Many shared services leaders can quote off the top of their heads figures demonstrating their organisation’s cost savings, reduced headcount, KPIs and SLAs. But how many can tell you accurately how satisfied their customers are with their services? How many even measure this as a key metric?

Last month, at sharedserviceslink.com’s US Summit for Leaders in Finance Shared Services, Bhupesh Patel, Head of P2P Operations at The Coca Cola Company, led a session on what it takes to go from zero to hero in your customer’s eyes.

For Coca Cola, it all began in 2009 when they chose to outsource their procurement and accounts payable functions. Quite quickly they realised it wasn’t working and brought both functions back into. But why wasn’t it working? And what actually did satisfy their customers?

The way forward was clearly to survey the customers, and survey hard.

This wasn’t a painless process, however. As Bhupesh said, “2009 wasn’t a good year to be me; I couldn’t show my face in Europe”. Their survey results that year showed an average of 2.6 out of 5 customer satisfaction rating for North America, and a 2.1 out of 5 rating for Europe.

But by ensuring that the data collected was actionable as well as informative, overall Coca Cola were able to pull this up in just two years to average results of 3.12 and 3.15 for North America and Europe respectively. “When you fix and improve customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction goes up too”.

So what were their key success factors in tackling the elephant in the room that is customer satisfaction?

Plan, plan and plan. Coca Cola conducted extensive research with their customers to find out what how they measured satisfaction, and identify exactly what they saw as important services. It took them around a year to design, implement and execute the first customer satisfaction survey, but as Bhupesh stated, “we’re in this for the long haul. The first year was tough, but eventually you will see your costs reduce. After the initial investment, the second year is just about tweaking the project, and by the third year it’s running on autopilot”.
Invest in full time staff. With an audience full of shared services leaders, everyone understood the sometimes conflicting drivers of cost reduction and customer satisfaction. But as Bhupesh emphasised to our audience “you can’t make progress or continue to drive the project on part time resources”. Coca Cola invested around $1mil in training 1000 staff on core service excellences, and followed this up with half-day training sessions to ensure that it stuck in people’s minds as a change of culture as opposed to a one-time event.
Get your timing right. Make sure you schedule the survey before your annual business planning cycle to allow your customers time to give complete responses. This may sound an obvious strategy, but if you’re bombarding people with surveys or approaching them in the middle of their busy season, they are less likely to take part or give considered answers. “They still have day jobs”, warned Bhupesh. Instead, get to know your customer and integrate your survey with the appropriate upstream and downstream activities.
Tone from the top. As Bhupesh mentioned, by aligning your customer satisfaction aims with the overall shared services strategy, you’re more likely to get senior sponsorship. “Proactive company-wide education about your activities and results will stop the CFO breathing down your neck”.
Stay positive. “Keeping things going is hard work, but when a customer takes time to actually thank you, it’s a motivator”, said Bhupesh. “And when customer satisfaction goes up, so does employee satisfaction. I can finally say it was worth it!”.

Staying in The Good Books: How Coca Cola Drastically Improved Internal Customer Satisfaction