Customer Service Excellence Within a Call Center Environment: A Discussion with Derek Bishop

In the current economic crisis, ensuring that your company is operating its call center effectively is critical. Derek Bishop, the former Head of Customer Service for the global financial security firm AXA, speaks about the challenge facing call centers today. With his extensive experience in the financial services industry, Bishop explains why now more than ever it’s crucial to listen to the voice of the customer. He gives practical advice on how to thrive in the current environment and how to create strategic alignment across an organization.

What is your experience in the call center environment in the financial services industry?

I have designed, built and managed several in house call centers both customer service and sales-based operations, inbound and outbound and managed a regulated financial advice telephone operation. I have also established a number of outsourced call center relationships and managed the ongoing relationships of the call center.

How can a call center create a more customer-centric approach?

Firstly, ensure that the call center representatives really listen to the customer and gain an understanding of what’s driving the queries of the customer—not just answering the question, but getting to understand what triggered the customer to ask the question. By asking these more in-depth questions you get to really understand the needs, wants and expectations of your customer. By capturing this information, it enables you to improve the existing products and services to prevent future problems and allows you the ability to predict the next product or service the customer will need. This customer information can therefore be hugely valuable to marketing teams in the business.

This does require the business to suitably train the agents to ask deeper customer questions, and to allow them the time to be able to do it accordingly. When done right, it can prove highly beneficial for the business.

Secondly, instead of measuring service excellence through periodic customer surveys, try gaining “moments of truth” feedback, which provides real customer feedback. This allows call center management to lock into the real time and emotional feelings of a particular customer at the point in which the service was provided.

The quality of the customer feedback will be significantly higher than it would be if the business just issues periodic customer surveys. The real-time nature of capturing customer feedback in this way means you obtain better quality insight and feedback, and it allows you to be more responsive in taking action—to either improve service, or to explore further opportunities.

At AXA, a financial protection company, you led and designed the implementation of a full customer service operation within six months. With regards to the economic crisis, how would this task be different today?

My top tips on building an operation to support a new proposition in the current economic crisis include:

• Be clear about the proposition. You must define the customer journey and embed that into the processes, the organization design and the training so that your actual service delivery matches the proposition you go to market with.
• You must also ensure that there is an alignment of expectations between the customer, the brand, the proposition, management expectations and actual service delivered by staff. If there are mismatches these will become very evident quickly and will cause challenges.
• Rather than building a complete system solution to support your launch, implement it with the core system needs, and support these with controlled manual processes. No matter how much planning you do, when you launch, customers will behave in ways that you hadn’t predicted, so having manual processes allows you to adapt the process in response to customer experience and hence be “nimble” with your service delivery. Once the processes have been refined, look for ways in which automation/systems solutions would enable better efficiency.
• Ensure you have good controls and governance in place, particularly if you have a lot of manual processes and you will be changing them. This ensures that as you change, adapt and grow you remain in complete control of your operation.
• Ensure you define and build the appropriate management information reporting that will enable you to make the decisions that you need to on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. It’s surprising how many times insufficient or inaccurate management information exists.
• As much as there will be resistance to this, you must ensure that you have contingency in your resources to enable you to respond to unexpected challenges and demands.

Speaking from years of experience in finance, what is the best piece of advice you have for a firm struggling with its call center, as well as trying to improve customer engagement and retention?

Most importantly, you need to actively listen to the customer and use that to focus on the key areas of attention to achieve the fastest impact.

Also look for what value the call center can really add to the business overall, not just service delivery. The insight gained in the call center can fuel huge opportunities for customer engagement and retention, whether that is through initiatives that are actually within the call center itself, or via marketing campaigns.

Look for other ways in the media that will enable you to communicate and engage with your customers, i.e. Facebook and Twitter. Customers will wish to “connect” with you using a variety of different methods, so think about how you can use these technologies to engage fully with your customers, rather than just purely relying on your contact center.

I recently returned from a ski trip and experienced first hand the potential of social media to enhance a business and grow its customer base. I was part of a group of 15 people on a skiing holiday, many of whom did not know one another before. We created our own community as a group, which can, and has in this instance, overflowed onto Facebook. In modern society, this is an all too common occurrence and there are literally thousands of Facebook groups online that provide highly targeted and valuable customer data for businesses that are savvy enough to tap into the insight provided by these communities.

For example, if we take the travel company, they had a captive audience of 15 people (we are now already in discussions about next years trip). If we have those discussions within our community online, and if the travel company were a part of this, this would give them huge insight as to what our needs were and what we would be looking for from our next holiday. They could then use this customer feedback to snap up the opportunity of organizing it again for us next year, rather than leaving it to chance that we would use them again.

On the penultimate evening, we were also asked to complete a paper customer satisfaction survey—which was way too long anyway. However, it is not optimal timing to ask 15 people during a sociable dinner. What they could do is use the vehicle of the online community to gain that feedback immediately after the holiday.

If you consider the day after we returned, photos were all being posted on Facebook; it would have been a great opportunity to capture that audience for some online customer feedback. As it happens, they probably only got a small number of surveys completed, to which you would have to question the value of the feedback.

Today companies are trying to do more with less. As someone who has worked in complex environments, what advice can you give companies who need to lead teams through change and create a performance-based culture within their call center?

Do not underestimate the importance of strong people leadership. In tough times senior management within organizations are so focused on finding the right ideas, delivering plans and developing strategies (for survival and growth) that often less attention is given to the leadership of their people. As leaders, make sure you engage the call center representatives, communicate with them—explain the bigger picture and take them on the change journey, whilst actively managing their expectations along the way.

You must engage the people in achieving the change as the staff in the call center are the closest to the customers, so tap into this insight and potential.

You are known for delivering sustainable improvements in customer service and leveraging greater value from outsourced partnerships. When is it time to outsource? Do you have any tips on how to effectively manage a relationship with an outsourcing partner?

When? There isn’t a standard answer as to when is the right time, it depends on the organization.

However, a few scenarios are as follows:

• When the service you are looking to outsource is not a core competence of the organization
• Where there is a huge fluctuation in volumes of activities
• Where an outsourcer is an expert and will be able to add value well beyond the capabilities available within their own business
• Where there is a proven track record of service improvement being achieved by outsourcing a particular activity

You shouldn’t just opt to outsource if you have a major operational problem and think outsourcing itself will solve the problem—fix the problem first, then evaluate whether outsourcing will help further.

My tips on managing relationships:

• Develop and agree a suitable relationship governance matrix. Perhaps meeting weekly (tactical operational issues and day to day performance), monthly (performance against Service Level Agreements[SLAs]/ Key Performance Indicators [KPIs] and upcoming implementations), quarterly (tactical review of overall performance, initiatives) and half yearly (strategic discussions)—with specific objectives and different attendees for each session.
• Keep in tune with developments within each other’s companies as this is likely to identify other opportunities for further value to be leveraged from the relationship.
• Build good working relationships between key people within both businesses—people do business with people, not businesses, so ensure you have good healthy personal relationships in place which are open and honest.
• Create an open working relationship which encourages issues to be raised early on.
• Finally, ensure you have the appropriate management information in place—focus on the key drivers, KPIs, etc.

Operate as if the outsource partner is just an extension to your business. Think about communication with your outsource partner and keep them informed and engaged as if they were just another department within your business.

Interview by Blake Landau, publisher