National Customer Service Week

BT Enterprise is a longstanding member of The Institute – since 1998. The business has been participating in NCSW for a number of years. But for NCSW 2019, they decided to really up their activity and also take advantage of their new internal social media platform Workplace to maximise engagement.

The Institute of Customer Service has running National Customer Service Week (NCSW) for many years now. For countless organisations across the UK, it has become a great focal point to celebrate excellent service and give recognition to their hardworking teams.

(more…)

Since starting out from founder Jeremy Hyams’ front room in 1996, Claims Consortium Group has become something of a success story. Now employing nearly 300 people, primarily at their offices near Taunton in Somerset, the company provides property claims handling and claims workflow technologies working with the majority of the UK’s blue chip insurers. They specialise in claims for property damage from perils such as storm, flooding or fire. Integral to the group’s success has been a focus on customer service. You only have to read a short way down the homepage on their website before you come to the statement: ‘Customer service is the foundation of everything we do.’

Matt Brady, Group Managing Director, explains: “We’re very conscious that the customers we deal with are in a situation they didn’t want to be in. They’re often stressed and, having placed their policy with a blue chip insurer, have high expectations of service. So we put the emphasis on service right from the outset. For example, we ask our call centre staff to score a customer’s happiness from their very first call. This individualises the customer and places the focus on customer satisfaction straightaway.”

Service through the supply chain

However, customer service is not only delivered by Claims Consortium staff themselves, but also by the company’s network of partners, the contractors and surveyors that they employ to assess building damage and carry out work. As a result, the company works very closely with its partners and delivers customer service training to them through regional workshops. “We have a multi-layered operation and we need to get our supply chain to work in the same way as us,” Matt says. “In many ways, the most difficult part is getting the service ethos embedded into businesses that are not ours , so we work very hard at that.”

Linking it up

The majority of customer interaction is over the phone, but online is also growing fast as a channel. Overall, about a third of customers mainly use online, and for one insurer client, this rises to around 50% of their customers. Claims Consortium has developed a unique social media style portal called TrackMyClaim through which customers can communicate with parties involved in the claim and track the progress of the claim and repairs in real time. They can use it as an information source only or proactively post messages or add photos. An extension of this is Synergy, the company’s multi-enterprise software platform that brings all parties (not just the end customer) involved in the claims process together in real time, linking up everyone in the chain. “We’ve had around 1.5 million uses of Synergy so far since we launched it in 2015,” Matt says. “We think it’s a step-change in the industry. The system has also garnered outside recognition , such as winning the Institute of Customer Service’s Customer Satisfaction Innovation award in 2017.

Institute membership

The system has also garnered outside recognition, such as winning the Institute of Customer Service’s Customer Satisfaction Innovation award in 2017. Claims Consortium Group has been a member of the Institute since 2013 and, in 2016, achieved ServiceMark accreditation. They also use The Institute’s FirstImpressions customer service people development programme, run by their in house Learning and Development team.

Matt reflects: “Key to our business strategy is to invest in and develop our staff. We don’t have a ready market of insurance specialists around us here in Somerset so it’s essential that we train our people well ourselves and can retain our talent. We already had insurance qualifications that staff can do (through the Chartered Insurance Institute) but we needed something on the customer service side too, and the Institute fits the bill perfectly.”

Motivation and validation

The company didn’t rush in to doing ServiceMark, but ran the staff and customer surveys first to benchmark where they were before deciding to go for accreditation. Carly Eggar, Head of Accreditation and Certification at Claims Consortium, says: “We didn’t want to just chase badges and we realised that ServiceMark is not about badge collecting. We learned a lot through the surveys, of both our staff and our customers. For the customer surveys, we surveyed both our insurance company clients and their policyholder customers to get the fullest possible picture. A lot of the learnings related to the communication piece. It became very clear that although we were doing many of the right things as an organisation, we were at times failing to ensure that our staff and customers were kept as engaged as they should have been with changes we were making and the reasons behind them. This is something that we have worked extremely hard to address over the last few years and is an ongoing commitment.”

