1. 12
Celebrate and record
Customer satisfaction:
the Xerox Canada story
Susan E. Robinson
The author
Susan E. Robinson is Vice-President, Education and
Training, at Xerox Canada.
Abstract
Looks at how Xerox Canada modified the Xerox
Corporation’s “Leadership through quality” strategy to
focus specifically on customer satisfaction. Traces the
development of the corporation from its birth to uncon-
tested market leadership and into the competitive world of
today. Notes that the biggest challenge in approaching the
quality programme was the attainment of higher levels of
customer satisfaction and reports how this was achieved.
Concludes that the corporation still has some way to go on
the journey to quality.
Just over 50 years ago, Chester Carlson invented
xerography, a technology that revo- lutionized
office productivity around the world and led to
the creation of the Xerox
Corporation. Xerox quickly grew to become a
multibillion-dollar, international company.
For years, we were the world’s uncontested
and primary supplier of copiersand duplica- tors.
We lost that status in the late 1970s, however,
when our unique technology
became available to suppliers at large and, for the
first time in our history, we found our- selves
facing stiff competition. The threat from the
Japanese alone was fierce – their products were
not only innovative, but they were being sold at a
low price. The effect on Xerox was dramatic –
our share of worldwide copier revenues dropped
every year from
1976 through to 1982. It was clear that we had
to change how we did business radically.
In the early 1980s, David Kearns, Xerox’s
chief executive officer, began studying suc- cessful
organizations throughout the world to see how they
operated. He paid particular attention to the
Japanese. He found that, whereas Fuji-Xerox and
other Japanese com- panies took a systematic
approach to running their business, we were
primarily functioning on intuition. We gradually
realized that our organization was not properly
prepared to do business in a competitive
environment: our business practices and
management struc- tures and philosophies had
evolved as those of a company accustomed to
uncontested lead- ership. We had become
internally focused. As a result, we had failed to
keep pace with our customers’ changing
requirements in product innovation and services.
Our processes were undisciplined; we accepted
errors and rework as a norm, and the energies,
talents, and ideas of our employees were
essentially untapped.
Given this knowledge, we decided to move
towards quality through a fundamental, and
systematic change in how we ran the business. The
strategy by which we would implement the quality
policy was christened “Leadership through
quality”. The initial goals of the leadership
through quality programme were
to make sure that everybody in Xerox talked
Managing Service Quality
Volume 7 · Number 1 · 1997 · pp. 12–15
MCB University Press · ISSN 0960-4529
This article first appeared in the Forum Corpora-
tion’s Forum Issues, and is reprinted here with
permission. For further details of its diagnostics,
consulting and training services, contact The Forum
Corporation at One Exchange Place, Boston, MA,
USA.

2. 13
Managing Service Quality
Volume 7 · Number 1 · 1997 · 12–15
Customer satisfaction: the Xerox Canada story
Susan E. Robinson
the same language of quality, to develop universal
processes and disciplined work and to encourage
team building. The primary reason we focused on
quality as an objective was so we could streamline
our work, reduce our costs, and increase the
ability of our products to conform to customer
specifica- tions. Total customer satisfaction as a
goal,in and of itself, did not come along until later
in the process, and Xerox Canada played a
leadership role in this important area.
This article focuseson how Xerox Canada, a
5,100-person operation with annual rev- enues in
excess of $1.1 billion, modified the Xerox
Corporation’s leadership through quality strategy
to focus specifically on cus- tomer satisfaction.
Today, the Xerox Corpo- ration worldwide has
embraced the customer satisfaction vision. Now,
for more than
110,000 employees, customer satisfaction is the
number one priority. Our corporate cul- ture has
been irrevocably changed. In late
1989, the Canadian Government recognized our
achievement, awarding us the country’s first Gold
Medal Quality Award in the Cana- da Awards
forBusiness Excellence – Quality Category.
Defining quality at Xerox Canada
Although Xerox Canada was eager to become a
quality company, we knew that many quality tools
and processes had originally been devel- oped for a
linear manufacturing environment. Since we are
primarily a sales and service organization, the
basic quality issues, such as reducing product
defects, did not have much application for us.
What, we wondered, did being a quality company
mean to Xerox Canada? What did we need to do
differently tomorrowfrom what we were doing
today?
