How do you scale your team ?
In many knowledge-intensive service-oriented verticals, working as a team to handle the overwhelming work load from your clients is of critical importance. As a typical example, partners in law firms are typically completely overwhelmed with requests from several dozen or more of their clients, and are looking for ways to reduce the turn-around time, so as to provide a superior client experience for their customers. This goes way beyond getting back to your clients quickly, but also includes being “ahead of the ball”, and of course never dropping it. Simply put, when you are dealing with high-touch, high-value clients, you are expected to provide a high level of service, and the high-bandwith connection between the team and the client is of critical importance.
At Kalexo, we researched different verticals with this characteristic, and discovered that one of the core issues is that the back-office team has a hard time scaling up. Adding more people to a team does not translate into faster turn-arounds and better service when you have a hard-time balancing the work across the team. The problem is quite pronounced in service organizations that are heavy users of email and meetings to coordinate activities. Often the information you need is either in the head of somebody else or in the wrong inbox. Getting the right information in the right hands becomes a full-time communication and coordination task.
A critical part of Kalexo’s solution to scale up teamwork is the concept of an easy-to-use shared database of activities coupled with innovative dashboards and analytic capability to keep the pulse on the team. (You can’t provide superior service if you can’t measure it. ) We’ve developed new ways to ensure the team database is always up to date, and that it does not become a burden on the team. The latter area is particularly interesting since we are working on new ways to plug your clients right into your team, which makes it a win-win for both the team and your clients.
As usual, more information in follow up postings.