Everyone likes a success story. CMC has one that deserves some recognition involving the PPL team, which had been struggling to meet its program goals a year ago. Fast forward to this July and it’s a tale of two programs.
“We just keep breaking records,” said Jamie Hetrick, PPL program manager. “April was PPL’s best month to date with more than 900 scheduled appointments! It’s encouraging to see this level of success and how we can leverage these ideas and tactics in other programs.”
So, what led to the turnaround? In September 2023, the PPL program team, marketing, business development, and customer care teams conducted a deep assessment of how things were running and recommended changes to improve performance. The first few months were spent identifying programmatic issues and bridging departmental gaps to facilitate better communication and teamwork that were instrumental in driving future success.
The team realized that too many pieces of the puzzle were working independently. Each team was working toward a goal, but the overall effort was not moving each piece with the same intensity and speed. Effective communication was the issue.
“We found that frequent communication with the marketing and customer care teams was needed to hone our efforts to increase appointments,” Hetrick said. “Most importantly, all decisions regarding changes or new ideas were preceded by check-ins across departments, ensuring alignment, agreement and cohesion.”
The team decided to leverage each member’s unique skillset. They began to focus on comprehensive measures and small appliances, pivoted from remote to onsite assessments and embraced positive changes, which helped build better relationships and improved outreach.
These team interactions with each team were often informal but created a shared understanding of ongoing developments and changing processes, enabling everyone to proactively adapt and innovate within their respective departments.
The team shared accomplishments and obstacles in the same manner, which enabled each department to address challenges and continue to promote overall program success. CMC’s IT department was able to incorporate Salesforce 2.0 to better track and streamline our in-field resources, which reduced technician downtime and grouped audits that reduced travel time across the gigantic 10,000-square-mile PPL territory.
After only a few months, team morale quickly improved and breaking new appointment records became a badge of honor and a goal for everyone involved. The team also added a new outreach associate that helped increase multifamily appointments from 180 completions in the first program year to 1,644 in this (current) program year. As of this article, the team has scheduled 315 audits already in July plus two multifamily projects that equal an additional 400 completions.
Way to go team!