About Growth Associates

Press Releases

What does Growth Associates do? (Partial Client List)

Since 1973, Growth Associates has been providing organizational improvement in customer service, customer treatment, and continuous quality improvement. Improvement that is measurable and guaranteed.

Our consulting and training services are based on research, management science, and, most importantly, commonsense. Growth Associates services include effective customer treatment and communication skills, customer satisfaction measurement, organizational and staff audits, management development, continuous quality improvement, and managing organizational transitions.

All of our energy is directed to providing practical, action orientated solutions that produce measurable results. Our Client Satisfaction Guarantee is simple. If you are not completely satisfied that your first year financial benefit is twice your investment, Growth Associates will provide additional needed service at no charge.

Growth Associates services produce measurable results by focusing on customer driven basics: A customer driven vision, realistic planning, sensible controls, and observable accountability. From this sound foundation we offer simple and usable leadership tools to build and maintain positive customer relationships, optimize customer satisfaction results, and ensure profits.

Our formula for customer satisfaction is: Customer Satisfaction = STP [Service X Treatment X Product]. If any variable is minus or zero, customer satisfaction will be also. Therefore, we provide assistance with all three variables.

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION = SERVICE X TREATMENT X PRODUCT

SERVICE

To ensure that the level of customer service your organization provides is exceptional, we audit and provide assistance as needed to confirm that:

• A customer driven vision exists that will satisfy and exceed your customers’ needs and expectations
• Your most valued customers are clearly identified
• An operational plan exists that will fulfill your vision
• Your people are hired, trained, empowered, and rewarded for implementing your customer driven plan
• You and your people receive timely and accurate customer data to the quality of the service and products they receive.
• You have a system for continuously renewing and improving your level of customer service

Specific services we provide are researching customers’ needs and expectations, benchmarking your service level against competition, establishing hiring profiles, ensuring that staff development is effective, designing and auditing operational plans, training managers on how to effectively establish employee empowerment and a motivating work environment, and designing and implementing customer satisfaction measuring systems.

TREATMENT

Ultimate Customer Treatment™ is our premier training experience for anyone who deals directly with customers or manages those who do. This workshop:

• Focuses on tools for successfully resolving both external and internal customer situations by internal customer we refer to team member relations. Experience has proven that these must be managed if you wish to offer consistent quality communications to all customers.
• Includes personal growth and self image building. Our experience has taught us that there is a direct correlation between a person’s self image and their ability to handle stressful situations without getting psychologically "hooked" and personalizing the interaction.

We customize this workshop to your people’s immediate customer situations and needs. We offer an onsite visit before the workshop to meet your people in their work environment. Workshop situations and role plays are all based on research of your organization and examples of challenging situations you have identified. We provide post workshop follow up exercises to reinforce the learning experience.

We have trained thousands of professional customer service representatives and field service engineers in hundreds of companies. The original program was used to train 16,000 ground and flight customer service people at American Airlines in 1970. Since then we have constantly revised and updated our materials to provide the best customer communication tools and skills. Ultimate Customer Treatment™ represents the culmination of all those experiences.

Ultimate Customer Treatment™ deals with resolving customer dissatisfaction immediately. Customer research has found that handling customer problems without hesitation is critical to customer retention. However, the ideal is to prevent customer problems before they happen. Our Service and Product services accomplish this by proactively addressing customer satisfaction.

For more information on how your organization will benefit, call Bill Werst at [541] 386-1117

PRODUCT

Ensuring that your customers are receiving consistent quality products is a never ending process of continuous quality improvement. Customers are not static, neither is your competition. You can’t afford to be either.

Our approach to establishing continuous product quality improvement is to audit and provide assistance as needed to ensure that your organization has:

• A vision statement that includes continuous improvement and is understood and accepted by all employees
• A sensible plan for fulfilling its vision – congruent vision, goals, objectives, and action plans
• Appropriate controls to measure implementation success and monitor progress
• Reasonable standards and measurements to determine accountability for contributions to the organization’s success

These four basic elements establish the solid foundation of your organization – vision, planning, controlling, and accountability. Everything your organization does is launched from this base. We have observed over a thirty year period that most organizations do not have this solid base. Consequently their attempts to launch the newest sales, marketing, or engineering imperative is just that, an attempt. Frustration, and even panic, sets in and these organizations search for the latest organizational breakthrough that will provide a quick fix. We refer to these quick fix attempts as P.O.T.Y.s – Programs Of The Year. Others call them Reengineering, TQM, Zero Defects, etc.

There is nothing wrong with these approaches so long as they are appropriately implemented from a solid organizational base. We help you build that base so that you get you off, and keep you off, the P.O.T.Y.

