CASE STUDY

Succeeding with global customer service in turbulent waters

3

Companies

Merging three companies into one globally aligned customer service operating model.

15+

Locations

Driving global alignment across markets and regions in customer service.

1

Global operating model

Defining one way of working for customer service to ensure a consistently good customer experience.

“With competencies to drive both strategy and implementation, NORTH has been a valuable partner in our journey towards one operating model.”

— Martin Gaard Christiansen, Global CCO, Unifeeder Feeder Division.

Unifeeder's situation & challenges

Unifeeder has become one of the largest feeder operators in the world and plays a critical role as a facilitator of customers’ supply chains for global and regional trade. To build on its competitive position, Unifeeder has in recent years expanded its geographical reach with multiple acquisitions and made it a strategic priority to strengthen customer partnerships by putting the customer experience at the centre of ways of working.

Unifeeder’s customer service organisation was challenged for two reasons:

Heavy workloads and missing tools to obtain better visibility of tasks at hand and to use customer data insights to improve workflow and customer experience.
An imminent integration of 10+ new offices required a global operating model aligned across offices and regions to support scale and efficiency.

Unifeeder partnered with NORTH to establish a global operating model for customer service by assessing regional differences across the organisation, driving global alignment, and identifying levers to support its strategic ambitions on growth and customer satisfaction.

“ Getting buy-in for one globally aligned operating model for Customer Service is important for us to drive scale efficiency and an improved customer experience.”

— Martin Gaard Christiansen, Global CCO, Unifeeder Feeder Division

Solution

Three phases towards global alignment

Phase 1: Understand current ways of working and customer sensitivity to different service needs

NORTH executed a global analysis of current organisational structures, service agreements, processes, and technology landscape to identify regional differences and challenges. To ensure customer centricity in the operating model design NORTH also collected insights on customer needs and preferences.

Phase 2: Design one customer service model & develop roadmap of initiatives

NORTH facilitated global alignment between regional decision-makers on key operating model components. With the customer experience in focus, the buy-in from the customer-facing employees was ensured from project start to end.

As a final step before implementation, NORTH translated global ambitions into a roadmap of prioritised initiatives with the goal of supporting front-line employees in their customer interactions while enabling management to do root-cause analysis and to continuously improve the global operating model.

Phase 3: Implement key customer service processes

NORTH implemented four critical customer service processes enabling Unifeeder to effectively handle customer interactions in the same way globally, track performance in real-time, collect and react on customer feedback as well as manage both small and large global operating model optimisations:

Case management was rolled out globally, enabling service agents to handle customer interactions with approximately 1.000.000 e-mails and 300.000 cases on an annual basis.
Organisation-wide performance management was implemented, including global KPIs and target setting, enabling commercial and service management to track performance and perform insightful improvements on a global, regional and office level.
Feedback management and NPS tracking were established to receive feedback from customers based on their recent interactions with Unifeeder.
A business improvement process was implemented to ensure continued global alignment and future improvement of the newly established customer service operating model.