ABOUT JILLIAN MERCER
JILLIAN MERCER
(B.A., B.Ed., M.Ed.)
PROFESSION: Management Consultant
NATIONALITY: Australian
COMPANY POSITION: Sole employed Director
Business profile:
- Published author (Allen and Unwin).
- 27 years’ experience consulting to the private and public sectors.
- Site evaluator for the Australian Organisation for Quality’s Gold Awards for Business Excellence.
- High level facilitator to achieve accelerated consensus amongst groups.
- Comprehensive experience in consultative methods.
- International experience conducting extensive Master Class programs in aspects of customer focus throughout Asia and the Middle-East.
- Internationally-recognised expert on the International Standard on complaints-handling.
- Regularly quoted in the media as an expert in customer focus including Channels 9’s A Current Affair, Financial Review Boss magazine; BRW; and National Accountant, amongst others.
Jillian is regularly engaged by the Society of Consumer Professionals (SOCAP) to deliver programs on expertise in the service sector, including managing difficult behaviours of customers, skilful strategies for de-escalating complaints, and the complexities of complaints data collection, analysis and management.
She is one of five national site evaluators for the Australian Organisation for Quality’s Gold Awards for Business Excellence; and contributes as a panel judge for the Customer Service Awards of the Customer Service Council in Australia.
She conducts extensive Master Class programs in aspects of customer focus throughout Asia and the Middle-East. Topics include Customer Complaints; Voice of the Customer – Beyond Satisfaction Surveys; Managing Difficult People, and the new International Standard on Complaints Handling. Programs are conducted in, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Thailand, Philippines, Kuwait, China and United Arab Emirates.
Her customers include representatives from Asian-based, large private and public-sector and global organisations.
She is author of the book, May I Help You? Great Customer Service for Small Business published by Allen and Unwin. It details her Intellectual property of ©9 Rules of Good Service and Service Performance Indicators (SPIs).
She was also a contributing author to the book, Customer Service Excellence: How Organisations in Australia are Exceeding Customer Expectations (1998).
Jillian is considered an international expert on the International Standard on Complaints-handling.
Past working life has included being the Manager of Quality Improvement at the major Women’s and Children’s teaching Hospitals in Perth, Australia where she oversaw the integration of the quality improvement and customer focus initiatives.
Jillian also worked with the Department of Premier and Cabinet, where she was architect of the whole-of-Government customer focus program, and conducted major reviews in the customer focus, supply chain, information management and public employment reform arenas.
She has also had extensive experience with stakeholder consultation and coordination in various government departments and has developed various complaints-handling systems integrating techniques such as Voice of the Customer (VoC).
Jillian works in complex and ambiguous environments rather than simple retail sectors. Some of Jillian’s unique projects include:
- the second largest mining company in the World, BHP Billiton Exploration, where she advised on how to improve the process of allocating human and infrastructure resources to optimise drilling project timelines and success rates – with no wastage.
- Delivery of an extensive contract to the Department of Education and Training to assess and assist them meet the benchmark of the International Standard on Complaints (ISO 10002: 2004/ASA10003:2006).
- Work with the bio-security division of the Western Australian Department of Agriculture contact centre;
- In 2011, she worked extensively with astro (Measat), Asia’s largest satellite broadcaster on the complexities of complaints handling and root cause analysis in the service recovery context.
- University of Western Australia implementing the ISO 10002:2004 on complaints-handling;
- a Petrochemical Company in Kuwait (EQUATE)