We work in individual businesses, usually in the private sector to bring about successful organisational change. This can involve a combination of interventions:
- leadership development, coaching and mentoring with teams and individuals at every level
- organisation and process redesign
- developing transformational business strategy
- often we use strategic customer feedback programmes to help create impetus for change
“They were brilliant, the way they got their heads around our company and products so quickly, delightful to work with, got on with it and produced an excellent analysis of what our customers say and what we should do about it. Thank you very much.”
Customer – IT company
Strategic customer research
We have undertaken “intelligent customer feedback” projects for over 50 companies. The purpose is to directly improve performance by obtaining in-depth feedback from key customers (and optionally, former customers). The key is to use that feedback to prepare the ground for change and improvement in the business. We obtain strategic feedback on issues such as service delivery, performance relative to competitors and staff skills. Unlike most feedback programmes, our projects deal with business level issues that are critical to both customers and supplier. We find motivation to respond among staff and managers is high because it is key customers who are at the centre of the programme – and they pay for the wages!
Our support for change leaders can take many other forms:
- Mentoring of Directors and senior managers so they provide a smooth succession when the current owners/MD move on.
- Coaching of key individuals so they enhance their management of staff and personal performance.
- Facilitation of workgroups so that they enhance delivery of major projects, create performance improvement and improve service delivery.
- Top team development Working with Boards and management teams to enhance their teamworking processes, governance and skills.
- Performance improvement projects include organisation re-design, process mapping and improvement and enhancing business planning and delivery.
- Project management Assignments range from training in project management and evaluation skills, to consultancy support for the delivery of major projects.
Click to download a Leading through change 2 page article
Strategic Customer Feedback
Few organisations listen hard enough to their customers and as a result great opportunities to improve performance are lost. These opportunities are often largest in organisations (or autonomous business units) of a manageable size, around 250 employees or fewer. This is because their best customers will know most parts of the supplier organisation well, they probably deal with Directors, sales staff, customer-facing staff and technical specialists. If anyone is well placed to suggest to an organisation how they can improve, it is the best customers of such businesses.
Click to download a Strategic customer feedback article