A pan-European satellite broadcasting, broadband and telephone services company:  Customer Services Leadership Programme
Bring our brand to life 

For many of the Customer Experience Managers this was the first time they had ever led or facilitated change so it was hugely developmental.

“The impact on the managers’ approach to their jobs has been significant and we have now incorporated the ‘performance factors’ into our performance management system. This would not have happened just from the reselection process and the revised job descriptions. Managers needed to know how to manage performance in the service of the customer experience and this process helped them to develop the skills, practices and confidence to do exactly that.” Client feedback

Our client is a market leader in their industry.  A new CEO had prompted an ambitious new strategy and external brand message.  The customer experience of speaking to a call centre operator needed to match this new brand; the customer experience needed to be altogether more reliable and more human. The challenge was to change the approach to leading, managing and delivering customer service from large contact centre operations. This involved redefining the real job of a Customer Experience Manager and giving them ultimate responsibility for how the brand lived in each interaction with a call centre operator. With many of them currently spending only 20% of their time with their people, this was a challenge.

Our solution was based on the premise that a sustainable impact on the customer experience performance could not be delivered by a one-off programme of mass communication with the frontline. The secret was in the contact centre line managers’ ‘chef-like’ ability to deliver the right standard of customer experience day in and day out.  Managers needed to deeply ‘get it’. They needed to get what the standard of customer experience was that was expected and to then ‘get’ how to uphold those standards at the frontline. We knew that managers who had been used primarily to manipulating spreadsheets and reporting numbers would not immediately understand how to deliver on the new requirements.

Firstly, in collaboration with our client we developed a customer experience performance ‘wheel’ for first line managers which set out the seven key areas that managers should pay attention to in the 80% of their time they were now being expected to spend with their people.

Secondly, we provided intense development to a small population of second line managers so that they could run practical, work-based events with their first line managers to agree specifically how these seven key areas would be built into daily habits, routines and work practices.

Thirdly, we then supported these line managers as they delivered lively, loud, interactive and energetic sessions with customer service team leaders in which the standard of customer experience required was deeply understood and every idea and suggestion to bring it to life was given the “tomorrow test”…how will you make this happen tomorrow?

The powerful benefit of the events was that they were run by line managers (not by external facilitators) so the agreements reached were practical, relevant and explicit… and able to be followed up and monitored in the days and weeks following. For many of the Customer Experience Managers this was the first time they had ever led or facilitated change and was hugely developmental.

They said
“The impact on the managers’ approach to their jobs has been significant and we have now incorporated the ‘performance factors’ into our performance management system.  This would not have happened just from the reselection process and the revised job descriptions. Managers needed to know how to manage performance in the service of the customer experience and this process helped them to develop the skills, practices and confidence to do exactly that.”