Even the best operations leaders (and their continuous improvement teams) can find it difficult to get to the bottom of issues such as customer complaints, performance failure, retention or skills challenges.  Getting help from an experienced, objective external consulting partner can be a very useful step, getting you quickly to the root-causes and potential solutions.

Our assessment approach is thorough, practical and empathetic. It is based on workshops, interviews and observation. We ask questions and listen hard to stakeholders before any analytics are deployed.

Our approach is highly flexible, calm and collaborative. How we build the improvement roadmap depends on your needs and preferences, but it will always be a positive experience carefully balancing process, operations, skills, behaviour and technology change.

Business-to-business sales performance is driven by a complex mix of relationships, behaviours, information and process quality, usability and automation, as well as many human factors.

PiC can help you make a difference to performance in two main areas:

• through behavioural and motivational support
• by addressing friction in the end-to-end business customer experience

Business-to-consumer sales performance, especially beyond the store environment, is often closely related to the quality of the customer experience. We can help you map, design and optimise the key human and automated interactions, focusing on both the customer and colleague experiences.

By their nature, every service organisation (whether in field, in branch or via contact centre) has a busy change portfolio. As a result, they sometimes need help either to orchestrate multiple change activities or to deliver a specific project.

No two change portfolios are ever alike however experience shows us that two common themes are often present:

• How best to organise and manage people, process, operations and technology projects to achieve the best outcomes
• How to mobilise the right team, plan effectively and deliver a new product, service, channel, process, tool or performance improvement project

Our people bring an impressive blend of practical service experience, coupled with strong project and delivery disciplines that will help you achieve successful and sustainable results.

There are some brilliant examples of successful automation in sales and service (as well as some less-than-brilliant ones). Technology advances, including AI, are making things possible (and affordable) that seemed impossible only five years ago but they still need to be carefully designed and deployed.

However, there is also a flurry of hype with vendors and consultants falling over themselves to over- promise (and usually under-deliver).

We have experience of many real-life implementations of automation, both standalone and AI-powered.

We have good relationships with leading vendors who understand our approach, understand our independent position and will provide a ‘no-nonsense’ demonstration or introduce you to some of their successful case studies, if that is helpful.

If you are exploring options around whether to outsource or which of the many potential partners, locations or contract types might work best for your sales or service operations, we bring skills and experience in the operational, commercial and implementation aspects of the outsource transition.

This expertise can also be useful when helping our customers reset a difficult outsource relationship or improve a service that isn’t performing as expected. We fully understand the added challenge of navigating contractual constraints and SLAs between client and outsourcer, all of which requires experience, independence and objectivity.

Partners in Change is renowned for a practical, hands-on approach to projects and programmes. Our calm and collaborative approach is well suited to helping when a project is stressed or failing.

The combination of the steadying influence of experienced project leaders, combined with the injection of the right customer-oriented skills and experience, at the right time, can make all the difference.

We get to grips with the planning and resourcing, solve complex problems and help to reset supplier and partner relationships. In parallel we coaching project leaders on the best way forward, leaving a legacy of change excellence long after we have finished our engagement.

A sales or service environment is typically very busy and can often suffer from medium/high staff turnover. In such an environment, making change stick is especially challenging.

B2B and B2C environments each have unique challenges, but experience tells us that in both it is often the supporting players that are key to successfully embedding change. Team leaders, coaches, performance and quality managers and others with experience within the business all have a role to play.

We will work with you to bring together the ‘outside-in’ view of how the customer experience needs to change and the ‘inside-out’ view of what needs to happen to processes, tools, information and ways- of-working. We’ll engage and collaborate with all of your people to make it happen.