ORIGIN STORY
Shawn Kelly, Asurion’s Director of Major Appliance Repair, has worked for the tech repair company for almost 17 years and is now hitting his first year in this current role. His 17-year history at Asurion makes him the poster child for the company’s commitment to developing and promoting talent from within.
“I just have typically tended to bet on myself, and I really don’t like saying no to good opportunities. It’s opened a lot of doors to me. And that mindset really accelerates the learning curve, accelerates the career development, and accelerates leadership thinking, and that’s been really helpful,” Kelly says.
Kelly started work in Asurion’s roadside assistance business before moving on to a series of liaison and partner performance management roles. He found himself back at the call center leading large teams when he heard of the opportunity to lead the Major Appliance Repair department earlier this year.
“I was pretty passionate about it. I had some experience from Asurion’s retail business, as well as [the] extended service contract for Home Depot and a few other retailers,” he says. Along with Kelly’s continuing interest in field operations, these factors made the role hugely attractive to him.
“At root, we’re building a network of people who repair appliances, refrigerators, stoves, washers, dryers, dishwashers, over-the-range units, and microwaves. Our team goes into customer homes, figures out what their issues are, and repairs them,” Kelly says, maintaining that the role goes deeper than that in ways that description doesn’t cover.
Kelly wants customers to have the peace of mind of having a trusted repair network at their disposal.
“A lot of times in the industry, unless you know someone, you don’t know who to call first, and it can be pretty stressful for the customers. And so, we have an opportunity to go in to do a great job [and] deliver a fantastic customer experience,” he says. “We value bringing a diverse and different team to the challenge. And ultimately, you know, we connect people to subscription services that give[s] them peace of mind and save[s] them money in the long run.”
Kelly says Asurion’s Appliance+ Repair plan appeals to three kinds of people:
- People who are concerned about the catastrophic failure of appliances and the associated costs.
- People who don’t know who to call for help.
- People who know the kind of service they want and know Asurion delivers it.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
“I think our customer orientation is probably the biggest difference. We tend to put ourselves in their shoes and think about the experience from their angle,” Kelly explains.
He says the strategy is to hire repair workers who have a certain amount of experience. Then, Asurion is confident they can scale and grow employees and teach new hires the appliance business. This way, customers get the best experience and don’t encounter the sort of “I can’t get this done for you today, and here’s why” non-repair outcome.
“We’re really focused on ‘How do we make it easier for the customer? How do we give them [the]opportunity to get pulled forward in the schedule? How do we help them along the way, even when the outcome isn’t perfect? And how do we doggedly obsess over making that experience perfect?’” he says. “And the best outcome for the customer isn’t ‘Hey; we can order parts and reschedule you in two weeks from today.’ It needs to be ‘How do we solve this right here? How do we prioritize first thing tomorrow morning?’ Because that’s more convenient. I think that’s where we’re headed, and it’s a really important differentiator for us.”
To achieve this, the company stages a kind of pre-triage to understand and predict a customer’s issue and potentially order parts ahead of time.
“When our people go into the home, the first thing we expect them to do is [to] ask the customer to explain the situation. Because sometimes the notes from an experienced person don’t speak the customer’s language,” Kelly explains. “Not only are we repairing any problem, but we’re helping that customer kind of understand how to make the appliance work better for them along the way.”
PACE OF HIRING TO COME
Kelly says that the division recently added upwards of 180 new experts a month to the team, but it has currently hit the pause button to solve a few growing pains.
“In the very near future [we] will scale up, and we’ll continue to grow,” he says. “There will be 1,000 people on the team probably within the year. And then we’ll double that. We’re very bullish. So there’s a real need for us to find people to do the work.”
The company smartly relies on a three-tiered hiring system, with a need for all three types of candidates:
- Entry-level experience
- Moderate experience
- Very experienced
“Within that, we’re working to build a job progression because there’s a significant pay difference as you build experience and certifications. And, I think that there’s a real value in bringing people in at a good living wage and then teaching them the business,” he says. “We think, longer-term, that those senior roles will have a large coaching contingent to it eventually to teach the very technical aspects. We’re very passionate about coaching.”
“We have a very structured leadership development program that all our leaders go through that’s self-driven,” Kelly says. “I’ve gone through it. So I take these things for granted, like frequent performance conversations like self-reflection about opportunities. All of these things are kind of natural to me, but I realized as people come in from a ‘mom and pop shop’ and join us that this does not feel the same. And so we have to be really thoughtful about that along the way,” he adds, noting that all three of the experience tiers represent hiring challenges in different areas Asurion serves.
THE DIFFERENCE IN ASURION’S CULTURE
About the company’s culture, Kelly admits it’s not for everyone.
“Very traditionally-minded people who like very rigid processes and long lead times and that, see comfort in the black and white,” he says. “It is very difficult for them to adapt to us because we are fast-moving. I have adopted the word ‘scrappy’ lately. We’re confident we can move very quickly because we’ve got[a] very good listening culture. We’re good at listening to our team members, getting feedback, testing,failing fast and adjusting course very quickly. There’s an entrepreneurial [spirit], even though we’re a large company.”
Kelly says successful Asurion employees are goal-oriented and love a challenge. The company has a pay-for-performance philosophy when it comes to the competitive wages it offers. Kelly says monthly incentives for sales are also a differentiator.
“Also, we seem to attract people who just naturally want to raise the bar,” Kelly says. “And people who have a competitive nature tend to thrive as long as they’re doing it the right way.”
And of course, people with career orientation and a personal growth mindset will thrive on Asurion’s coaching and feedback.
“It’s really intentional development through the year, and we spend a lot of time on our frontline leaders because they have such an impact. And those coaches have more coaching conversations than almost anyone else in our business because they have fairly large teams. And so we invest heavily in that. We spend a lot of time in huddles,” he says. “It’s something we really pride ourselves on.”
CONTINUED SUCCESS
“Right now, we’re focused on stabilizing the customer experience and getting to a place where we’re faster than anyone else in the business, and our supply chain and our integration [are] seamless. We are very focused on getting our service to world-class status very quickly to enable our growth,” Kelly says.
“Our people who are most engaged and most enjoy the work are people-oriented and have that problem-solving ability. … They’re driven more by the idea that they took [an]appliance that didn’t work for this person and then made their life easier because now they can wash 16 loads of laundry that they’ve been building up, or now they have a fridge,” Kelly says. “I think … the people who are really successful and that we want to model [in our hiring] are the ones who really enjoy meeting new people, really enjoy being out there in people’s homes and are really satisfied by connecting with them and making their lives a little bit easier.”
