Culture Change at California Business Machines Drives Service to New Heights

As any seasoned manager will tell you, getting staff buy-in on a new idea or way of doing work is tough. Sometimes to get your people to change, you as a manager have to change. That’s the challenge that California Business Machines (CBM) in Fresno, California, faced four years ago when it decided that its service department needed to change the way it worked.

“That goes back to family and taking care of the customer and also being local, because no company is perfect, and you make mistakes, whatever those mistakes may be or are perceived by the customer,” said company president Teri Brymer. When a customer calls with a problem now, the response is, “How do we make this right?”

Teri Brymer with IT tech Dave Clayton with friend Darth Vader at Tulare County’s 2016 Annual Tech Fair

CBM currently has 22 employees, including six service techs plus an IT tech. A customer support person does training, supports an MPS program, and manages the FMAudit tracking. Those six service techs service 35 percent more machines than the average tech. How it achieved that efficiency has earned CBM the BEI/ENX Platinum Office Technology Service Excellence Award.

To get to the level of service excellence that CBM has today, the company began a big cultural change four years ago. At that time, Brymer had taken over management of the company from her mother. “My parents started California Business Machines back in 1953, so we will be 63 years old this December,” said Teri Brymer, CBM president. “Our main mission of providing office technology, services and support to our customers has stayed consistent over the years. We’re a mid‑sized dealer. I think not too small, not too big.” CBM started out selling and servicing manual typewriters and adding machines, and started selling Mita copiers in the 1970’s through the transition to Kyocera and still today. “It’s been a great partnership. We do right by them, and they do right by us,” said Brymer.

What drove the cultural change was employees’ perceived priority on profit. Brymer wanted a customer-centric attitude. For example, service techs should be making decisions based on what’s right for the customer, not necessarily what’s most profitable for CBM.

Most of the companies that CBM serves are family and locally owned small- to mid-sized businesses, much like CBM. “We also do a lot with local government, a lot of county, cities, churches, schools, and we have local large companies that we deal with as well,” said Brymer. “They really feel like a part of the California Business Machines family.”

Business is good for CBM, with double-digit growth. “With Kyocera alone we did 20 percent over the prior year, so that’s good. [Growth is] tied in with service excellence,” said Dick Elixman, owner of Business Systems Consulting. “The better we take care of our customers, the easier it is to get both the growth and sales volume. [Prospects] call our customers and find out that we have a good reputation for service.”

Equipment sales are growing a little faster than service sales, due in part to a marketing focus on new accounts. About 45 percent of CBM’s equipment sales come from new opportunities, either businesses that have not been customers or customers returning after leaving CBM for at least 12 months. 60 percent of CBM’s revenue growth comes from equipment sales and 40 percent from services and supplies.

CBM Showroom

Brymer is confident that the improvement in its service delivery is helping build customer loyalty. It’s also having an indirect positive effect on new sales, including a big government account in the Superior Court of Fresno County. “They weren’t happy with their current situation, and they were very focused on getting the right product and mostly getting the right service and response time,” she said. “You can imagine that the Court needs everything up and running all the time, so they need us to respond quickly when it isn’t.”

After CBM put in a bid, the Superior Court started calling into its account base, including its two largest customers – Fresno and Tulare Counties. “They got excellent testimonials about us and they felt very good about going with us,” said Brymer. “We’ve had them now since last spring, so not quite a year. We meet with them quarterly, and they love us, so we’ve done everything right. I think it’s apparent that our support at every level has been good before, but improved.”

Keeping the Momentum Going

To maintain growth and adapt as the marketplace changes, CBM needs good data on how its service department is performing. Access to data not only helps identify problems, but also helps to develop and coach service techs once they are hired.

“BEI is the tool that allows us to have a base of information that hits all the key spots that we want service technicians to perform,” said Elixman. He said it’s not necessarily about overall performance, but knowing on which areas to focus a tech’s coaching—for example, noting that one tech has a high recall rate. “By using a coaching approach, we get one to improve then move ahead. Every day, every month, we’re looking for an individual we want to become better,” he said.

To encourage buy-in and create incentive, CBM uses a metric-based pay system. “We don’t employ a merit‑based type of pay solution where we pay them for staying,” said Elixman. “A metric-based pay system defines what they’ll be paid in six months in their semiannual review for performing and getting better at what they do. They have to not only do their base job, but they have to meet three objectives. One is a workgroup objective, one is a personal development objective, and another that is specific in their job that they need to change.”

“BEI is the basis for everything we move forward with in the next five years to attain certain metrics or certain outcomes,” said Elixman. One of those outcomes is first‑call efficiency. “What is that percentage of calls that they actually fixed on the first call?” BEI can identify the drivers of first call efficiency, such as whether the tech had the right parts or did not troubleshoot correctly.

The cultural change and access to service data through BEI has changed the way CBM manages its service department. “We coach instead of dictate,” said Elixman. One of Elixman’s responsibilities at CBM is to coach the service manager to properly operate a service department.

CBM’s service manager, Bill Cooper, had been a field manager, not a service manager. “His skill set is absolutely second to none in working with the people, but you see in terms of really managing a service department, that was not first nature to him,” said Elixman. Using the data from BEI, Elixman has shown Cooper to tie it together with productivity goals, so he in turn can coach the service techs. “He’s learning how to move the numbers that are in a trend line—keep that trend line so that first-call efficiency number keeps improving every month or every quarter,” said Elixman.

Another key to maintaining growth is creating career paths and hiring younger people into the industry. “We employ what we call a customer service representative who touches base with the customers, helps them solve problems, and makes sure that everybody gets everything that they need,” said Elixman. This is an entry-level position, but very important. Elixman said that because this person wants to build a career, he responds well to being challenged to constantly do better.

Overcoming Resistance

When CBM first rolled out the BEI program, the service techs were skeptical about the information. “If I’m a service tech, I prefer not to have anyone talking to me about my activity,” said Elixman. “We’re getting into a very personal neighborhood when you start showing someone their report card. As a matter of fact, before we have all this dialed in, I never show the report cards to the technician because it would be too startling to them.”

CBM started with “little bits and basics” such as first-call efficiency. A tech might think he has 70 percent efficiency, but the data says 26 percent. That provides the opportunity to show how BEI arrived at that percentage. “BEI does a great job of presenting it in a simple enough manner that with three or four sessions you can do that, but it’s always about that data,” said Elixman.

“Until we reach a buy in of 80 percent and preferably 90 percent of the technicians, you cannot move on to coaching with this,” said Elixman. “If they disregard the information, then why would that help us, why would they believe it?”

CBM has shown that a family focus and customer-centric culture make for engaged employees and loyal customers. An environment like that makes tools like BEI that much more effective.