Customer Service – To some, those words might refer to your work role or your department name. But for others, the words customer service might remind them of long hours wasting time on phone calls, endlessly repeating the same information to representatives but never receiving the information or help needed.

If you think about all the negative customer service experiences you’ve endured, many might just boil down to a very simple concept – a lack of customer focus. That’s because some customer service teams aren’t really working to solve their customers’ problems. Rather, they’re treating their customers like numbers, not people.

Great customer service requires a deep understanding of people and the realization that loyalty is built on cultivating meaningful relationships.

According to WHR Group President, Paul DeBoer, “To truly provide service excellence requires a company to be flexible in its service delivery. That means being available whenever, wherever and however your customer needs you.”

Some larger companies use call centers that operate in an environment that’s not always customer centric. Consider for example, a company that dictates quotas to its call center employees requiring them to answer a certain amount of calls per hour or a certain number of calls per day. These types of environments can lose sight of the personal touch, white-glove service required to provide exceptional excellence.  

What does great customer service really look like?

A proven example of great customer service is demonstrated by well-known service provider, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC. In a Forbes article, Ritz-Carlton President, Herve Humler said that he tells his employees, “You are not servants, because unlike a servant, I want you to be engaged with the customer—you have a brain, you have a heart and I want you to use them.” Humler goes on to explain that employee engagement is crucial to his guest engagement. Ritz-Carlton employees are empowered to fix a guest’s problem and can spend the necessary money (up to a certain limit), without asking permission.

A philosophy of great customer service can be seen in Japan. A commonly known word in the Japanese culture, Omotenashi, refers to wholeheartedly looking after guests. It represents the mindset of hospitality that centers around care rather than expectation. It’s about fulfilling people’s needs. More recently, the term Omotenashi has been associated with customer experience.

Japanese car manufacturer Lexus embraces this philosophy. Dealership employees are empowered to treat customers as they would treat a guest in their home. LEXUS embraces Omotenashi by cultivating a customer-centric culture encouraging employees to “go to any lengths to solve their problems, mechanical or not,” according to an article from Lexus.

What these companies have in common is their dedication to putting the needs of their customers first and treating others as they would want to be treated. It’s about empowering employees with the tools needed to deliver service excellence, and it’s about cultivating a culture of employee engagement where employees care enough to want to be part of that gold star service delivery.  

At WHR Group, we view our role in employee relocation as a privilege. We understand that when our customers succeed, we succeed. We strive for Omotenashi to ensure our service is at its best so that our clients and their employees can focus on what matters most to them. Our service structure is designed for client flexibility and low file counts while our office dynamic fosters open communication between teams. This customer service structure facilitates a relocation experience that is smooth, pleasant and made simple for our clients’ employees and families. We make it our mission to simplify the relocation experience while bringing hard work, trustworthiness, empathy and proactiveness to every facet of what we do.

If you’d like to learn more about WHR’s approach to customer service, and how we can help your relocating employees feel great about their move, please contact us.

There’s a talent shortage. Of course, you already knew that! With competition so high for skilled workers, it’s even more important your talent management strategy includes a solid relocation program that helps attract and retain top talent. Some organizations view relocation simply as a cost center and do not incorporate it into their talent management strategy. This can be a big mistake!

You might be putting lots of effort and resources into attracting, engaging and retaining top talent, but if you’re not incorporating it into your relocation initiatives you may be missing out on a valuable talent pool. It’s important that your transferees relocate with the least amount of disruption to their work and personal lives. Whether they are new employees or existing, the right relocation policy will help transferees navigate this process and help you secure and retain your most important asset.

How a Comprehensive Relocation Program Helps Your Organization

It’s about relocation policies in the context of today’s workers, evaluating their family situations and customizing policies that will address their specific needs, all while providing the maximum benefit to your organization:

• Move transferees as quickly as possible
• Minimize disruption to transferees work roles and personal lives
• Maintain a smooth transition to ensure the least disruption to internal work productivity
• Save organizational expenses by managing the relocation process efficiently and effectively
• Facilitate a diverse workforce by expanding your geographic talent search parameters
• Minimize financial impact to transferees while maximizing benefits to your organization

Are you willing to embrace relocation and re-think mobility as a strategic solution to the talent crisis?

Our goal is to become your employee relocation guide and resource from creating and updating your policies, to matching current best practices, to full program development. Please contact us if you’d like to discuss your organizational relocation needs.

Workflows have become a bit of a buzzword in the business community, and no wonder why! With all the redundant tasks that can pop up in a process, workflows not only help your team perform at their best, they emphasize exactly what contributes to the success of a business. 

This, in turn, dramatically improves business operations by minimizing room for errors and increasing overall efficiency through streamlined and automated tasks. Account managers can make quicker, more effective decisions and employees can collaborate in a more productive and efficient way. 

