Client background

One of the nation’s leading wholesale distributors with over $5B in sales, 70+ distribution centers and six customer service centers servicing over 30,000 reseller customers.

The business challenge

The company’s reseller customers range from small shops to large nationals, each having different expectations of their customer service interactions. The company realized they needed to become more market-relevant, e-commerce savvy and customer-focused. Facing intense industry and technology pressures, the company began a strategic transformation effort to consolidate their disparate business units to a single, common operating platform to provide a consistent and better customer experience for their business-to-business (B2B) customers. 

The Baker Tilly approach

Baker Tilly supported the company’s transformation, helping to create a business-to-consumer (B2C) like experience for their B2B customers. Working closely with the company to facilitate the consolidation of their people, process and systems across disparate business units, Baker Tilly utilized a multi-step program to enable the transformation to a single, best-in-class customer service organization:

• Future State Definition – Collaboratively worked with the company to identify service gaps and design business processes that would result in a unified vision and a customer-centric point of view for customer interactions, with a focus on driving a B2C customer experience across multiple channels
• Program Roadmap – Developed a roadmap for program activities and investments in people, process and technology to support both internal service center needs and customer-facing technologies
• Change Management and Training Plan and Execution – Developed and implemented an in-depth training and communications program targeted towards internal associates and customers to ensure a solid transition. This program impacted nearly 700 associates over the course of 2 years
• Program and Project Management – Executed an approach that was nimble across project management resources, customized to the scale of the changes, and that which would work best for the organization
• Implementation Support and Value Realization – Helped the client adopt and transition to new processes, systems and customer support functions across six service centers that impacted hundreds of associates and thousands of customers, tracking customer feedback and other key business metrics

Business impact

The company successfully transformed their customer service operations to more effectively and efficiently meet their customers’ expectations. Utilization of a single set of business systems and processes not only simplified the internal management of a previously fragmented customer service organization, but also eliminated redundancies across their discrete business units. 

The company has a consistent model in place for serving their customers. With automation and self-service capabilities to place and track orders, the company can confidently meet the expectations of its highly-sophisticated national customers, while being able to provide the personal touch some customers still require.

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