In our experience this is rarely the case and leads to short sighted decision making that doesn’t solve the underlying issues or deliver a better customer experience.
One recent experience involving the team that formed Credo was a real eye opener. The brief was to review a large organisation’s contact centre performance that on the surface appeared to be under performing, but what transpired was very different…
Discovery: data and insight trumps hearsay every time
In this case, the leadership team were convinced that poor performance was linked to the behaviours on display in the call centre.
Through taking time to bring teams from across the organisation together and measure the success of the current customer journey, it quickly became apparent the root cause had nothing to do with the people or the behaviours. By looking end-to-end, beyond the boundaries of the contact centre, we discovered that the real driver of poor customer experience was broken promises by the operational service delivery teams. This was compounded by poor technology and outdated business controls that restricted the contact centre's ability to deliver good customer outcomes.
Act: change the mindset by listening and taking positive change
Acting on the insight gathered was not without its challenges. Leaders needed to be convinced of the findings and that the recommendations were right for them.
To overcome this, we mapped the “as is” and 'to be' customer journeys to demonstrate the pain points and using continuous improvement principles delivered a series of changes to empower staff and eliminate customer waste.
Review: learn from your mistakes
In this example, we started to move the dial by making small, incremental steps. Importantly, we got leaders to look at performance differently and think end to end. In a short space of time, we started to see an improvement in employee engagement, complaints reduced, and we managed to put in motion a plan that would deliver significant savings.
Embed: Continuously evolve to improve current performance
Embedding any change takes time and too often businesses fail to invest in this area. Our aim is to build sustainable solutions; as part of our approach we embed the learnings from the work by developing the skillsets of the SMEs.
In this case we were fortunate enough to work with leader group that wanted to impart our knowledge within their organisation. By the time we exited we had fundamentally changed the way they looked at customer experience and left them with the tools to continuously improve performance.