WHR’s unique workflows create the framework of our technology allowing our team to stay proactive and work on a just in time basis. From our vendor management system that creates metric driven scorecards, to our 100% accurate and compliant invoicing processes—everything is completely integrated so clients and their transferees have a positive relocation experience.

Introducing “myWork One”

Designed to keep the high-touch aspect intertwined throughout every relocation process, “myWork One” monitors every transferee experience for key events and critical dates. This allows our staff to remain aware of all relocation dates/deliverables and consolidate key documents/correspondences into our document repository.

Because our system is fully integrated with DocuSign®, we can use the repository to pull together all file details into a single electronic representation that remains available for easy reference. We want your transferee’s relocation process to be as simple as possible, which is why our workflows offer complete transparency, adaptability, and compliance for every national and international move.

Complex compliance issues can create daily challenges for those managing relocation programs, and the consequences of being non-compliant holds large implications for companies. For this reason, we literally build your policy parameters into our technology. Every expense limit and cap lives within our system and is monitored, tracked, and reported to ensure compliance.

How Do Our Workflows Function?

The best thing about our workflows is they optimize key tasks for our employees to be proactive by seeing and addressing issues before your transferee is even affected. 

As every workflow task is completed, our system will monitor key dates and documents to ensure complete compliance to policy and allow maximum utilization of the relocation benefits.    

Service Partners

We take client and transferee satisfaction very seriously, which is exactly why we have spent years building a quality service partner network that can meet your needs with the highest level of quality service. Transferee satisfaction surveys are the backbone of our service partner’s performance measurements. We utilize the responses to quickly address any service issues, and our leadership and management teams receive immediate alerts if a survey is returned with a score lower than 4 out of 5.

We contribute our success to the commitment we have to provide our clients with the best possible service. The workflows we’ve developed facilitate this superior customer service by providing cost-effective and efficient relocation services. We invite you to learn more about our workflows and the high-quality service we provide to our clients. 

WHR Group is in the business of making the complex simple. However, when it comes to the economy, nothing is black and white. To take pulse of the current economy and the Federal Reserve’s sentiment in 2020, WHR attended an economics luncheon in Milwaukee on January 9th, 2020. The featured speaker was Charlie Evans who has been President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago since September of 2007. 

While Evans emphasized he cannot speak on behalf of his colleagues, he is currently happy with the state of the domestic economy and the current Federal Funds Rate of 1.75% (see Federal Funds Rate). In fact, the U.S. unemployment rate of 3.5% is at its lowest rate in the past 50 years, and the U.S. economy has been enjoying a mature 10 year expansion period, the longest on record in the post-WWII era (What is Unemployment?). 

Even in a decade of expansion, there is always room for economic improvement. Addressing the regional economic outlook, Evans stated that the Upper Midwest is dominated by heavy manufacturing which has struggled to attract workers due to the unusually low unemployment rate. Several business leaders in the Midwest have been held back from expansion plans due to the tight labor market. One way businesses are overcoming this labor challenge is by offering flexible work hours and more attractive work environments. 

On the national level, Evans is a member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) which influences federal monetary policy through the purchasing and selling of U.S. Treasury Securities (Open Market Operations). And while Evans may be happy with the current Federal Funds Rate, he would like to see an improvement in the U.S. inflation rate of 1.7%. The Federal Reserve has an explicit target of 2% symmetric inflation to insulate against zero lower bound risk (Why 2%?). The federal funds rate and inflation are negatively correlated (as interest rates are reduced, more consumers borrow and spend money which increases the inflation rate, and vice versa). Therefore, if the economy is in a downturn and the Federal Funds Rate is already at 0%, this may cause a liquidity trap and limit the capacity that the Federal Reserve has to stimulate economic growth by reducing the Federal Funds Rate.

Will the Federal Reserve consider negative interest rates? Per Evans, no, the U.S. is not seriously contemplating negative interest rates, even though there are multiple central banks across the globe with negative rates (e.g. Japan, Switzerland, and Sweden). Negative interest rates are an unconventional monetary policy tool, and drastic measure to prevent a country from falling into a deflationary spiral (Deflationary Spiral). In simple terms, if consumers want to keep their money in banks, the yield on those accounts would be negative which incentivizes consumers to spend instead of save, similar to a fee for keeping your money in the bank. Interestingly enough, if the Federal Reserve followed this policy during the Great Recession, interest rates would have been -4% to -5%.

If you have questions or insights about how the U.S. economy may impact your global mobility, let us know in the comments below.

Since we wanted to put the power of information in your hands, we created two online portals. One for you, our client, and a second portal for your transferees. Our client and transferee portals are designed with one thing in mind—to make the relocation process simple. Simple means stress-free, streamlined, transparent, informed, and functional. 