Specific services we provide are developing a vision statement, communicating that vision statement throughout your organization, measuring staff’s understanding and acceptance of the organization’s vision, developing and auditing practical plans for fulfilling the vision, establishing practical milestones for assessing progress, defining clear and measurable definitions of success, and establishing individual, team, departmental, and functional accountability.

Please call Bill Werst at [541] 386-1117 for additional information.

ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

Our Organizational Performance Assessment produces a high return on your investment that is always far greater than the cost – we guarantee it. The OPA assesses customer service, customer treatment, and product quality. We eliminate many of the problems immediately, and develop action plans to capture the major opportunities. We offer the OPA for our normal fees of free to any client willing to share 10% of the first years savings

Organizational Performance Assessment process:

• We review your company information – history, brochures, web site
• You identify any specific concerns and issues for us to assess
• We tour your primary facilities and several representative sites if appropriate
• Client reviews vision, plans, measurements, and accountability with us
• We interview senior management, all functional department heads, and others you suggest
• We survey employees on job knowledge and skills, job authority and responsibility, management support, direction, and style, teamwork and cooperation, performance obstacles and job satisfaction, and customer perceptions of service quality

We present our findings to you in the following format:

• Identify the gap between where performance is and where it should be
• Recommend any critical issues requiring immediate action
• Identify primary opportunities for immediate improvement
• Identify primary opportunities for long range improvement
• Establish priorities, completion dates, and accountability for agreed upon actions and improvements
• Provide a common planning format for all action and improvement leaders
• Review and gain commitment to plans
• Offer the option for you to extend our engagement to provide implementation support services.

Please call Bill Werst at [541] 386-1117 to discuss your specific needs.

GROWTH ASSOCIATES EFFECTIVENESS

Our effectiveness is proven enough to offer our 2:1 Return On Investment Client Satisfaction Guarantee. We strive to attain a 5:1 ROI.

$2.4 million first year savings Dealing with the Service and Treatment variables of one client, we reduced emergency orders from 24% to .4% in a six month period while reducing staff and dramatically improving customer satisfaction.

$180,000 inventory solution Working with all three variables [Service, Treatment, and Product] we facilitated an inventory outage from $180,000 to $300.

100% increase in productivity Working with all three variables, our utility client increased Field Service Engineer productivity by over 100% within two months while improving customer satisfaction.

Who are we?

Bill Werst, founder and president of Growth Associates, holds two degrees from Cornell University, a Masters degree in business from California State University, and is a member of the University of Wisconsin's Management Institute Faculty for 26 years, where he is listed as "One of the Management Institute's most effective guest faculty." He has keynoted and presented at 17 national conferences, and designed and implemented leadership programs in both the public and private sector. Growth Associates has been providing assistance to organizations world wide for over 25 years, providing a full range of practical and lasting organizational improvement assistance. The Associates include nationally known professional consultants, enabling Growth Associates to offer expertise in specific organizational arenas.

Who do we serve?

Aer Lingus

Allen Bradley Co.

American Airlines

American Can Co.

Apple Computer

Associations:

American Management Association

Consumer Finance Association

International Customer Service Association

National Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers

National Association of Service Managers

National Handicapped Sports

Banking Institute of America

AT&T

Bank of America

Beckman Instruments

Bell & Howell Co.

Bermuda Gas

BFGoodrich

Black & Decker

Blue Diamond Growers

Bobst

Boeing

Burroughs Corp.

Burlington Northern

Carnation

California State Government - Department of:

Air Resources Board

Consumer Affairs

Corrections

Employment Development

State Personnel Board

Justice

City Bank of New York

Clark Equipment

Continental Can Co.

Detroit Edison

Domino Amjet

Du Pont

Eaton Corporation

Eastman Kodak

Echo

Fisher Controls

FMC

Federal Government:

Air Force

Customs

Forest Service

Parks & Recreation

Golden 1 Credit Union

IBM

Kaiser Hospitals

Lawn-Boy

Loomis Brothers

Loral

Lufthansa

3M Company

McDonnell Corp.

Mettler Instruments Corp.

Monotype Incorporated

New Brunswick

Power & Light

Ohmeda [Ohio Medical Products]

Perkin-Elmer

Pellerin-Milnor

Polaroid Corp.

Quantas Airlines

Sacramento Blood Bank

Sacramento Vision Services

Shonie South [Big Boy's]

Singer Company

Skil Corporation

Sutter Medical Corp.

Telco Systems

Tenneco Packaging

Texas Electric

University Affiliations:

Montana State University

National University

Penn State University

Stanford University

University of Wisconsin [25 years]

Xerox Corp.

 

 

Back to top

Return Home

The Book - Tips, Articles & Presentations - Interact - Casino - About us - Contact us

 

© 2004 Growth Associates
P.O. Box 2039
White Salmon, Washington 98672
509/493-1985 

e-mail bill@growthassociates.org

Web design by Riverside Graphics
e-mail