TALENT MONDIAL

Client

UK Based Specialist Insurance Company.

 

Situation

Create and deliver a branded customer experience.

The Customer Services division of this insurance company is callcentre based and holds responsibility for the sales and service of their products.

 

The Director (senior executive) identified the need to create a culture of “excellence” going beyond satisfaction to what he termed

“Customer Delight”. He wanted to change the culture within Customer Services so that the sales and service professionals became the brand. In this way, the customer would experience the brand in each and every interaction with the organisation and the “experience of these interactions” would become part of the “product”.

 

Their goal – ‘Delight’ meant that every customer would learn and come to believe that this was a company with whom doing business

was “easy and a pleasure”.

 

Solution

Led by Ann Buzzotta, the team designed a strategy for creating the culture of excellence - “Customer Delight”. Key to the success of developing and sustaining the culture was the engagement and support of senior executives who were involved at the outset in setting the goals and objectives. Since the sales and service professionals worked in teams, an important component of the strategy was to engage the Team Leaders and skill them to become active change agents in building and sustaining the new culture. Another important component was to gain customer input to help define “Customer Delight” in the customer’s own terms.

 

Understanding

A dynamic customer-experience measurement framework and tool was created for ongoing use by each team. This enabled teams to understand how customers viewed their experience at any given point in time and where any gaps existed in their own performance.

 

Action

Following this and armed with information Team Leaders and sales and service professionals attended development workshops to build the knowledge, skills and behaviours to live the brand and deliver “Customer Delight”.

 

Creating “Customer Delight” meant that all staff needed the behaviours and skills to live this brand. They needed:

• An understanding of the new culture of ‘Customer Delight’,

• To understand how this impacted their individual roles and the opportunities and benefits this provided each of them,

• The confidence and competence to take ownership and responsibility for the customer,

• Improved customer focus – a way to understand each individual’s personal needs in addition to their business needs,

• The flexibility to adapt to different individuals and work with them appropriately’ and effectively in line with the expectations and

• standards of Customer Delight’

• ‘People skills’ to engage with customers and build collaborative relationships

• The skills to expand the products used by customers

• Tools to monitor the customer’s experience

• Skills and tools to seamlessly deliver on their promises and to continuously improve service quality,

• The skills to recover effectively when things went wrong, and

• The skills and behaviours to build lifetime relationships with customers, build trust and deepen customer loyalty

 

Team Leaders participated in 3 days of workshop. The overall objective of the workshop was to provide Team Leaders with the knowledge, skills, behaviours and attitudes to create high-performing customer service environments that delight. To meet this objective, the programme was designed to provide not only the information and skills required, but also a common language and set of principles associated with the dimensions of a customer-focused approach to sales and service. Team Leaders acquired performance coaching skills to build and sustain the performance of their teams and prepared to co-lead development workshops for their teams.

 

Results

The company reported increased loyalty through their measures, an improved ability to adapt to changing customer expectations and desires, improved ability to continuously improve service quality and delivery at the point of customer contact – key touchpoints. Finally, the company was able to sustain and build on the change they achieved.