Bouygues Construction: A lack of customer-related performance indicators
Objectif :
The company’s assessment of its customer culture during the Cos Company® diagnostic:
In this company, the customer is absent from the main performance indicators used by teams and management. The sales and profitability KPIs for ‘business’ are closely observed, but never those relating to customers (satisfaction, expectations, etc.).
Another sign that says a lot about what the teams have in mind: they talk about ‘projects’ and everything is referred to by the name of the ‘project’… the customer is never mentioned! It’s not just a detail, it’s a symptom of day-to-day practices: the very name of the customer is virtually absent from discussions.
Finally, when we do think about the customer, it’s usually in terms of a power struggle (‘if we don’t manage the customer, he’s going to win’) and commercial cynicism is widespread, sometimes with deliberate concealment on the part of sales staff to encourage additional billing at a later date when the customer discovers a ‘new’ problem.
Mission :
Actions taken internally following the Cos Company® diagnosis:
The voice of the customer has been more widely and systematically disseminated: customer surveys and customer service feedback are now shared at every management meeting.
The company has embarked on a customer journey project to reconnect the sales and works teams with customer expectations. ‘In concrete terms, we’ve done away with our old methods during project kick-offs: instead of making it a purely technical point, we ask the customer to present his project, his intentions and what he expects in terms of usage’.
Until now, the 3 teams – Sales, Works and After Sales – worked sequentially, with a lack of transparency between the teams. This dissatisfied customers and contributed to the idea that we were ‘business’ and ‘production’ oriented. From now on, the 3 business lines will work in overlapping fashion, so that the relationship between them runs more smoothly, immediately generating greater customer satisfaction.
Finally, all these changes have been made possible by local management, with the creation of regional and subsidiary/subsidiary customer culture referents, supported by a multi-skilled team whose mission is to promote customer culture on a daily basis.
Résultats :
In the space of two years, the company’s customer culture has been radically transformed. A new COS Company® survey conducted at the end of 2021 showed that the company’s customer culture had been boosted and that employees’ practices had become more customer-oriented:
The company’s COS Company® score rose by 10 points, a sign that employees on the whole perceived a new dynamic and real transformations within the organisation.
Another symbol of a change in culture: on average, individual levels of customer orientation have also risen: this is true of all employees, and it’s even truer for managers!
The corporate culture has changed, and so have the ways in which our teams think. Proof, if proof were needed, that when action is taken, attitudes really do change – in favour of the customer.
Témoignage
Little by little we moved from a project culture to a customer culture, which wasn’t easy. It was not easy. It helped me to de-silo. When you think about a project, you have a sales phase, a production phase and a post-production phase, but when you think about the customer journey, that’s not how things work at all. You have someone who you trust at the beginning to do a project, you live a project and the real experience of the project starts when you deliver what he puts into the building, and all you want to do at that point is say basta. So by changing our processes, we’ve become aware of this and we’ve changed the role of the sales person, the works… There’s a lot more interaction between all our internal teams now.