Customer experience development


My experience at KBR, with US business “customer is king” culture, showed me that the UK engineering, construction and property industries have little customer service culture. Almost nobody in these industries receives any training in customer care concepts, so naturally, the school of hard knocks fills this training void, with very mixed and generally poor results – for the customer at least.

 

Whilst at KBR, I was fortunate to be selected to attend a year-long strategic development course, the Halliburton President’s Seminar, as just 1 of 20 people from a 100,000 strong group. During the course, I researched and delivered a major customer service excellence project. The learnings from that experience were valuable and have since heavily influenced my approach.


At Pearce, I led the development of a customer experience training and operational programme intended to dramatically alter Pearce’s customer experience awareness and results, working with Sidona Group. “Before” and “after” customer feedback assessed by Sidona showed that the intended outcome was achieved, with a huge feedback shift between 2006 when the programme started and 2009 – substantially coinciding with the near-trebling of Pearce’s turnover. Quite apart from the positive results of the initiative, the training programme itself won a 2010 National Training Award.

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Much of this growth was achieved from the major retailers, who are widely recognised amongst the most challenging customers of the construction industry. Our customer experience initiative enabled us to both grow our workload in existing workstreams for these customers, as well as expanding our activities into new workstream areas, such as extensions and new store construction.

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