At a former employer, I was tasked with launching an internal technical services team. The team comprised reservoir modelers, petrophysicists, seismic data processors and discipline leaders for land, engineering and geoscience. The group also had resources for tracking undrilled inventory, the exploration portfolio, and technical assurance or historical prospect data. The group acted as a resource to the company’s asset teams and was a collection of talent that would be difficult for one asset team to fully utilize. As a company though, we needed access to these specialized talent resources and sharing them from a centralized team made sense. As the group was a collection of high-end technical subject matter experts, very few had experience in customer service. Our assets teams expected service and if we didn’t meet their expectations, they were free to utilize outside third-party vendors. This was a perceived challenge at the time of the team’s formation and executive leadership encouraged me to seek out learning opportunities to speed up our journey of becoming a customer-centric organization.
Off to School
This sent me on a quest to identify companies known for customer service and discover how they achieved this reputation and results. It was 2008 and at the time, Disney was recognized as a leader in customer loyalty and guest satisfaction. They also had a training offshoot called “Disney Institute,” which offered courses to the general public about their models for quality service and business excellence. After getting my supervisor over the optics of attending training at Disney World in Florida, off I went to a multi-day course on business excellence.
The course was powerful, the instructors were superb and they leveraged the parks and park staff for a unique hands-on learning experience, but what made the course even more special was a fellow class attendee. Attending the class alongside me was a Disney employee who was auditing the courses to become a Disney Institute instructor. Mr. Hugh Kincaid was a former manager of human resources and had been with Disney for more than 32 years at the time. Hugh was transitioning into the instructor role and had recently been part of a cultural change initiative at Disney parks under the direction of Mr. Judson Green, worldwide president of Walt Disney Theme Parks and Resorts.
Hearing Footsteps
During the class, Hugh learned from me that I also had some company cultural change aspects in my new role that I needed to address. Hugh had the class instructors pull me aside during a break and they showed me a video of Judsen Green’s call to action presentation to the Disney parks leadership team. They called it his “footsteps” presentation because he was talking about the rise of competitors in their space who were making noise and gaining ground. He felt the parks team was complacent and challenged park leadership to commit to performance excellence. He called them out for being change averse and implored them to stop saying, “We have always done it this way,” or “That’s someone else’s job.” Green associated the following guidelines with the culture of excellence:
- Not one way of doing things for the whole company
- Not a short-term flavor of the month
- Not a cost-savings measure
- Not a fad or cycle
- It is a way of thought.
- It is excelling.
- It is effective teamwork.
- It is communicating freely across silos.
At the conclusion of his talk, he asked the staff to commit to participate in being excellent. He asked them to get onboard and to be enthusiastic, energetic and to over-communicate. And those who couldn’t commit were ultimately encouraged to find their happiness elsewhere.
Operationalizing Excellence
After the video ended, Hugh then walked me through how they operationalized the cultural change by holding leadership accountable and by specifically defining the behaviors they expected of their leaders. For Disney, it was openness, respect, integrity, diversity, courage, honesty and balance. They put in place training, coaching and a 360-degree feedback mechanism. They also assigned leaders to small teams to take on organizational change tasks that they had to plan, own and execute. These small groups enabled team members to be part of the change and enrolled them in the change management process. Lastly, they aligned their performance evaluations around customer experience, business unit performance, direct report management and the behaviors articulated above. In the end, it took Disney a year per layer of the organization to implement this excellence accountability program.
Exhibiting Excellence
This textbook business case presented to me on the spur of the moment was astonishing and gave me the tools I needed for my new role. Hugh made the extra effort to ensure I had a phenomenal, enhanced learning experience that was supplemental to the business excellence course. In short, he exhibited performance and customer excellence. Per his LinkedIn page, he continued with his career at Disney for another 10 years. I have no doubt his more-than-42 years of service were valued. I still remember him 17 years later.
Listening to You
During my limited tenure, I have been approached by some who have expressed concerns about the customer service they have received from the AAPG and the lack of timely responses. This does not fall on deaf ears, and we are taking steps to address our customer service. On average, we believe we receive 130 emails each day requesting assistance from our customer experience team of three. Our response time is typically about 10 days due to the email backlog that has built up and the inefficient email system we have in place. To breathe new life into our approach to members and to address customer concerns, we created a new position: Nicole Braley is now our new head of marketing and member experience.
Beginning the Journey to Excellence
The team is building out processes and moving to a technology platform that will enable us to implement a true customer service function – one that is not only responsive but also focused on delivering experiences that feel intentional, consistent and even memorable.
With this platform, we will gain the ability to understand the nature of member and customer inquiries, establish clear service-level agreements and provide structured feedback to other parts of the organization on chronic requests and recurring issues. More importantly, we will begin to formally measure our customer experience. If we don’t measure it, we can’t improve it. By leveraging tools such as Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction, we will be able to capture real feedback, initiate service recovery when needed and continuously build on the great experiences we are creating.
As a first step, we have introduced a new member concierge service for renewals, something AAPG has never offered before. We have added a temporary customer service geoscientist for this new offering, and she is providing a concierge-style service to walk lapsed (and current) members through the renewal process.
Delivering Member Value
In closing, we are on a journey to improve our member experience. We are not yet at the level of excellence modeled by Hugh Kincaid, but these steps represent meaningful progress. I look forward to working alongside the AAPG team to ensure our members receive the experience they expect and deserve. If you don’t receive excellent service, please let me know. Our ultimate goal is to deliver real value.