this season’s car: how nailing the basics can turbo-charge customer service excellence

Formula One is a great example of the proverbial well-oiled machine. Each elite team of 300 to 1,200 people works seamlessly to deliver consistently excellent results. The teams’ focus is two-fold: optimising performance this season and developing innovative new strategies (and cars) for future seasons. Both are vital to success. If you don’t get the day-to-day basics right, innovative design solutions won’t get to shine.

In our water industry work, we’ve learned that success is underpinned by the same dual need: to deliver the basics brilliantly today while innovating for tomorrow. So how do you raise your customer service and operational efficiency to the level of Mercedes or Ferrari? A Formula One pit crew can change tyres, repair the car, adjust the aerodynamics, and clean the driver’s visor in about three seconds. Achieving this requires continual review and reinforcement of these basics:

Right goals

In F1, the ultimate goal is to finish the season as high up the table as possible. To help make this happen, individual pit stop goals are set for each of the season’s 23 races. Factors include driver style, tyre degradation, weather forecasts and track temperature – all flexible depending on developing conditions during a race.

In other words, aspiration is directly linked with operational reality. The same need to work backwards from top-level goals applies to water companies. Consider a scenario in which the principle of ‘right goals’ is applied to supply interruptions. Here, our best practice water company has set Outcome Delivery Incentive (ODI) targets around the average number of minutes lost per property per year. They have then broken this down into measures for different teams across the business.

So, when a customer calls about a supply interruption, the water company acts to reduce the minutes lost per property. They fix the burst that caused the interruption and address reducing future bursts, thus also meeting their goals for first-time fixes and number of bursts per year.

This scenario requires speedy dispatch of frontline resources to complete a spot fix, plus investigative work to diagnose the underlying network issue. Fixing the underlying issue brings us full circle to the top-level goal of reducing minutes lost to supply interruptions. Frontline and investigative teams are both clear on how their actions help meet the ODI targets.

Right data

Formula One pit stop goals are formed using data from many different sources. Specialists on the pit wall and behind the scenes continuously review the data to get a complete picture of race day conditions, making strategy adjustments accordingly.

In our best practice scenario, a team of network analysts similarly uses the right data to identify the problem’s root cause and make better long-term decisions. The data includes historic operational data, network monitoring and hydraulic modelling. Together they show that significant transients were causing more and more bursts. By drawing these diverse data sets together to see what was happening in the network, the team was able to innovate ‘next season’s car’.

Having in place the right skills, techniques, team structure and technology enables our water company to use their wealth of data to identify new strategic opportunities.

Right conversations

The high stakes conversations that ensure perfectly timed F1 pit stops draw on a wide variety of perspectives. The collaborative process relies on understanding and buy-in from the driver, his race engineer and support strategists. The head of strategy then makes the final decision on when to bring cars into the pit lane. Each decision must balance comprehensive pre-race analysis and strategy with the realities on the ground.

Our best practice water company created a forum for experts from across the business to collaboratively identify solutions to network problems. When our team of network analysts shared their burst findings with this forum, a network monitoring expert told them there have been issues in this area for the last two years. They had analysed transient patterns indicating regular and sudden flowrate changes. With the additional information from our network analysts, the forum decided to investigate a pump upstream of the bursts and found that it was repeatedly tripping and restarting, causing surge flow and bursts in the most vulnerable parts of the network downstream.

The combination of right goals, right data and right conversations with the right team reduces frustration for frontline teams and, ultimately, the customer.

Rigorous process and clear accountabilities

A pit crew typically has 20 members, each with a defined role. Jack men (responsible for lifting and lowering the car) and tyre changers must work in perfect synchronicity to successfully complete their jobs. Actions for every step of the pit stop are defined, refined and rehearsed until the whole thing is a seamless repeatable process.

In our best practice water company, the rigorously defined investigations process works to serve frontline planning and scheduling & delivery teams as key internal customers. Because the process is standardised, teams representing agreed delivery routes receive well packaged root cause evidence that allows them to plan their work more efficiently.

Once the issue is resolved, frontline teams attend fewer appointments, and the customer centre has reliable information about the problem/solution to share with customers if required. Rigorous processes have created solutions that also serve other parts of the business, resulting in new standards of efficiency and excellence end-to-end.

In conclusion

Innovation is the word of the moment. But successful innovation requires a deep understanding of what makes the basics brilliant: joined up thinking that translates top-level aspirations into the right goals. Brilliant basics leverage the right data and expertise, and rigorous processes benefit internal as well as external customers. Collaboration through the right conversations and a commitment to continuous improvement are vital to optimising both this season’s car and future innovation.

Look out for Egremont’s take on what ‘next season’s car’ looks like for the water industry in the next edition of Institute of Water.

Published in the IoW Q2 magazine 2022

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