Graeme was initially engaged to un-stick a particularly sensitive pay deal with the trade union and Unite, which had been in negotiations for over a year. Gaining representatives’ trust through informal and personal meetings, he was quickly able to forge an agreement that was agreed by 80% of members, saving £4m across the group.
Due to this success he was tasked with creating and managing a completely new Residential team, encompassing the entire customer care operation from billing operations, complaints and correspondence to smart metering. This was radical change delivered in an ex-public sector organisation with minimal IT budget; balancing the new ways of working with the existing culture was a stiff challenge.
Furthermore, the efficiency savings he was asked for required the closure of an existing site. After managing this to a successful conclusion, he then focused on creating a complete organisational design for the new operation, including management structure, reporting lines and new ways of working. Graeme also designed and embedded a standardised management framework that was rolled out initially across the five sites and then group-wide, supporting better performance management and a new bonus scheme. Until his intervention, there was no way to identify what a ‘good day’ looked like in terms of productivity and employees were unaware of how they were performing against colleagues. The new framework gave them more ownership of their careers and significantly increased engagement, driving some incredible results such as:
- Reduced backlogs from 300k to 36k
- £37m reduction in held charges
- Increased sales 3.4k to 5.3k per week
- £77m cash collected against £68m target
- Shrinkage reduced from 37% to 29%
- Complaints to resolution reduced from 77 days to 34
Identifying an opportunity to measure improvements in customer service and employee engagement, Graeme also introduced the Net Promoter Scoring system. Again, he realised some impressive results: the Employee NPS score increased from -37 to -5 over 6 months while the Customer score increased from -13 to +18 over the same period.
Graeme has now completed this delivery, coming in £750k under budget and 20% over sales target. This was all achieved in just 12 months, across five sites involving 2,500 people.
