The Challenge: Increased competition and a demand for greater service from clients.

The Solution: Drive efficiencies in the organization while utilizing Raving Fans service to enhance the company’s value proposition and create a clearly differentiated service experience.

The Results: Dramatic improvements in profitability, cash flow, colleague retention, and customer satisfaction.

In the world of global relocation, Weichert Relocation Resources Inc. (WRRI) leads the way in providing turnkey workforce mobility solutions to its clients. As one of the world’s largest relocation and assignment management companies, with more than 30 years of experience and innovation, WRRI offers a broad portfolio of services, extensive global resources, and comprehensive capabilities, delivered via integrated technology.

But recent changes in the relocation industry, ongoing cost and pricing pressures, clients requesting more service at lower costs, and the prospect of dwindling revenue caused WRRI to take a hard look at its internal workings and structure. Ultimately, the organization knew it needed to shore up its strengths and further define its value proposition in order to remain competitive.

When a targeted diagnosis of the company revealed that customers believed that WRRI did everything well but nothing exceptionally well, the organization was convinced that driving efficiencies and differentiating its competitive advantage through service was imperative.

The diagnosis also revealed that customers were evaluating WRRI’s customer experience not against the organization’s competitors but against the best service providers in all industries. And, in order to deliver a world-class service experience, WRRI needed to benchmark and emulate organizations such as Disney, USAA, and Williams-Sonoma—best-in-class examples of customer service.

Developing a Multi-level and Balanced Solution

Led by President Aram Minnetian, the organization chose The Ken Blanchard Companies^® as a partner to assist them in creating a customer service culture that would stand on its own. Minnetian had confidence in the strategic nature of Blanchard’s solutions, their ability to create impact and deliver on ROI, and the enormously positive brand name associated with Ken and the Raving Fans philosophy and skills.

“Most importantly,” says Minnetian, “Blanchard positioned itself as a true business partner—a strategic player that could add value, improve our value proposition, and promote a high performance culture.”

In the organization’s favor was the fact that WRRI’s colleague base embraced change and had the desire to be a truly great company. Further, the organization already had a culture of engaging in constructive debate and soliciting feedback. WRRI began by implementing the Balanced Scorecard assessment, which focused on learning and growth, financial fitness, business process, and the customer perspective. A corporate scorecard was created to focus on 12 specific goals. Further alignment was created by developing scorecards for departments and individual colleagues with the primary objective of creating long-term growth in cash flow and net income.

Building upon these strengths, WRRI and Blanchard designed a process that linked the Balanced Scorecard assessment and competencies to Blanchard’s Situational Leadership^® II and Situational Self Leadership programs, resulting in the Balanced Leadership™ development process. The process focused on collaborative goal setting, Partnering for Performance, and succeeding in a scorecard environment to support a transition to a culture of performance management with a goal of attracting and retaining top talent.

Senior and mid-level managers were trained in the concepts, which assisted with the process of identifying clear goals and ensuring that leaders and colleagues were working on the things that would create alignment and drive the organization’s core initiatives.

Additionally, the executive team went through the Raving Fans process and is still heavily involved in cascading it throughout the organization. Using the principles of Raving Fans, WRRI began discovering what its customers wanted, delivering plus one service, and celebrating successes. The core curriculum included the principles of Raving Fans with additional skill building in needs analysis, expectation setting, problem management, and service recovery.

Raving Fans has become institutionalized into nearly every aspect of WRRI’s business, from its Web site to the orientation of new associates to both individual and organizational scorecard requirements. It is now so strongly infused into the culture that prospects and clients are told up front that they will be asked to measure interactions with the WRRI’s team based on whether or not they have received Raving Fans service.

Results

WRRI’s diligence and focus on customer service has earned them tremendous results, and the company has seen satisfaction scores improve as well. In addition, the organization has created a solid platform for skill development, career growth, and career pathing. Overall, they report being very pleased with the business impact that Raving Fans and Situational Leadership^® II is making in the organization and feel that WRRI now has a discernable value proposition as a leader in customer service and performance management. “The real power in Raving Fans,” says Minnetian, “is people have told us that when they hear Raving Fans in our industry, they immediately think of WRRI. That mindshare is priceless.”

Market Results

WRRI wanted to create a culture that attracted and retained the best and the brightest while achieving long-term growth in cash flow and net income. Market results the past two years have been tremendous including:

• A 65% increase in corporate housing volumes
• A 50% improvement in cash flow
• A 32% increase in mortgage volumes
• A 25% improvement in profitability
• A 5% improvement in “key colleague” retention
• A 3% improvement in colleague satisfaction
• Tangible improvements in 11 of 12 key Corporate Scorecard goals

Customer Results

WRRI wanted to redefine service in the relocation industry by setting a new service standard and benchmarking against other world-class service providers. Tangible service improvements include the following:

• A 20% improvement in customer survey response rates
• A 2% improvement in overall customer satisfaction
• A 38% increase in the number of customers who consider themselves Raving Fans (34% vs. 72%)