Before expanding the extensive training effort
that the leadership through quality programme
encompassed, we did some research. After
surveying our customers, studying the competition
and analysing our strengths and weaknesses, we
realized that, as an organization, our biggest
challenge was to attain much higher levels of
customer satisfac- tion. Customers were judging
us not only on our products, but also on a whole
range of key interactions they had with us on a
day-to-day basis; for example, invoicing, repair,
delivery, installation and complaint handling. They
found our invoices difficult to read, were
inconvenienced by how long it took us to resolve
billing problems, and could, in some
areas of the country, obtain their electronic
typewriters and copiers from our competition in
less than half the time that it took us to deliver
them.
It became clear to us that quality meant adding
value to the customer experience – not just meeting
internal standards. At the same time, we also
realized that having superior customer satisfaction
was the only way we could differentiate ourselves
from the compe- tition.
Inverting the pyramid
As our quality plan evolved, the most impor- tant
fact to emerge was that we needed to understand
customer requirements better. We eventually came
to realize that the power at Xerox Canada had to be
shifted to front-line employees – the sales, service
and administra- tive staff who deal directly with
customers daily and represent Xerox to them.
In the old Xerox, the organizational struc- ture
was a pyramid with the senior staff at the top of
the organization, controlling every- body’s
activities. The people who dealt with our
customers on a day-to-day basis had little way of
getting through this hierarchy, so the customer was
often left out of the loop. In redesigning our
organizational structure, we decided to adopt the
structural concept of an inverted pyramid – with
customers at the top, immediately supported by
our front-line employees, who in turn are
supported by management. We changed the
management role from one of controlto one of
support – today, our employees are top
management’s customers.
The role of training
In watching the Japanese, we learned that one of
the hallmarks of a total quality company is the
consistency with which processes and tools are
applied within the organization. Everyone, from
the boardroomto the shopfloor, must speak the
same language of
quality improvement. In designing the leader- ship
through quality strategy, we knew that one of our
biggest challenges would be to change the way
Xerox people think. We used training as the
primary vehicle to communi- cate the content,
language, and importance of the leadership through
quality strategy.
• Basic training. The Xerox Corporation
introduced a programme called “Basic
leadership through quality” which has

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Managing Service Quality
Volume 7 · Number 1 · 1997 · 12–15
Customer satisfaction: the Xerox Canada story
Susan E. Robinson
become an integral part of the training for our
100,000 employees worldwide. It covers
three basic areas: how to improve the work
you do; how to fix problems; and how to work
with people. Today, new
employees must receive this training within
90 days of joining the organization.
At Xerox Canada, we took this core
training and rewrote it to focus more on
customer satisfaction. While we continued
to emphasize the Xerox Corporation’s
quality goals, we decided to create a differ-
ent context, one which focused on what the
external customer valued most. With 5,000
employees to train, our initial roll-out was a
massive undertaking representing at least
25,000 training days over a two-year
period. Training was supported by orienta-
tion sessions, videos and top-management
presentations.
We chose to cascade the training pro-
gramme. Training is done in “family
groups” consisting of a manager, who has
received prior training in preparation, and
his or her direct reports. A professional
trainer, assisted by the manager, conducts
the week-long, problem-solving and quali-
ty-improvement training. Following the
training, the manager works with the fami-
ly group to apply what they learned,in
their day-to-day work. Members of the
group then co-teach with a trained facilita-
tor before a group of people in their area.
In this way, the training cascades right
through the organization, so that a person
in the classroom always learns from a
manager what quality is all about.
• Management training. Probably the biggest
area which needed attention was manage-
ment behaviours – five or six days with the
basic leadership through quality training
was not going to change how our people
managed. One of the key things we found
was that managers did not have the knowl-
edge and skills or the behaviours which we
needed them to have in our new definition
of their role. If we were expecting our
managers to act as role models and to
support their people, we had to make sure
they were living the quality approach.
After completing a benchmark study of
how other companies trained their man-
agers, we decided that everyone at the
management level should receive 40 hours
of management training each year. This
would be in addition to the core leadership
through quality training and any other
training already included in their education
programme. The training, which used Forum’s
Influence programme, was designed to teach
people how to become quality managers – to be
open and honest, to develop trust with their
people, and to develop a working environment
which would allow for innovation, creativity,
and nurturing. Influence taught the kinds of
behaviours which we wanted our managers to
have. Also, it was critical to implement a
feedback-based course, because our man- agers
might not have seen anything wrong with their
management style as it had worked in the past.
Influence helped us change how people
worked. In the leadership through quality
programme, people learn what quality is all
about, and then in Influence they get right down
to how to make sure that quality happens.
