A husband and father of three, an avid golfer, a fitness aficionado, a wine lover (in moderation) and a cable industry expert. That’s Mike Burnett in a nutshell. Prior to coming to California, Mike served as Vice President of Field Operations in the Oregon/SW Washington region. Mike also previously served as Vice President of Sales Channel Effectiveness for the West Division, where he was responsible for product sales, working with all six regions cross our residential field sales channels, including Xfinity stores, direct sales, indirect retail and Xfinity Communities.
What attracted you to this role in California?
First of all, it’s California! I’ve been in the West Division for eight years. There is a saying that Bill Strahan said recently. He said that the company’s leadership is like the weather. It starts from West and it goes to East. The West Division has led the company in many ways and if you break it down even further, a lot of that starts in California: high performance, innovation, creativity and setting the bar for the division and the company. And once you start to meet the team, and not just Tech Ops but the whole region, you realize that you want to be a part of such a high-performing team.
What are the challenges that come with being the VP with the largest organization?
The one obvious challenge is getting to know your team. It’s not just the size of the organization, which is 2,300 counting internal employees and business partners, but also the geography. With 34 field offices from Ukiah all the way to Santa Barbara, geography can be challenging too. One of the things that’s very important to me is being visible and getting to know my team. I’m trying to figure out the best and most efficient way to be present with my team. You can’t shake every hand every day, but you can get creative and leverage technology such as video conference, broadcast, and allocate time to be on the field.
The second challenge from a communication standpoint, is that with an organization of this size and complexity we need to ensure that we are all aligned and on the same boat driving the same priorities.
How have your roles in sales and marketing prepared you for this role in Tech Ops?
It helps connect the dots across the business. We are not just about installing and service. You need to understand what feeds the activity model because a big part of what we do every day is resource management. We are trying to line up from an efficient perspective what’s going to happen that day, that week and that month based on activity. I do have a good understanding in connecting the dots around forecasting and how that translates into how we build our manpower resource model and stay aligned around the resource management part of the job. It also helps to understand the customer journey from end-to-end. From the point of a sale to a point of install. Understand where there may be opportunities within that process and help improve the overall customer experience.
What are your goals of 2020?
I would say that my goals fall into three buckets.
- Overarching this Endless Pursuit of Perfecting the Customer Experience
At the end of the day, everything we do is geared toward the customer experience. We recently launched something called Trust which is a training module that sets expectations for our technicians in the field around the behaviors that they should be demonstrating in the home or business so that we can drive a consistent experience in terms of what our customers would expect in terms of how we interact with them.
One of the things we know about our customers is that the less we touch them, the better their experience is. A big initiative for 2020 is how do we continue to reduce the negative activity from the business. We are going to have a big focus this year on how we get to one truck roll. Touch our customer one time, get it right the first time so that we don’t have to go back and touch our customers again because we know that the better we can do that, the better overall experience our customers have.
- All Around, our Employees
We recently announced significant changes in terms of how we are going to operate as a business, both in supply chain and how we support our technicians in the field. That’s how we simplify the employee experience so we can continue to simplify the customer experience. A big part of this year is how we transition into the new model in an effective way and in a way that doesn’t disrupt our techs in the field. Ultimately as we get to instating both of those initiatives, that we have truly simplified the experience for our employees so we can make it easier for them to do their job for our customers.
- Net Promoter System (NPS)
How do we stay highly engaged for our leaders? How do we stay highly engaged for customer callbacks? How do we double down and get more engage in the elevation process with our employees? How do we hold ourselves more accountable to those fundamentals; because I think that as leaders, we have to drive that consistency.
What’s your passion outside work?
I love to play golf and I’m highly competitive. I’ve done some Spartan races; I like to challenge myself. One of the things I’m more excited about living in California is being an hour from Monterey and an hour from Napa. I do enjoy wine (in moderation). I love the outdoors, hiking and camping.