One of the biggest impacts of doing ServiceMark was internal, as Carly explains: “Staff found it really motivational to see that we were serious about benchmarking ourselves against the best. It gave them a greater sense of ownership too, that their views were being asked for and listened to. Gaining accreditation is like a validation, a sign of their efforts being recognised and rewarded. Since we did ServiceMark, staff have asked me when they’d be doing the survey again, so keen are they to be involved!”

When the assessor came in as part of the accreditation and interviewed around 25 staff, many of them were fairly nervous and didn’t know quite what to expect. But you could see their enthusiasm afterwards and how inspired they were. Meanwhile, First Impressions training has become part of the company’s on-boarding process and some 65 staff have been through it. Claims Consortium is also piloting the Institute’s more advanced Level 3 qualifications which were launched to the business as part of their National Customer Service Week celebrations and have received great levels of interest so far.

A ‘tie-breaker’

But it is not only on the internal side that the company has seen the benefits of its work with the Institute. Matt Brady says: “There has been at least one instance where we won a contract with an insurance client and our ServiceMark accreditation was one of the deciding factors. It was the tie-breaker if you like, that tipped the contract in our favour. Of course, winning new contracts or retaining existing ones is usually the result of multiple factors and complex scoring systems, but having the accreditation and being members of the Institute certainly helps” Matt also values some of the materials that the Institute produces, such as the ‘Customer of the Future‘ report which, he says, “helped me to think further about customer behaviours and therefore service strategies.” In the end, the goal as Matt sees it is quite simple: to provide a joined-up, professional service that satisfies the customer and therefore the end client. “The best we can do in fact is hardly to be noticed,” he says. “Our greatest compliment is when it’s been so effortless for the customer that they don’t even remember who we are or what we did!”

Looking after the fibre, copper wires and cables that keep the country connected, Openreach is the guardian of a critical national asset. These days, no one can operate without broadband connectivity and the telecom infrastructure across which digital services run. Openreach maintains the local access network that covers 30 million customers in the UK. Over 500 communications providers rely on the Openreach network to deliver telephone, internet, data and TV services to their customers at home and work.

Openreach engineers make a staggering 185,000 customer visits every week on behalf of communications providers. As Imran Patel, Director of National Operations and TV at Openreach, explains, providing excellent customer service is central to their mission: “One of the cornerstones of our strategy of Building Britain’s Connected Future is being trusted to deliver and we’re very conscious that we’re delivering a service that people absolutely rely on. So the service that we offer has to be right every time.”

NCSW “ a perfect opportunity

Openreach has long-standing membership of the Institute through BT Group. Having entered, and won, an award in the National Customer Service Awards for ‘best application of technology’ earlier in 2015, the company had begun to get more involved with Institute activities. And National Customer Service Week (NCSW) seemed like another great initiative to get behind. ‘When we heard about NCSW, it felt like a perfect opportunity to galvanise our staff around our customer service mission”, Imran said. “We saw it as a way of really getting momentum going, to engage the organisation and create a link for people to understand where we are aiming to get to for our customers.”

Openreach’s 26,000+ engineers are certainly key to its interactions with customers, but it’s not only about engineers. The company also has around 4,000 staff that provide desk-based customer support in its service centres. “It would have been easy to focus everything on our engineers, but we wanted to include everyone because the whole team has a huge part to play”, Imran observed. “Our service centres have significant amounts of contact via phone and email with communications providers, so we wanted to take a really all-encompassing approach.”

Social media at the heart

They decided to make it a truly interactive week, to engage and involve as many people as possible, and put their internal social media channel at the heart of activity, as well as promoting it on their internal radio service, Reach 365. The company developed a comprehensive plan of activities for the week, building on the templates and suggestions that the Institute provided. “There was a very helpful newsletter from the Institute both in the run-up to the week and during it”, Imran said. “They provided access to case studies of what other organisations had done previously. We spoke to our relationship manager to get feedback and help shape our approach.”

