’s net promoter score, one of the key measures of customer satisfaction the programme set out to address, has increased from 81.3% to 86% for car sales and 66% to 68% for servicing

On the bottom line, through the recession and a difficult trading environment for auto-dealerships Ford Retail grew sales by 8 per cent

Employee turnover has dropped 35% since the programme began; employee satisfaction is up 15%; internal survey response rates are up 72% and the perception of the importance of customer service has increased by 20% across the business

Customers have backed the programme, making over 20,000 nominations for staff who delivered a great customer experience through the ‘You make the moment’ reward and recognition scheme

Every single one of the company’s 3,300 employees has been trained and received either a NVQ or a Ford Retail Diploma in customer service

The programme has won awards year-on-year for efficacy including the CIM Marketing Excellence Awards 2010, National Customer Service Awards 2010, the MCA awards 2011 and the Customer Service Training Network awards 2013

BACKGROUND

Ford Retail is the UK’s largest Ford Dealer Group owned by Ford Motor Company. Formed by amalgamating independent dealerships with widely varying operating operations and cultures, the group encompasses several brands including Dagenham Motors, Polar Ford, Brunel and Heartlands. Ford Retail employs over 3,000 people at 65 sites across the UK and Ireland.

In 2008 Ford Retail’s vision was to create a consistent service culture so that every customer’s experience was a great one. They put employee engagement first-and-foremost and asked Customer Plus to create a behaviour transformation programme that could:

CHALLENGE ✚ Increase Ford Retail’s net

promoter score

✚ Involve the whole company so that everyone gained a nationally recognised customer service qualification

✚ Reduce complaints;

✚ Improve employee morale, satisfaction and engagement

✚ Improve customer retention

SOLUTION

Building a behaviour change programme to drive customer excellence and improve business performance >

✚ Developed the Ford Retail Moments of Truth programme over 15 months of consultation with leadership, employees, and over 500 customers nationwide to establish the values customers expected and wanted and devising an engagement strategy to ensure its success

Spending time to make it work

✚ Delivered a set of six values and a value statement to act as a central pillar of the programme and link training, communications, behaviours and business performance together

Creating a set of values Ford employees believe in

✚ Completed over 7,000 ‘man’ training days, 217 workshops, and 50 launch events throughout the lifetime of the programme to train every staff member to NVQ or Ford Retail Diploma level – Ford Retail is the only auto retailer to hold the Institute of Customer Service TrainingMark for four consecutive years

Training 3,300 employees to the highest standard

✚ Developed a branded programme to reinforce the behaviours and values, rolling out the brand across all collateral from screen savers to training workbooks to mugs, posters and calendars. The collateral kept the behaviours front-of-mind and reinforced their importance to the Ford Retail operating model

Sustaining the behaviours through branded communications

✚ Implemented the Ford Retail ‘You made the moment’ scheme, encouraging customers and employees to acknowledge great customer experience in the moment to retain employees belief in the programme – the scheme has paid out £57,350 in high street vouchers to over 20,000 nominees so far

Reinforcement through a compelling reward and recognition scheme

Contact us:

01332 840422 care@customerplus.co.uk

www.customerplus.co.uk

@CustomerPlus

Customer Plus is an award winning customer experience consultancy.

We believe the world doesn’t have to be difficult. Good customer experiences should be every day, not every so often (if you’re lucky).

Employee engagement – and by extension happy employees – is critical to delivering good customer experiences, with a great experience for customers starting with a great workplace for colleagues.

So we help our customers help their customers (both internal and external) to improve organisational performance.

We provide a full consultancy service to our clients to improve employee engagement, customer experience and organisational performance, comprising:

Clear strategy

Memorable learning

Insightful research

Creative communication

About Customer Plus

WINNER

Customer Service Training

AWARDS 2013