Media and Communications
Releasing Customer Service Potential

“The results are speaking for themselves and straight away: adviser buy-in, positive change and NPS are up 9 points in a month.”

“It is the only programme which has had a lasting impact in my four years of being with this company.”

We simply want to deliver the best service. This means that every single one of us needs to be at our best, working together as one team, pulling together like never before for our customers and each other.

We’ve done big things before and we’re great at doing lots of things today, but our customers are demanding more, and serious competitors are more determined than ever to steal them away. So now is the time to revolutionise our service and our culture.

To do this we need to deliver a large transformational change programme that fundamentally changes how we deliver service and put our people and our customers at the heart of everything we do.

The most important thing this programme had to do was to cut through the noise of organisational life to the heart of what it means to enable and empower people – in practice. There was no space for unclear thinking or expediency, so we made the principles of our approach clear. It was to be:

Purposeful – The programme had to make it crystal clear that biggest single thing you can do to help someone perform is to show that it’s what you truly and fundamentally want from them, and that that it’s what you are committed to enable them to do above all else
Personal & Individual – What helps one person take the next good step is not the same as what helps another person. Conversations were required between managers and their people that were meaningful.
True – It then had to be what actually happened and felt like a difference taking place in the relationships between people – not just more words, guides, tools, measurements (i.e. not more ways to avoid getting stuck-in, in person)

Deeply Listening
Level by level, people were engaged in identifying what made them believe that they personally are enabled and supported. This ran in a diagnostic flow, level-by-level, up the organisation.

That process itself was as much about establishing that this was a tangibly different experience as it was about diagnosis. Very unlike a traditional survey or focus group!

Twenty–two Deeply Listening sessions were run discussing, expressing and capturing views on “When I’m at the top of my game”, “When my manager helps me to be at the top of my game”, “When my manager gets in the way”, and “What it will take for me to believe that we really mean it when we say we’re going to offer the best service”.

Insights Workshop
This step enabled a core client group to develop an understanding of the fundamental shifts required in the way they need to lead, manage and work together at all levels.

Thirty managers from different levels across the organisation immersed themselves for 2-days in all the Deeply Listening information (literally thousands of original verbatim comments and observations on speech bubbles papered every wall of a ballroom). The information needed to be deeply understood, not mathematically reduced to vanilla.

Using the facilitated steps in our Insights Workshop process participants were enabled to let patterns emerge which led them to the breakthroughs they needed in the way they work together to enable them to offer the best service.

Releasing Potential Sessions
The powerful insights created were then used to design and facilitate a process for profound and transformational ‘real’ conversations between managers and their people. This rolled back out reversing the route that the Deeply Listening had come up through the organisation, from senior leaders to the front line.

In these sessions real work was undertaken live as each manager worked with their people to address and resolve their fundamental issues of customer service performance. A very different experience from uniform sheep-deep workshops that suggest your people are components in a machine.

• The Releasing Potential programme has moved us closer to achieving our vision of offering the best service by increasing:
– Customer focus
– Teamwork
– Commitment and belief in the vision
• 87% of our participants reported Releasing Potential as beneficial impact on them and team
• 91% reported teams had made progress in the areas identified by Releasing Potential
• 90% enabled to experiment more and make changes in their teams
• 87% identified commitment from all layers of leadership to releasing the potential of our people to offer the best service

“The results are speaking for themselves and straight away: adviser buy-in, positive change and NPS are up 9 points in a month.”

“You have empowered every manager, team leader and adviser and they have embraced the responsibility with passion and real belief. This is the way forward.”

“I feel that since RP I am much more motivated and positive about being there for our customers. My productivity has improved and so has my attitude towards work.”

“The RP session is the format for future team meetings: we discuss what’s relevant, explore how we can get better and agree how to act.”

“It is the only programme which has had a lasting impact in my four years of being with this company. I was initially skeptical as I have been through a few similar ones previously where the emphasis was always on saying the right thing with a smile (i.e. being fluffy) than actually identifying and engaging the core issues which kept coming back time and again. We are very good at bringing out new things but rarely stop to review them to see whether they have been effective before moving on to something else – so its good that this is different.”

“I experienced each individual go through a personal transformation, deal with fears and anxieties, have light bulb moments, and really connect with what we are trying to achieve.

I particularly valued how you had a plan of how the days would come together and flow, but at all times took into account what the group needed, and were flexible and adaptable enough to deal with those things when they appeared.

You created a really open environment, where people had the freedom to try things out, and supported and coached people through wherever they were at that point, whilst also stretching not just their capabilities, but their thinking too!

Overall I experienced some real potential being released, and came away feeling a real sense of excitement in what we are aiming to achieve, and pride that our people are really getting it! They are of course a great bunch of people, but each of you managed to help them to bring out their absolute best selves!

I also particularly wanted to thank Dom for all his hard work in helping us get to this point, for being a purest to the approach just when we needed it, and for being adaptable when we’ve needed another course of action.
It most definitely is feeling like a partnership, and I got a real sense that IU are as much invested in the outcomes (and the journey) as we are!”