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Bewley's
Delivering superior customer satisfaction and eliminating waste
Improving customer service and bottom line results
A 20% improvement in operational capacity, a new customer care structure to support better customer service, substantial bottom line improvements, increased employee empowerment - all the result of a twelve-week engagement between Bewley's Limited and VISION.
Bewley's, one of the most-loved Irish food brands, is the premier purveyor of coffee, tea and bakery products in Ireland. In addition to its strong domestic business, Bewley's owns a growing international portfolio, which includes a 1,600-tonne roastery, 80 cafes, 520 franchisees and a branded product portfolio in the United States and Europe. The company is renowned for its world-class product portfolio, coffee roasting techniques and its unique "Barista" training academy.
Positioning for growth
Bewley's recently moved to a state-of-the-art EUR11.5 million international headquarters at Northern Cross in Dublin. As part of the move, Bewley's recognised that it had an opportunity to improve customer service and decrease waste by designing the most effective internal processes and procedures.
"We wanted to equip our people to work more successfully in our new manufacturing plant. Our customers enjoy world-class products from Bewley's; our ambition was to offer them world-class customer service too," says Jim Corbett, Managing Director, Bewley's.
Bewley's senior team selected VISION to work with them because they were impressed by their focus, industry expertise and Commitment Based Management methodology. This methodology puts both the customer and the relationships between the people within an organisation at the centre of all process and systems design.
Customer service optimisation
VISION conducted a detailed diagnosis of all Bewley's practices that included interviews with staff and the review and analysis of existing roles, processes and measurements. All activities performed by the sales, accounts and logistics departments were evaluated, which led to the creation of new processes and practices.
Recommendations were made by VISION to introduce a new business architecture, with specified timeframes, responsibilities and deliverables on the project, which were to be implemented by a joint Bewley's/VISION team in eight weeks.
The deliverables would improve the effectiveness of the sales to delivery process and increase customer satisfaction by minimising any errors and waste within the system.
Customer service ethos
To kick off the project a new Customer Service Team was created, a consolidation of the telesales, sales administration and credit control teams. This team would act as a central contact point for all customer interactions and the agents would track and make real-time categorisations of customers' requests including general enquiries, complaints and returns.
VISION set up training workshops and created new scripts for Bewley's agents, which gave them a set of tools for delivering customer satisfaction and a new focus on making customer promises.
The Customer Service Agents hold the responsibility for maintaining contact with customers and proactively manage service requests to completion. The creation of new roles with clearly defined responsibilities and measurements has increased employees' productivity.
VISION also worked with the Despatch team and third party logistics companies to select the most effective delivery routes and to set agreed standards and customer service levels.
To reinforce the emphasis on making and delivering on promises to customers, VISION also partnered with the management team to develop a new reward structure for Area Sales Managers, which reflected the customer service standards that Bewley's offered its customers.
As communication was key to the success of the project, a daily project meeting was set up, which allowed speedy resolution of any project issues and created a collaborative atmosphere for all the team members. A cross-functional team ran a daily returns meeting with the objective of investigating and eliminating the root causes of customer returns and errors throughout the business.
Outstanding results
The results of the new processes introduced by the combined Bewley's/VISION team were outstanding:
- operational capacity increased by 20%
- credit notes issued due to errors were reduced by 8%
- aged debtor days reduced by 15%
- repeat service installation calls reduced by 20%
- retail depot stock variances reduced to 2% or less of total stock levels
Bright future ahead
Bewley's is known for the quality of its products and now the service it offers customers matches the quality of their product offering. Sustainable cultural change has been created in Bewley's.
"The work we did with VISION is critical to the management and operations of the company and to facilitating its future development. VISION's approach really gets to the core of the issue and creates a solution that starts and ends with the customer. They have a practical hands-on style of working and the speed of transformation in our people and our business was impressive. By improving our customer service and eliminating waste in our chain, they have cemented our position as a market leader", says Jim Corbett, Managing Director, Bewley's.
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