American Home Shield 2002 Annual Report Download - page 9

ServiceMaster 5
We introduced the Six Sigma methodology across all of our businesses in 2002.
Thousands of employees from technicians to senior leaders have been trained
and are now using utilizing Six Sigma solutions to serve our customers each
day. More than 3,000 replications have been installed, and we are targeting over
10,000 by the end of 2003. The Six Sigma Program became accretive within the
business units in the first quarter of 2003 – an achievement we are extremely
proud of. The bottom-line benefits of Six Sigma, from now on, will far outweigh
our investments in it.
Beyond the financial return, the Six Sigma methodology is bringing new discipline
to our work. Six Sigma demands that we base decisions on data, guides us to
turn that data into actionable knowledge, and helps us develop processes that
can be powerfully replicated across the enterprise, benefiting our customers
and employees.
focusing on the customer
In another area of successful execution in 2002, we increased our focus on the
customer. Our unrelenting commitment is to start with the customer’s point of
view and work back to ServiceMaster. And when we say “customer,” we mean
those who use our services – plus those who might use our services if we better
align our offerings to their wants and needs.
ServiceMaster has made a commitment to ongoing customer research, which is
something we’ve never done strategically as an organization. In order to truly
understand our customer’s wants and needs, we made a significant investment
in market research in 2002.
We’ve always had great people who went to work every day determined to make
life easier for their customers. Now, we’re equipping them with data that tells
them where to focus and teaching them skills that will help them achieve specific
results. And then we’re generating feedback to tell them how they’re doing.
They are now much better prepared to serve their customers as effectively as
they’ve always wanted to.
This is a win/win proposition.
For example, what if we could gain two additional customers for every 10 existing
customers if we fully understood their expectations? The research we’re
conducting is supplying us with the data to secure those additional customers
by fine-tuning our service delivery. For our company, with millions of customers,
even a small incremental gain becomes significant. Those are the kinds of
stakes for which we’re playing. Each branch now has its own goals, its own targets,
its own scorecard and its very own direct and measurable local accountability.
Successful execution was the foundation we needed to build in 2002, and we did it.
For this we are indebted to all our people, but we offer a special thanks to the branch
managers who took on all the accountability we gave them and delivered results.