As a global provider of Internet services, having experienced rapid growth, vast market and organizational change, VeriSign recognized in late 2005 that innovation and operations were suffering from reduced collaboration due to growth and the need to have teams work virtually. With major functions in India, Washington D.C., San Jose, and many individual acquisitions in other areas, sales revenue growth increased but service suffered.
Goals
- Bring a fragmented, global team together.
- Assist in transitioning a highly technical workforce into a more consultative, collaborative high performance organization.
- Change in how the technical, global teams functioned and work together—from silos to teams.
- Improve customer loyalty and satisfaction for the IT Infrastructure and Product Development Groups
We were engaged initially in early 2006 to help build consensus within the leadership team (including the CTO and CEO) for what came to be known as the Customer Focus Program. We developed a mechanism to communicate the change, why it was important, and how it would impact each discipline. We created education, leadership development workshops and coaching prior to rolling out a series of Consultative Partnering workshops. Approximately 1,200 people in the Infrastructure and Product Development Groups attended these workshops over a two-year period using real life scenarios and business cases to examine different approaches and attitudes. We advised VeriSign on changing organizational and operational elements that presented obstacles to customer service strategy execution and focus, and provided coaching to existing and new managers in how to work with staff to reinforce skills and drive the needed behavioral changes.
Results
At the completion of our engagement at the end of 2007 the teams were working more collaboratively and the organization was more unified and focused on building customer loyalty.
Some specific examples included:
- The Network Operations Center utilized three of our Consultative Partnering tools to understand common systemic issues and build alignment around their solutions. These call center best practices contributed to a reduction in call center volume on systemic issues by 50%.
- After attending the customized virtual teaming workshop the leadership team realized that the primary issue was not an inability to be strategic, as they had thought, but was an inability to execute well. This changed their management training and strategy significantly.
- Several teams reported significant reductions in rework after using the Consultative Partnering tools to establish greater rapport with their internal customers, understand their needs better, and build responsive technology solutions.
