Service Excellece Project Updates

Happy June! The rain has finally stopped and the sun is back in Cleveland, Ohio! There has been a lot happening since my last post several weeks ago and I want to share some of the new developments in my Service Excellence rotation.

Just a week ago I helped launch our Net Promoter Referral Program at ETC. This program allows us to have an opportunity to reach out to clients who would like to make a referral to our company. For this project I worked with our Vice President of Operations and Client Services, our Managers in Client Services and Sales and our Salesforce expert in IT. We are still early in the start of this program, but I am hopeful that it will help to generate leads for our Sales team.

I have also been working hard to prepare my presentation to our Managers and Supervisors at both Equity Trust and Sterling Trust on our Net Promoter Score Program. The presentation is just weeks away and I am starting to feel like the presentation is coming along very nicely. Next week I will be doing a run of my presentation with our HR trainer and make any necessary improvements or changes before the big presentations in two weeks!

My Service Excellence rotation has gone by very fast and I will soon be moving into my Leadership Rotation in the end of July!

Exciting Times

Equity Trust Company's Leadership Trainee Program has yielded great results! Two of our previous Leadership Trainees have officially finished the program, and now are excelling in their full time position as a Business Analyst and Internal Wholesaler. Congrats to Rachel Cain, our Operations Business Analyst, and Aurie Watkins, our Internal Wholesaler.

Eric Groesch, our current Leadership Trainee, is doing very well in his current rotation in Operations. He is working directly with our VP of Operations and Client Services on our Net Promotor Score. He has found new reporting capabilities that have eliminated manual reporting and has allowed us to see directly how our clients are preceiving our service.

Now we wait patiently for our new Leadership Trainee to join us in June. Please stay tuned to learn morr about Robert Starrett, a recent college grad from the University of Dayton!

~Amanda

Enhancements to Equity NPS Program

This week I officially rolled out some big enhancements to our NPS Program here at Equity that I have been working on since I moved into my Service Excellence Rotation.

We are now running our survey through our own in-house survey software which has allowed us to link our survey responses to our Customer Relationship Management Software. This has evolved our program by reducing the time it takes for us to have actionable results from 4 weeks to instantaneous.

Before implementing these changes I presented the proposed changes to our Executive Team. We covered the changes in the program and the new ability to have the same type of information and data that would take days to prepare before, available at their finger tips as new survey responses come in.

There are more changes to the program on the way and I will be posting about them as they are implemented.

Expys Awards!

Today I attended the Expy Awards in Cleveland with two members of our Human Resources staff and one of our former interns. The Expys are presented by the Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education (NOCHE) and recognizes the best experiential learning programs in Northeast Ohio.

The awards included Best Intern, Best Mentor, Coolest Internship, Best New Internship, Best Overall Internship. Equity Trust Company was a finalist for both Best Intern and Best Overall Internship. While we did not win either we did finish in the Top 5 out of over 200 applicants. That is something to be proud of!

For more information on the awards and a list of the finalists you can visit CBC Magazine Expy Finalists

Goodbye Leadership Trainee Program...

Today is bitter-sweet as I finish up my last day as a leadership trainee at Equity Trust Company. I have been offered a full-time position in the Sterling Sales Division as an Internal Wholesaler. I will be working closely with one of the external wholesalers to maintain a strong relationship with Sterling's institutional client base and work towards educating them on non-traditional investing.

During my time as a leadership trainee, I have gained valuable knowledge and a strong skill set not only to be a successful leader but to be successful in any position within an organization. I have learned what it takes to hire valuable employees, how to handle escalated client issues, how to manage daily stats and work them in to a staffing model, how to deal with conflict between employees, managing a project, finding ways to make processes more efficient, identifying ways to reduce costs, the value of the 'voice of the customer', and so much more.

I hope to take all of the knowledge and skills I have gained to my new position and to keep growing with Equity Trust Company. This has been an amazing experience that I feel lucky to be a part of!

Net Promoter Launches at Sterling Trust

Since my last post I have been busy with our net promoter score program for our Texas company, Sterling Trust. Using our new survey software I designed the survey we would use to send to our clients who had work-flow items closed in the previous week. The implementation with Sterling Trust has gone very well and we are already seeing the value in the responses that are coming back. In addition to this Sterling Trust survey I also launched another one last week for Sterling Trust's Institutional accounts.

In the upcoming weeks I will be working to move our Equity Trust NPS program over to our new survey system.

