I bulletproofed a professional services organization's rushed vendor-outsourcing model — raising average project CSAT from 2.71 to 4.5 within 2 months, saving 3,000+ hours of internal support time in 6 months, and shortening the average project lifecycle by 3 business days.
Average project CSAT
2.71 → 4.5
Client satisfaction transformed within 2 months.
Support team time saved
3,000h+
Internal support ticket team time saved over 6 months.
Project lifecycle
−3 days
Average project lifecycle shortened by 3 business days.
A professional services organization ran short on internal service consultants relative to client demand. To fill the gap, it made an emergency onboarding of an external services vendor to outsource project delivery. The ramp-up was rushed — and the consequences cascaded:
In one line: a rushed, under-enabled service vendor was delivering slow, error-prone, low-satisfaction projects — and the new servicing model was at risk before it had properly started.
I stabilized and improved the vendor-managed model through six interventions:
The pieces fit together deliberately: diagnose first, attack the biggest manual bottleneck with automation, instrument the operation with daily KPIs and a governance rhythm, and build a self-reinforcing knowledge system where support tickets feed the FAQ and the FAQ reduces future tickets.
Average project CSAT rose from 2.71 to 4.5 within 2 months. The internal support ticket team saved more than 3,000 hours over 6 months. The average project lifecycle was shortened by 3 business days.
A rushed vendor model, bulletproofed into a long-term, high-quality service partnership.
Beyond the metrics, the engagement secured a long-term, high-quality vendor relationship — turning an at-risk emergency measure into a durable service model the organization could continue to rely on for supplementing internal team capacity.
By attacking root causes rather than symptoms: I mapped the project delivery process to find the bottlenecks, automated the manual information handovers that were slowing every project down, and put daily KPI monitoring with weekly vendor feedback loops in place — so every lagging metric was identified and addressed within days, not quarters.
A capacity shortfall forced an emergency vendor onboarding with minimal time for training and enablement. Because the vendor had no access to internal project systems, every project required manual information handovers — the resulting wait times slowed delivery, and enablement gaps produced errors that dragged average CSAT down to 2.71.
The automation centered on Salesforce export automations that removed the human element from project information transfer. The process changes wrapped around it: process mapping to eliminate redundant steps, objective daily KPI reporting, weekly feedback loops with vendor management, and a support ticketing rotation feeding a continuously updated FAQ.
Through a self-reinforcing knowledge system: a support ticket queue staffed by rotating internal team members gave vendor staff a reliable channel for questions while operationally capturing recurring knowledge gaps, and the most-requested information was continuously published to an FAQ — so every question answered once reduced future tickets, saving 3,000+ hours of internal support time over 6 months.