The notion of helping people is so fundamental to Nashville, TN-based ENA, a provider of network and technology solutions to K-12 school networks and public libraries, that when you visit the homepage of the 12-year-old firm's website, it is fitting that a different employee's picture, name and title appear each time, accompanied by a few words about what helping their customers means to them.
The company's president, David Pierce, who assumed leadership of the company five years ago, also pops up, with the quote, "Meeting the needs of our network of one million users requires much more than high-speed connectivity. It requires people with exceptional dedication to supporting our customers."
This is not mere jargon. Pierce can make the employee-to-customer connection without wandering into cliché because he's been in the trenches with them, continually bringing them back to the basics, which for ENA means not just satisfying their customers, but delighting them. "We have kind of a higher purpose," Pierce says. "And that is to help teachers and administrators do a better job of teaching school children."
In 2002, shortly after Pierce became CEO and chairman of the firm, the company experienced allegations stemming from a questionable government contract that affected a number of companies, including ENA. Although employees of the company knew these allegations to be untrue, and later they were indeed proven untrue, ENA nevertheless faced a federal hold on funding, which prevented 70 percent of receivables from being collected for a year and a half.
Jean Schmidt, chief people officer at the firm for almost eight years, remembers that time vivdly. Although keeping ENA afloat meant reducing staff by 50 percent, Pierce concentrated his energies on rebounding with his remaining employees. His multi-prong approach to reach this goal included increasing employee communication, improving retention packages to entice remaining employees to stay and, later, hiring strong managers from outside who could implement and strengthen practices geared toward employee participation, as a segue to attaining unparalleled customer satisfaction.
"I think that was a maturing process for our organization that became very health for us," Schmidt says. "A lot of that had to do with David. He is so trustworthy, and that was just felt among the employees. Sometimes he told us the brutal truth – maybe more than we wanted to hear – but he made sure we knew what was going on."
The controversy went away and the receivables were collected. But that's not the end of the story. The foundation of caring for and nurturing employees as a means to both help them develop and to maintain the benchmark of a delighted customer base continues. It changed the culture, and the staff never looked back.
Some of this stems from data on ENA's customers that Pierce has been collecting for the last four years. He sends two surveys to each customer each year. Each survey contains 25 questions, and in each six-month cycle Pierce and the leadership create four to five new questions to ask. Pierce says that these surveys have received an unusually high response rate of between 80 and 90 percent.
Both this customer survey and an internal survey for employees that helps gather retention data have reached 99 percent satisfied rates the last two years.
What has led to such high satisfaction on the employee side? Many developments, but perhaps chief among them being a willingness by the leadership to work closely with employees to help them develop large-scale program initatives and see them through. For example, Merle Gruesser, who has served as the state director of ENA's Indiana office in Indianapolis for almost two years, is busy working on a "Challenges and Opportunities" effort that will influence the company's competitive service offerings in the state.
Gruesser is clearly excited about the opportunity. "We are really examining how to be more successful going forward – not just in Indiana, but across the country, into new markets that we may be serving," she says. (Besides Tennessee and Indiana, ENA also currently serves the public school system in Orlando, FL.)
Then there's the opportunity for advancement, which is very high at the firm despite the fact it has only 70 employees. Michael McKerley is a walking example of this, having joined the company six years ago as an engineer and taken several emerging opportunities to arrive at his current role as director of research and development – a role he created to address a gap in resources that he saw in his previous roles at ENA in product design and marketing.
There is an oft-heard sports analogy that relates to business, which goes something like this: A team can have earned the trophy last season, or it could have ended up in last place. Regardless, at the start of the next season they're all on equal playing field, in practices working on the fundamentals. At ENA, under Pierce's leadership, those fundamentals are the people who work for the company and the people the company serves.
McKerley puts it best: "People who in other companies are barely empowered to do anything other than answer the phone and generate a trouble ticket number, here can change configurations on the fly make things work, right then and there. That's why I think people enjoy working here."
Company: ENA
Website: www.ena.com
Industry: Network and technology solutions provider
Location: Nashville, TN
Number of employees: 70
Sales: $40 million
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