Case: Pirkanmaan Osuuskauppa – 40 million opportunities

Exceptional experiences for customers

Thanks to the collaboration, employee satisfaction has improved significantly: the TYT index has increased by as much as 2.4 percentage points. Pirkanmaan Osuuskauppa was one of the best chains in terms of customer satisfaction in 2016.

”The amount of spontaneous positive customer feedback has increased. The heart-felt action mindset has been successfully instilled in the personnel’s actions and vocabulary. During our collaboration in 2016, 3.1 million heart-felt actions were logged”, says Tero Hassinen, HR Director at Pirkanmaan Osuuskauppa.

”The senior and middle management are unanimous about the importance and promotion of this matter. Some managers have said that heart-felt actions have brought new motivation and meaning to their personal work”, says Timo Mäki-Ullakko, CEO at Pirkanmaan Osuuskauppa.

A service culture revolution

Pirkanmaan Osuuskauppa updated its strategy in autumn 2014. ”We started with two themes: an amazing customer experience and a good place to work. The projects built around these themes have aimed to revolutionise our service culture”, Hassinen says.

The collaboration between Trainers’ House and POK focused on the service and management culture. The goal of the collaboration was to accelerate the implementation of strategy by making the customer experience a matter of pride for personnel.

The customer experience at the core of management

The customer experience became the core of the management. We built the Heart-felt Action Model to ensure that results were quantifiable.  Heart-felt actions are encounters that have a particularly positive effect on the customer’s experience. “To manage the change in the service culture, we set up an Operations Centre. Operations Centre meetings involve business managers leading change together”, Hassinen says.