The worst thing in the world a company can do is say 'but that's how we've always done it!'.
When we launched our company over 10 years ago, we made all sorts of strides and bounds doing things that other companies didn't, and we were really successful. We weren't afraid to try new things, and we could gather our very small team around us and change direction on our work in less than ten minutes. But just because your company grows on systems and ideas that appear to work doesn't mean they continue to work as well as they could.
When we built our own phone servers and housed them on premises, integrating them into our CMS database, we didn't know SHAKEN/STIR protocols would be a thing, or ways we could validate our phone number to not come up as spam. In 2013, 40% of our targeted debtor calls were smart phones -- now they are closer t o 90%. You have to evolve.
Internally, we built our commission structure and salary ranks based on what was a good salary at the time, we always need to ask 'are we recognizing the hard working people who have been here for years and treating them as best we can'?
As well, we didn't anticipate the potential for automation -- Interac self-fulfilling requests, AI voice agents, APIs to automatically respond to inbound SMS, website chat bots. The list goes on.
Our world is changing. Some companies are still using predictive dialer systems that were built 40+ years ago, for a world where phones were bolted to walls in kitchens. It never hurts to stick your head up from the daily travails and challenges and ask -- 'Why do we do X this way?'
I'm incredibly proud that we work on an Agile Management structure where we can call the entire company together, talk about this and have input from everyone here -- today we started the day with 8 major changes and by the end of the day we walked away with 10, and got a lot of good will from our team members who got to ask questions, and make suggestions of their own.
If you haven't changed something major in your company in the last two years -- I mean major, not a logo rebranding or swapping out the coffee pods in your break room -- real changes, like trying new tools, restructuring core processes, seeking out new client opportunities that can transform your company's landscape, can you claim you are a 'leading edge, innovative, industry disruptor'?
This week was great -- hope yours was too.
Cheers,
Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
KINGSTON Data & Credit
Cambridge, ON
226-946-1730
bwettlaufer@kingstondc.com
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