In addition to administering and reporting on our surveys I have also been working on our core system replacement project. With this project I have put together a list of the reports that our management team uses that will allow us to prepare our new system to have these reports after our conversion.

We Have Fun at What We Do!

Last week Equity Trust Company closed down for half a day to treat the employees to a day filled with fun, games, and food at Dave and Busters. We all participated in a scavenger hunt which was a great way to meet our fellow co-workers! We also had a great lunch, played games for several hours, and had an award ceremony for the individuals with numerous years of service with Equity Trust Company. It was a nice treat to be able to relax in between the end of the year rush and tax season.

We also closed for half a day last Friday. The weather was extremely bad so management made the decision to close the offices early to allow for everyone to get home safely. They provided us with pizza for lunch so no one would have to leave the building and when we went out to our cars to go home, every ones cars were completely cleaned off. It's great to see a company care for the well being of their employees in that way.
With the short week, there is lots of work to catch up on! So until next time, have a good one!!

Leadership Rotation Continued....

Since I have been in my Leadership Rotation as team lead of the Account Support team, things have been very busy! When I first joined the team, I sat down with the members to begin to learn their processes. Once I got a good understanding of them, I put together a plan to begin cross-training the team. Now, instead of only having one person who knows a process, we have four! I am also in the process of re-writing all of the procedures for the team and preparing for the system conversion that is going to take place in July.

Some things I have done to prepare the team for this are, as mentioned before, the cross-training. Re-organizing the queues we work out of to better match what the new system will look like, and working with other departments to make the process flow better for ourselves and the client.

While in my leadership rotation, I have been responsible for payroll, monthly score-cards, daily stats, and attending different meetings with management. It has been a great experience and I am looking forward to learning all that I can over the next few months!

Beginning of My Service Excellence Rotation!

I am now three weeks into my second rotation in the Leadership Training Program! The past three weeks have been both busy and exciting for me! As part of my new rotation I am taking over our survey projects for our Net Promoter Score, which is a metric we use to measure how likely our clients are to refer us. I have been spending a lot of time learning how the survey program works and even took some time at home to read "The Ultimate Question" which talks about net promoter score and why it should be important to businesses.

I am now running our NPS program for Equity Trust on my own. As an added project from my past rotation, I helped to implement some of the many changes Aurie had suggested and we are now using them in our surveys. One of those is the new survey software that we just got to conduct our surveys. Another is for our sister company, Sterling Trust Company, where I am currently launching their first weekly survey program today through our new survey software!

Leadership Rotation

Wow, a lot has gone on since my last post! I finished up my Service Excellence rotation back in October. I had many successes while in that rotation. I was able to attend the networking conference that Eric spoke of earlier and I also completed my Green Belt training in Six Sigma.

The main part of my green belt project was re-structuring how the company does our client survey that calculates our net promoter score. I came up with a plan on how to restructure the survey as well as researched different software that would make our survey and calculations cleaner and easier. I am proud to state that management went ahead and chose the survey software I had recommended. My plan for the restructure was also approved and then passed on to Eric to implement and see through as I moved into my leadership rotation as Team Lead of the Account Support Team.

I wanted to give an update as to what has happened in the Leadership program the last few months, but now it is time to get back to work. I will follow up later in the week with my experience thus far in Account Support!

Client Services Rotation - Wrap Up

I am now finishing up my first 6-month rotation within the Leadership Training Program in our Client Services Department. I have been busy these past few months working on various projects that will help to improve the overall experience of our clients as well as assisting in the training of our new Client Service Agents.

In October we brought in 5 new hires that started for us a month prior to their Investment Training class. To assist them in learning their position I worked to pair them with mentors , tracked and followed up with their mentors on their progress, and developed a training packet that they could work through with their mentor to learn how to use our systems and processes. As part of their development, I worked with one of our Team Leads to present a systems training to all of our new agents in their December training class.

Leading projects was another area I have been busy with the past three months. I have worked to develop a FAQ for both our Client Service Representatives and for our clients in order to address topics important during our busy season. For our First Call Resolution project I worked to develop a system for tracking our daily score, managed an excel database and figured our the limits for the project so we could vaidate that our project was under control. As a part of the First Call Resolution project I have also gained experience working with other departments such as Service Excellence and Marketing.

I have really enjoyed my experience and my time in Client Services. I have gained a greater understanding of working in a client driven atmosphere where improving those interactions is an important part to our relationships with our clients.

Next week I will begin my new rotation in Service Excellence where I will be working on our customer survey and attending training for Lean Six Sigma. I look forward to the new challenges and what I will learn in my next rotation!