This is an account of my experiment and experience in reducing the customer complaints which posed as a severe headache for the vehicle dealer which I was associated with for two years. When I joined the above said organization, I was totally bewildered by the array of business processes and employee behavior in the company. My prior experiences taught me to serve the customers as kings and we did so. Here, customers were being meted out with the treatment as given in some public distribution shops. Not a single evening went without customer complaints and it was the order of the day. Each and every evening was a nightmare for the employees. Not only evenings, literally all the sales staff were obsessed with finding excuses to be presented before customers in the evening. Initially, I too have to take part in the process of finding excuses to fool the customers late in the evening. But, I was aware of the fact that if things were not controlled, it would spin out of our hands. The business process in the vehicle dealership consisted of booking a vehicle by paying an advance amount and submitting the documents to the finance provider for loan if it’s a loan purchase. After the loan is approved and the amount is disbursed to the dealer, the customer has to pay the balance amount and the allotted vehicle is billed and sent for registration with the required documents. After the registration the vehicle is fitted with accessories as required by the customer by the pre delivery inspection team who arranges the vehicle for the final delivery to the customer. This process is much similar in almost all dealerships. The real problem with the said dealership was that it took more than two weeks to deliver a new vehicle after receiving the payment for the vehicle. Normally it would take two to three days. I will summarize the problem areas which I learnt through observation of the situation.
1. The problem started with the allotment staff who used to allot vehicles to his notions. Thus there was a delay caused in the allotment process.
2. The customer file with allotted vehicle chassis number along with necessary registration documents would be sent to the billing section. Here, again the files were getting held because of the attitude of the billing staff.
3. After the vehicle was billed it would be sent for registration process, but, here the registration procedures and processes were contributing much to the delay in the final delivery for the ego and attitude of the registration staff.
4. There were other issues in the processes too, but compared to the above said issues they were less severe.
Solution To The Problem
Once the issues and the problems were learnt in detail, the causes contributing to the problems, I got convinced that it cannot be solved in part. The entire system was replete with bottlenecks and each and every next process in the system was delaying the end result. With few small changes in the workflow processes, I planned to observe “zero complaints days” for two days where all the files with full payment received would be sent to the registration paper works after allotment and billing. The very next day the vehicle would be registered and fitted with accessories to be delivered the same day or the next day. I set two conditions under which a file could be withheld from further processing. One condition to withhold the files fro m processing was payment not received and the other condition was non-availability of the vehicle. The aim of the observance days was to make the staff believe that delivery of a vehicle was possible within two days after receiving payments.
As expected, with some initial starting trouble, it worked out. Till noon on the first day, nothing happened, but my close supervision and well intended drive, set the things in motion. The two days taught the staff that it was possible to deliver a vehicle in two days after receiving the payment. After a week thereafter, I planned to observe a “zero complaints week” with the same conditions. I also instructed the staff to give immediate feedback to the concerned executives about any issues which would hinder the vehicle delivery to the customer on the committed date. It turned out to be a successful week with the number of customer complaints related to delayed vehicle delivery coming down drastically. It also helped me to improve the morale of the staff. On both the “observance programmes”, I had to be much focused and had to micro manage each and every process and people, but as the days went I was able to relax the degree and extent of supervision. Gaining more positive results from the two programmes, I again planned a “zero complaint fortnight”. This time the egoistic staff reacted with their usual delaying tactics and with some reprimand and internal transfers the system was set free of unwarranted ego issues and the resultant work delays. As the days passed, the way the staff were working during those “observance” days became a habit of them. Once it became the working habit, it continuously yielded positive results for the company.
This was much more than a business process reengineering. Because it involved not only changes in the processes but also conditioning the attitude of the people. This could not have happened by any other means. Be it a training programme or a counselling programme or any other programmes aimed at improving the overall performance of the organization. I believe, this type of programmes can be employed in a variety of situations and across industries, where the way things happens need to be changed or improved. But, the outcome will be wholly dependent on the level and quality of leadership and the extent of support from the top management.