Your Client Portal

The client portal houses information regarding employee benefits, data integrity, record retention, and information security. Access everything you need in one place, on any device, and at any time including the following:

•  Customized dashboards that include snapshots of key metrics
• Full access to all file information
• Online authorizations
• Real-time reports and invoices
• Employee satisfaction surveys
• Third-party scorecards
• Contact information for your client service manager/counseling teams with secure, live chat
• Document repository and more!

When clicking on an individual employee, you will be shown an “at a glance” summary of activity. All file notes and status updates are available to review in real-time.

Documents and invoices are also digitally stored within each file and available for review 24/7. Our authorization process is designed to ensure every task is executed correctly, regardless of size or scale.

We will build your policy parameters into our system so that your portal is customized to your specific policy, data requirements, and reporting needs. Controls are built into our system preventing duplication of relocation authorizations and providing an audit trail that will identify input, corrections, amendments, and approvals within each transferee file.

Access and review transferee required documentation and expense submissions for a transparent and easy experience that offers all our customers support. We’ll move your top talent to where you need them in a way that is stress-free, compliant, streamlined, and successful.

Your Transferee Portal 

Our transferee portal offers each transferee and their family access to all available tools and resources for a smooth and easy relocation. Similar to the client portal, the transferee portal houses snapshots of important information directly on the landing page.

We believe that your transferees should have the ability to communicate and submit documents based on their individual preferences, which is why the transferee portal includes the following:

• Live instant messaging with the counseling team
• Expense management
• Assigned benefits summary
• Notifications for required tasks/documents
• Document repository
• Resource center for hellpful websites
• Downloadable guides and checklists

Because physical documents are often a hassle with the potential for delays, our eForms feature means no more hefty paperwork or missing information. Your employees can complete all paperwork securely online from their computer, phone, or tablet, and sign all eForms using DocuSign®.

By putting the power of information into your hands, our portals help to make the complex simple. We invite you to learn more about our client and transferee portals to discover how we can improve turn time and visibility in the relocation process.

It’s hard to believe that we just welcomed in a New Year! As we reflect on the great things that happened in 2019, we’re also excited about renewing our commitment to exceptional service, year-over-year savings, and continued growth as we work with our clients to implement exceptional relocation programs. 

As we look toward the future, we are more dedicated than ever in continually moving in the right direction. All of us at WHR Group feel privileged in the work we do. As part of this, we are proud to share a few of our favorite highlights and achievements from the past year.

Our History

In 2020, we will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of WHR Group. When Roger Thrun started WHR in the bedroom of his house, he never imagined we would become a global relocation management company servicing such a vast diversity of clients in countries across the globe. As we begin to kick off our 25th year, we’re also celebrating the consistent ownership and leadership we’ve had over this time as it has provided a bedrock of consistency in an industry of constant ownership changes.

Award-Winning Culture

WHR was named a Top Workplace for the sixth consecutive year by the Journal Sentinel! We’re also very excited that our CFO, Jami Long, was named CFO of the Year by the Milwaukee Business Journal! We are proud of our leadership team and the commitment and loyalty of our employees. With an employee retention rate of 96.5% and NPS score at +76.8, it’s no wonder our clients are so happy with the tenure, experience, and insight our exceptional professionals offer every single day. We continue to invest in every employee by providing ongoing employee development including GMS, CRP, IT Training, Title Training, Cultural Competency, Presentation Skills, and Emotional Intelligence education.

Year-Over-Year Savings

We’re at it again this year helping our clients save time, effort, energy…and money! Through our policy reviews, expert program recommendations, and partner network utilization, our clients are creating workflow efficiencies, deepening employee engagement, and leveraging their budgets to provide the greatest value.

We Work in Our Client’s Best Interest

Our clients’ relocation requirements reach beyond U.S. borders, and while we have been offering international relocation services on a global scale, it was imperative to look beyond. In order to provide the level of customer service our clients need, we laid the groundwork to open two international offices in 2020. Operations will launch this year in Zurich, Switzerland, and Singapore, to support our global clients.

Technology You Can Rely On

Since compliance is so important, our NIST 800-53 alone features 262 controls. Our information security program is in accordance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Additionally, our technology works to help the planet and your bottom line. Paper-based processes don’t just cost you time—they can have a significant environmental impact as well. We’re committed to helping both and by moving to DocuSign®, we’ve helped save the following:

• 3,716 lbs. of wood
• 9,939 gallons of water
• 8,360 lbs. of CO2
• 549 lbs. of waste

The Best Service You Will Ever Receive

This past year, we continued to enhance the user experience by enabling push notifications, SMS, and videos with upgrades to the transferee and client portals. This has allowed real-time information exchange to correct and improve service issues on the spot. We also enabled a household goods virtual surveying tool to help reduce the number of contacts a transferee needs to engage with throughout the relocation supply chain.

Throughout the coming year, we look forward to building on our strong foundation and achieving even greater heights of accomplishment. Whether you are an employee, client, or service partner, our goal is to advance lives forward. We want to provide an impact directly to you as we help people move to new places and experience new opportunities every day.