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Top five leasing firm Arval is reorganising the way it handles customer's contracts by introducing dedicated account teams to manage individual clients, with the intention of improving its customer service to businesses.
The process involves pooling specialist staff, who would previously have been spread across multiple contracts, into individual groups to better deal with queries and problems raised by its fleet customers.
Benoit Dilly, the company's newly appointed managing director, told BusinessCar: "Instead of having a task for a department, you put them all together around a table - all the skills, experience and resources you need to sort out all the customer requests - in one team.
So you have people from ordering, procurement, quoting, delivery, managing accidents, end of contract, customer service analysts - they are all together and they work for one customer. As a team they are responsible for delivering all the services requested by the customer."
"Let's call that the 'middle office', which basically [starts with] the quotation and ordering [and covers everything] until the end of the contract," explained Dilly. Here in the UK we are reorganising our middle-office team with the concept of named account teams.
The process of collating the teams has already begun and is due to be completed by the end of the year, after which it will be treated as a "continuous improvement project" for a further year.
It also follows a trial that took place with two of the firm's large customers a year ago.
"The feedback. was 'it's absolutely fantastic. It changes the way you focus on us and not your internal problems,'" Dilly continued. "We expect a lot of tangible improvements in the way we deliver our services to customers and the way we sort out their problems."
He explained that most of the issues the teams are likely to deal with will be day-to-day logistical problems, but they're the ones that make a difference to fleets.
"It can be 'I don't need this car tomorrow' or 'I don't need this car any more' or 'we have extra mileage, what do we do?' or 'this car needs to be here tomorrow but we've changed the driver'," he said.
"It's not big problems, but if you put all of the staff together on one team, they're very responsive and it works better."
Dilly noted that similar management programmes had been rolled out within other Arval businesses across Europe, to good effect.
"It's nothing new for Arval - we've done it in many countries," he said. "We'll use it here - we need to adjust a few things but the concept is well known."
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