Submitted on Fri 03 Jan 2014
The final week of 2013 was a significant milestone in TRC Group's history. As a group we won two major awards:
- BRW Best Places to Work – Ranked Australia's 12th best place to work and the best recruitment company to work for in Australia
- Winner of the Australian Business Award for Service Excellence within the recruitment industry
We've talked about the Best Places to Work award extensively over the last week, but the ABA award is also a major addition to our trophy cabinet.
In 2012 we started a major project to pick apart, improve and rebuild every customer touch point we have. We ran a series of idea tank sessions and collated a whole range of ideas from our team. These ideas ranged from tiny system tweaks through to wholesale changes.
Since then we've been implementing these ideas and have been monitoring the results. We asked our customers a simple question:
"How do we rate when compared to our competitors – Significantly better, about the same, or significantly worse?"
We had historically asked them the standard questions – would you use us again? Would you recommend us to others? We had always been within the 95 – 100% range for these questions.
But we didn’t want to settle for this. We wanted to be rated significantly better than our competitors. We surveyed customers and found that only 74% thought we were "significantly better" than our competitors.
When was the last time you described a business as significantly better than all the other businesses in that sector? I eat out quite often and there are many restaurants I would frequent again, I would even recommend them to others. But would I describe them as "Significantly Better" than their competitors? There are very few that I would describe in this way.
We decided that 74% wasn’t enough and launched into our project as a company.
We implemented a whole range of initiatives, some worked, some didn’t. We gathered feedback and suggestions from clients and candidates and incorporated these.
Within 6 months, our survey results had improved to 90% of people stating that we were "Significantly Better" than other recruitment companies (in case you were wondering, only one person said we were "Significantly Worse"). 90% has now become our minimum benchmark and now forms our brand promise, "We are significantly better than our competitors".
We wrote a case study of this project and the initiatives we had implemented and used that as our entry to the Australian Business Awards.
Being named as the winner of the Australian Business Award for Service Excellence within the Recruitment Industry is a major achievement for us as a group and is affirmation for us that our project was a success. Most of all, however, the award is an achievement for every individual within the company who has contributed their ideas and helped us become significantly better than our competitors.
