RAJA: Customer Service of the Year 2017!

Last night I had the honour of receiving the 2017 Customer Service of the Year award for the RAJA team (Business Supplies & Equipment category). Inevitably, I was asked “How did we manage to unite the teams?”

This morning I wanted to share with you our success factors in this great challenge.

Raising awareness throughout the company

Like every year, before the challenge, working groups bringing together departments as diverse as accounting, the database, the web and the Customer Relations Centre of course, thought together about how they could further improve customer satisfaction. This is an approach that is part of the continuous improvement process. (boxes given to all employees participating in the launch)

To launch the challenge, we shot an in-house video. Each team wrote its own script to illustrate how it would take part in the challenge. The result: a video full of energy, smiles and the will to win!

(the video was broadcast internally to all the teams via Workplace by Facebook).

This spontaneity and initiative will be very important all along the way to the Pavillon d’Armenonville yesterday.

We have created a project group on the internal social network(Workplace by Facebook, formerly Facebook@Work) to communicate all our initiatives.

At this stage, it should be pointed out that we are working on fertile ground: Daniel Kapel-Moscovici, our president, and before her, her mother, the founder of the RAJA group, have made customer satisfaction their battle horse.

1. our entire organisation is customer-oriented,
2. internal events for our customers are organised every year,
3. our charitable actions are open to our customers so that they can join us in a responsible and civic approach (we are soon launching our 3rd Women & Environment campaign)
4. All our internal communications (from team meetings to the executive committee) stress the importance of customer satisfaction.

My job is therefore less about evangelising than about coordinating goodwill.

Anchoring the team’s motivation

Why do this challenge? The teams have to be deeply committed to the idea of participating – and winning – this challenge.

This is our 6th participation, each year the teams accept to challenge themselves, to compare themselves to the best and to progress.

During the 8 weeks of the challenge, we organise themed breakfasts on the key qualities for success: energy, commitment, enthusiasm, etc. so that everyone contributes to the building and voluntarily joins the process.

We focus on :

• business expertise (via quizzes, for example)
• the ability to be present in the moment with the client (workshop)
• the little extras throughout the customer journey that make the difference (training and tutorials)

I would like to emphasise at this point the essential role of local managers during this entire support phase.

The symmetry of attention

Being elected Customer Service of the Year is both proof of a quality of service for the benefit of the customer and also a success in the support and development of employees. In my opinion, local management is one of the cornerstones of a human service .

While we are in standardised and controlled professions, we must value trust and develop autonomy.

Fighting the routine of the job

This is our challenge, and I’ll end with a few ideas we’ve come up with to help us achieve it:

• Giving employees confidence and valuing initiative
• Celebrate the moments of sunshine for our customers created by our employees (detection and highlighting of “Golden Calls”).
• Putting quality first

At the RAJA Customer Relations Centre, one third of the monthly bonuses reward quality.

Our business, which is in the midst of a digital transformation, is rich and sometimes also difficult on a daily basis. But if we put creativity, confidence and enthusiasm into it, we can really do great things! This is what guides our approach to customer service at RAJA.

Congratulations again to our employees for this award and thank you to our customers for their loyalty!

See you soon by phone, email, chat, Facebookor at our next Open Day!

Finally, I’m sharing with you the video I had the pleasure of showing last night which illustrates the enthusiasm of the RAJA group teams as a whole.