Customer service

Trust your people and they will help deliver quality

Do your staff always put customers at the heart of every call?  Shanaz Hussain has some tips based on handling calls for Yorkshire Water

ALL too often, call centres are judged on three factors: on-hold queues, call lengths and repeat calls.  While these are significant in the success (or otherwise!) of business processes and applications, they ignore the most important factor of all…your customers!
Call quality is not, as most of us know, about a super-speed agent who whizzes through calls in double-quick time, nor is it solely dependent on getting it “right first time”. Customers not only desire but have come to expect a certain level of rapport with agents; they want to reach someone who is prepared to listen to their plight and show appropriate empathy and understanding.
Putting the customer at the heart of every call is essential for us in delivering a great customer experience for Yorkshire Water.  The culture, behaviours and values of your call centre need to reflect this.

...who whizzes through calls at double-quick time...

While values and behaviours are at the heart of a quality culture, only happy and contented staff can deliver a fantastic customer experience

Challenging the existing culture of a call centre can be a daunting prospect, but it needn’t be, so long as you recognise that employees are a fundamental factor in your success rate.
A call centre with shared beliefs, values and behaviours and a focus on customer service may describe itself as having a “quality culture”.  But, more than that, a quality culture is where every employee from agent to MD is constantly aware of their impact and influence on the customer experience.
The important thing to remember about culture is that it must encompass an entire organisation and it is crucial that people within the contact centre are not alienated, whether this is individually or as a team.  The processes and applications behind a quality culture may seem simple enough, but it is important that the implications of all employees are considered.
Senior management buy-in may well be needed before any major changes can go ahead, but don’t underestimate the influence and importance of agents and team managers.  After all, they make up the majority of your staff and without their commitment and support, any attempts to implement company-wide changes will be futile.
Staff empowerment can be the key to gaining maximum staff involvement.
Call monitoring is an obvious place to start if you want to identify the strengths and weaknesses in a call centre’s level of customer service.  But, why not take it further by involving agents in the process?  Self-analysis is a great way for employees to reflect on the service they deliver and is much more effective than being given a sheet with lots of ticks (or not).
By being encouraged to critically evaluate their calls, this demonstrates to agents that you trust them to take responsibility for their role in the customer experience; and it emphasises their importance in the overall performance of your contact centre.
Front-line people are the best feedback mechanism you could ever need -- they are the ones in daily contact with your customers and are better placed than most to suggest new methods of ensuring that your customers are firmly at the heart of what you do.

...listen to their plight and show empathy and understanding

A tried and tested method, which I continue to endorse, is the “colleague panel”.
This comprises representatives from across the business and is an ideal way of identifying weaknesses throughout the entire customer experience, whether these are in business processes and applications or in the “softer” values and behaviours.
By giving the panel a high profile within your business, employees can see the value that you place on their opinions and will be more willing to take their comments and suggestions to their local representatives.  This attitude goes a long way towards achieving a quality culture.
Employees need to know that you value their opinions.  Otherwise, why bother?  As their manager, you must ensure that the appropriate people give prompt responses.  No matter how sensitive, the key issues must be addressed and not skirted around in a shifty manner.
The key here is openness.  If you want employees to feel empowered to really make a difference to your organisation, it is essential that you show trust in them to do that.

At first, a lot of the comments may focus on the failings of the staff canteen or the inadequacies of the coffee machine.  However, as the quality culture grows within your call centre, employees will feel more inclined to make real business suggestions. That said, you mustn’t overlook these seemingly insignificant factors because they can be good indicators of underlying staff grumbles. While values and behaviours are at the heart of a quality culture, only happy and contented staff can deliver a fantastic customer experience. Ultimately, a quality culture can only exist if every member of a call centre is empowered to take ownership for the service they deliver.  Whether this is through self-analysis of individual performance or in enhanced feedback mechanisms, your employees hold the key to a great customer experience and it is your job as their manager to make them realise this.  Of course, there are a multitude of other methods you can use to promote empowerment -- broader job remits, delegation of minor projects, wider participation and contribution in change programmes are also possibilities. Once you have firmly established a quality culture you may well notice secondary benefits crop up – here we have noticed increased staff motivation and cost savings.  But, it’s important to remember why you are doing all this in the first place… your customer.

PROFILE

Shanaz Hussain, 39, is contact centre manager at Loop Customer Management, founded by Kelda Group in 2000, which handles contacts for the 4.7m customers of Yorkshire Water, also owned by Kelda.  Loop has call centres in Bradford, where Ms Hussein is based, and in Bangor, with a total of 570 staff.
It was recently placed joint first for customer satisfaction by Ofwat out of the UK’s 10 water and sewerage companies.
Ms Hussain, who joined Yorkshire Water in 1992, won the title “contact centre manager of the year 2007” in the Yorkshire and Humber Contact Centre Awards.  She has three children – aged 17, 15 and nine – and has been a school governor for 12 years.