Turning front-line staff into key agents of change
Rentokil Pest Control has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the UK’s longest established and best known pest control service providers.
Yet although the business had always been reasonably successful in terms of bottom-line results, these had started to weaken; they were increasingly being delivered at a heavy cost to the business through lack of development and consequent inability to retain market share. As a result a new MD was installed and, following his initial six-month review, a new business strategy was initiated. A key element of this involved refocusing the business along much more customer-centric lines, and this in turn required a radical change in the way the RPC’s proposition was delivered to the customer (a change actively supported and facilitated by Wingivers’ work).
One of the first pieces of advice the new MD received on arrival was “Don’t talk to the technicians (i.e. the customer-facing staff) as they’re always moaning.” It turned out that this ‘advice’ was symptomatic of the malaise that needed addressing.
So one of the first practical instances of change was to ensure that front-line staff had the right tools for the job, were properly incentivised through performance-related pay and, crucially, were motivated to work differently. This was because they had been earmarked as potential ‘customer champions’ – the people who, in practice, were going to transform service expectations and delivery, and thus play a vital role in achieving the company’s turnround.
Following Wingivers’ work on RPC’s customer proposition, ‘sales’ was redefined as a key element of service. (This meant that front-line technicians were encouraged to identify specific customer problems in a proactive way and resolve them there and then, while salespeople were refocused to consider sales as part of a service to retain the customer, rather than an exclusively short-term gain.)
To facilitate the deployment of front-line staff as a key resource in terms of embodying the new customer proposition and fulfilling its delivery, Wingivers worked closely with a cross-section of staff to develop a set of orientation workshops for the entire workforce, the goal of which would be to get everyone in the company talking about the concept of how to deliver outstanding service to customers.
RPC’s front-line staff played primary roles in designing and running these events, which were staged a dozen times in different UK locations over the course of a single week. All the workshops proved to be highly interactive and collaborative, and – importantly – respected the contributions of everyone involved (another clear shift away from the previous top-down culture). This activity played a vital part in defining and embedding RPC’s new customer-centric approach across the organisation.