Let’s get engaged…?!

No, sit back down, put your car keys away, don’t come here, although our Customer Service Management Champion, Dave Walker is quite the catch, his primary concern currently is engaging our key stakeholders.

As mentioned previously, we are inviting our key stakeholders into the centre and showing them the operation, how we work and, importantly, getting valuable feedback about People Services in order for us to improve processes/systems, praise good work and service or adapt to our stakeholders needs.

In order for us to get the very best out of these visits, Dave has firstly created his Stakeholder roadmap. This is an excellent way of ensuring we are engaging with the right people at the right time and that we are fully aware of any issues that may have arisen that we all need to be mindful of. It tracks the key stakeholders and briefly outlines their views on People Services and whether they are on board & supportive or our work or whether they have complaints or reservations about the centre. It then indicates, by use of a RAG status, those who need further attention in order to get them fully on board for our journey. What is most important for us is that we ensure these stakeholders can see that we are making progress and striving to embed improvements and we hope, by reaching out in this way, we can develop mutually beneficial working relationships.

In support of this we have also appointed a customer service champion from each team to engage on a ‘grass roots’ level and to give us an idea of the general feeling out in the businesses. These ‘champions’ will also be the first wave of our exchange programme and they will be visiting various businesses to get a feel of what it’s like to be on the other side. This initiative will be branded ‘Day in the Life’ (nothing to do with the Beatles) and will be kicking off in the very near future, watch this space for feedback!

In other news, I’ll bet you’ve all been dying for an update on the now infamous Matt Chadwick, well, he is on holiday but never fear, to keep you going - he has entered the ‘Hellrunner’ race, look it up, we are looking forward to the amusing photos that are bound to come from it…

Also a quick update on our ongoing acquisitions, currently we are getting very close to the Plymouth and Lothian & Borders integrations. This gives us great opportunities to put learning’s into practice and to prepare for the big Somerfield project. These acquisitions, though small in comparison, consist of around 1,200 employees per area. This involves getting these employees onto our payroll, and looking at harmonisation of all contracts, and we are hoping this all goes smoothly as is possible.

I hope you have enjoyed this week’s update, remember, Dave Walker is available for respectable suitors only!