At Xerox Canada, we believe that train- ing
is going to enable us to prepare our workforce
for the future. In late 1989, we integrated our
five training departments together into one so
we could implement a common vision and
processes for the education of our workforce. In
1990, we strategically placed this area within
the organization by naming a vice-president for
education and training.
Innovations
In trying to manage the customer experience
better, we developed numerous ways to improve
customer satisfaction at each Xerox
Canada/customer interaction point.
• Introducing teamwork. By introducing team-
work at all levels of the organization, we have
dramatically changed how decisions are made at
Xerox Canada, particularly those regarding
cross-functional customer issues. We started at
the senior levelby having the president of Xerox
Canada meet with its vice-presidentsonce a
month for two days to review the progress we
were making and to plan for future changes.
As a mirror image of top management’s
monthly meeting, each district also now holds
a monthly daylong meeting of its top people to
look specifically at issues of customer
satisfaction. Vice-presidents participate in
these meetings to lend head- office support. In
addition to training each district on how to
conduct these meetings, we have designed
specific processes for

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Managing Service Quality
Volume 7 · Number 1 · 1997 · 12–15
Customer satisfaction: the Xerox Canada story
Susan E. Robinson
them to follow as they examine customer
complaints. Complaints that are not resolved
within 15 days, for example, get elevated
through the system to the head office, where
they come before the Cus- tomer Satisfaction
Council. This council is a group comprising
the directors of each of the major functions,
such as billing, pric- ing, and service, as well
as several vice- presidents and our president.
These structural changes have resulted in
improved cross-functional teamwork, increased
communication, better imple- mentation of
programmes, and much more efficient, cost-
effective processes.
• Managing the customer experience. We have also
created the position of customer busi- ness
representative – a person who takes over the
customer relationship after the order-taking
point. Before, three depart- ments and
numerous people were involved with inputting
orders, ordering equipment and scheduling
deliveries. Today, one person takes care of all
of these steps to ensure consistent
communications and successful installations
and, of course, much higher levels of customer
satisfac- tion.
• Involving employees. Our quality policy states
that quality improvement is the job
of every Xerox employee. In addition to the
extensive training each employee receives, we
support our employees in their efforts to
improve quality with a quality specialists
network, which comprises over 100 people
across Canada, and an answer centre, an
800-number hotline which provides imme-
diate assistance to employees seeking
information for their customers.
• Xerox-initiated call strategy. Customer
satisfaction in the copier area of our busi- ness
has always been driven by one key
characteristic: responsiveness. We imple-
mented a major, highly innovative strategy to
reduce response time and prevent machine
down-time: the “Xerox-initiated call
strategy”. It was a unique way to deliv- er
preventive maintenance just before a machine
would normally require repair. By instituting
measurements on the perfor- mance of our
equipment and systems, we can prevent
problems before they arise. This, in turn, has
given us more time to respond to service calls.
As a result, our response time decreased
dramatically – from an average of eight hours in
1986
to 4.5 hours at the end of 1988.
Approximately 2.5 per cent of all service
calls are now Xerox Canada initiated.
Supporting change
We realized early on that we were introducing a
very disciplined approach to a business
environment which historically had not rewarded
discipline. The success of a quality approach,
which involves confronting things and demanding
change, depends to some extent on senior
management saying: “Take the risk – challenge the
system. You’re not going to lose your job over
this”. It also depends on an organizational belief
system. To help build this belief system, we
changed our performance appraisal process, the
crite- ria for promotion to management, and our
recognition and reward programmes. Xerox
Canada’s bonus system for managers, for
example, has been revised to include payment for
improving customer satisfaction. We also
supported a move to cross-functional team- work,
paying people for common goals as well as for their
individual functional goals.
Final thoughts
Like the Japanese organizations we studied in the
early 1980s, we now collect a lot of data and
measure how we are doing in all areas of our
business. Since 1984, we have increased our sales
productivity significantly. We have dramatically
reduced our overall order- through-install period.
Our employees also like the new Xerox Canada.
We have a better work environment, people are
more trustwor- thyand open, and they feel they
can take greater risks. Most important, our
customers tell us they are much more satisfied
with our overall service.
Changing Xerox Canada’s culture has not
been easy. I use an analogy that what we have
been trying to do is rewire the house with the
electricity on – while trying to improve our
business, we still have to 3.
When we began our quality journey, David
Kearns, chairman and CEO of Xerox Corpo-
ration, said: “We are no longer the company we
once were. We are not yet the company we want to
be”. This still holds true today, as we strive to
improve the products and services continually we
provide our customers and our people.