Engineer Customer-Centric Processes for Better Service Quality and Growth | What’s Your Edge?

Christina Porter, the President of Stallergenes Greer Canada and Vice President of Strategy for Stallergenes Greer North America. The company provides therapies to help improve life for people who suffer from allergies. In 2017, Stallergenes Greer acquired a successful family-owned Canadian company to create a fully integrated Canadian operation. The company encountered several challenges during the transition that required them to take some steps back and re-engineer customer-centric processes, in order to grow and improve service quality and customer experience. And that’s the focus of this episode of What’s Your Edge?

Christina, we are grateful that you are willing to share the challenges you faced as a result of the acquisition. Every company we’ve ever worked with that has gone through a merger or acquisition has told us that the integration process was anything but a cakewalk. Some of the issues we’ve heard companies have faced post-merger include cultural clashes, talent loss, customer retention issues, integration cost overruns, and integration fatigue. All of these can impact the customer experience and impede growth.

What can you share about the situation you were facing during the transition?

It’s all the things you mentioned and in a predictable pattern (although in our naïve optimism, we didn’t predict it, unfortunately!):

First: culture clashes: we are a global company purchasing a 2nd generation family business- our expectations regarding policies, procedures, documentation, decision making, almost everything were different, and it was a very uncomfortable, tense time for everyone

Second: talent loss: The natural progression of culture clash is talent loss, and when most of the company’s intellectual capital is institutional knowledge, that’s a huge problem.   We lost the 2 owners very quickly, despite our expectation of a 2-year transition.  And many of the key people followed right behind, taking their institutional knowledge with them.

Third: production/delivery disruption.  Without the key players in the company, we rapidly became unable to fulfill orders.

Fourth: customer dissatisfaction – you can imagine how our customers reacted.

Fifth: more disruption and delay caused by managing angry customers, and trying band-aid, reactionary solutions- training new employees, adding shifts, hiring consultants.

Delve Into the Right Data to Pinpoint Service Quality Issues

In my career and as part of our work, we’re big proponents of serv