3D Development

Public Service Team

Opportunity/Issue

A Senior Manager within the communications sector approached us with the challenge of working with a mixed ability population of Call Handlers, Team Managers, and Team Leaders across several sectors of the organisation. Outcomes required from our intervention were:

• Improving the public’s perception of their Contact Centre
• Equipping individuals to deliver exceptional customer and consumer experiences
• Motivating a transient workforce to take full ownership of every call and maintain consistent standards

The organisation felt that there was a lack of understanding between the various teams who needed to work together to provide service, as well as issues driven by frequently changing team dynamics resulting from staff retention issues.

Our Approach

Diagnosis

We interviewed a random selection of participants from each level involved (Managers, Team Leaders and Associates) to establish their views on barriers to delivering consistent service levels. This also allowed us to accurately identify the current knowledge and experience levels of the training population and understand the language they used around customer service. We held a focus group with Senior Stakeholders from across the organisation to clearly establish success criteria and build our understanding of the required changes in behaviour. During this event we were also able to gather examples for case studies and relevant up to date examples for interactive workshop exercises.

Design & Delivery

Stage 1

Designed and delivered a Pilot Workshop to be attended by Team Managers and Team Leaders
. This meant that they could:


• Experience the content as Delegates
 Refine our content as we worked through and add impact to Workshop exercises

• Provide insight to Tutors on current challenges their teams faced

• Formally agree evaluation mechanisms

• Commit to level and frequency of observations to reward and re-enforce required changes in behaviour

Stage 2

• Roll-out revised Workshops to 100 Delegates
• Population to be mixed with attendees from different Teams on each Workshop to aid cross functional understanding
• Groups of 8- 12 to maximise interaction and ownership of outcomes
• Each Delegate to produce SMART Action Plan
• Line Managers to review Action Plans and conduct observations to celebrate success

Outcomes

We ran a second Focus Group with the initial Senior Stakeholders and established agreement that all Workshop Objectives had been achieved. Specifically all attendees had subsequently demonstrated that they were able to:

• Use positive language and a polite and thoughtful tone of voice
• Describe how to open and close a call professionally
• Explain when to terminate a call and describe how this should be done
• Apply a minimum of three tactics to help them manage “challenging“ calls
• Recognise how they could manage their own mental state (after a challenging call)

When the organisation subsequently ran an internal review to establish the return on investment from this training they reported the following:

• Significant reduction of calls terminated by Associates – measured by relevant M.I.
• Vastly improved Consumers perception– measured by objective survey results
• Improved morale, motivation and individual performance as a result of Manager’s Observation outcomes and review of Action Plans