TPG’s Betsy Stumme, Executive Vice President of Customer Experience & Operational Efficiency, focuses on delivering solutions that enhance our employees’ efficiency and experience, enabling them to consistently deliver exceptional service to our clients. She co-founded and leads STEER – Spearheading Technology Efficiency, Experience, and Resources – a TPG initiative launched in early 2023.
What’s the mission and purpose of the STEER team?
Our mission is to work in a consultative fashion with colleagues across TPG to develop and implement process improvements and nimble solutions that provide value for our employees, our clients, and our company.
We formed STEER because of a collective realization that we could create greater efficiency in our work and, through that, make our employees’ jobs easier so that they could focus more of their time on directly serving our clients. The kind of consistent growth that TPG has experienced creates opportunities to leverage our scale, increase automation, and evolve our processes to better support the work we do. It’s exciting stuff!
What goals are you working on in 2024?
Our greatest focus in 2024 has been shifting off of a legacy customer relationship management (CRM) system that for the past 15+ years has been the backbone for 80% of our business units. That system was custom-built and served us incredibly well over the years. However, over that time we have grown tremendously, we’ve expanded the type of work we do and clients we serve, and of course the industry in which we work has evolved. It was time for a change.
What goals are you planning for the future?
Our goals start with meeting with each business unit and conducting a pretty extensive business process review to really understand the drivers of their work, their important deliverables, and the “why” behind the activities. Through that understanding, we can work collaboratively with business stakeholders to retool, refine, or retire processes to better derive value. When I say “value,” I don’t mean specifically dollars and cents. Our employees are spending 40 precious hours of their time each week at TPG. We want them to feel that they are able to do their best work here, that they know their expertise is important and valuable, and that they are using the unique skills and heart they bring to their jobs. So, let’s cut out anything that no longer serves us or our clients, let’s work to make what remains more efficient, and then let’s automate where we can to free up our team members to devote more of their time to being consultative partners to their clients and colleagues.
What successes have you celebrated since STEER’s inception?
Most recently, it was the move of our entire employee benefits service team off of the legacy CRM and onto a new platform that we’ve configured to meet their unique needs. It’s been fun to hear the feedback from our benefits team members. Someone said recently that the process now is “almost too easy!” That’s a good problem to have.
How about challenges?
There is so much we’d like to do! So, the biggest challenge is just being practical about what we can accomplish and where to focus.
How does this team aid TPG in innovation in our industry?
We are continually on the hunt for more innovative ways of getting the work done, and we’re big on collaboration, both internally and externally. We love talking with peers across the industry about what we’re working on, what they’re working on, and exchanging ideas. We all experience similar challenges and it’s enjoyable to work together to solve them.
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If you’re interested in connecting with Betsy regarding TPG or STEER, email her at bstumme@tpgrp.com.
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