The result was a very busy week with a different focus each day, all promoted via social media and other channels:

• Monday: a launchpad for the week, highlighting some of the key themes ahead and including a Know Your Customer focus, asking employees to share examples of how they had prepared for customer visits;
• Tuesday: with a theme of Dealing with Complaints, the focus was a positive one on what staff had learned, seeking examples of how they had turned complaints around and sharing these via their social media platform;
• Wednesday: centered on Return on Investment, the emphasis being on new technology Openreach had invested in such as ‘View my Engineer’ which delivers text notifications to customers to let them know when the engineer will visit, asking for ways in which it had improved customer service, as well as being an opportunity to promote the ‘Your Voice’ campaign in which engineers could suggest how technology could be developed in terms of new apps and functionality;
• Thursday: focused on Teamwork, building employee engagement by asking people to recognise their colleagues around projects and also undertake ‘job swaps’ to understand what their colleagues do;
• Friday: recognition day, in which a series of spot prizes were announced by senior management in a kind of ‘drum beat’ throughout the day for those who had gone ‘above and beyond’ service.

An uplift in satisfaction

Gratifyingly, there was an increase in engineer satisfaction results by 1.1% once the week was finished. This small percentage increase in fact translates to significant numbers of people when you consider Openreach’s 185,000 customer site visits a week. There’s no doubt that NCSW created a real headwind around customer service and has genuinely boosted employee engagement. “It’s definitely helped us to win hearts and minds and strengthen a customer-first ethos where people go the extra mile for the customer.

Looking to the future

Such was the success of NCSW, Imran is in no doubt about next year. “We’ll definitely take part again in 2016”, he said. “Indeed, we are planning to speak to our communications provider customers about it with a view to maybe getting them involved. It’s had great results for us this year, so we want to take it even further next time!”

Whether it’s known as Marks & Spencer, ‘Marks and Sparks’, or simply ‘Marks’, the M&S brand is an icon of the UK retail environment. Like any brand that has stood the test of time, M&S has had to change with the times. In 2004, the business embarked on a strategy to infuse what had been a ‘product-centric’ approach with a culture of customer service. That strategic drive remains in place to this day, reflecting the wider move in UK businesses towards the new, ‘relationship economy’. As Head of Customer Service at M&S, Jo Moran was originally in charge of promoting high standards of service in the traditional retail arm of the business, but since 2008 has taken on responsibility for the entire organisation.

Great service is part of the brand

Jo heads up a management team that focuses on customer service centres, together with a smaller team that focuses on the retail experience. Both teams are geared around ensuring all M&S employees deliver the consistently great customer experience that is so much a part of its brand. While the service values are consistent, there is huge range and variety in how they might be delivered. As Jo says: “I’m responsible for customer service across the brand. How that looks and feels in our store, in our customer service centres, customer contact by phone or email, letters, social media, even down to the home deliveries experience.” With the challenge of ensuring customers experience the same service values across all these touch points, Jo and her team use The Institute of Customer Service’s National Customer Service Week (NCSW) to remind everyone that they are truly involved.

A drumbeat throughout the week

NCSW runs during the first full week of October and M&S have been taking part since 2012. Jo describes it as ‘a marker in the diary that you know everyone is going to get behind.’ “Each year has been better than the last, both in terms of the NCSW experience and its business outcomes for M&S.” She says: “This year has clearly been the best yet. The support and structure coming out from The Institute provided a real drumbeat throughout the week, that we could build around.” Jo announced the NCSW early to her heads of region and frontline managers with both emails and conference calls. “We had a longer run-in around the communication of the week” she recalls, “so we could galvanise people and do more around recognition and rewarding great service.”

A framework for engagement

M&S used themes The Institute provided, running from ‘understanding your customers’ and ‘dealing with problems’ to ‘recognising the business impact of customer service’, to generate a toolkit suggesting daily activities for retail stores and service centres. Meanwhile, for the duration of the week, M&S used its internal social network, Yammer, as the place for employees to share their customer service stories and experiences and a budget was raised to reward customer service excellence wherever it was found. In just seven days, M&S recognised and rewarded 567 individuals who had provided exceptional customer service. The national event provided a framework to further promote customer service within the company and see staff actively engage with its values.

I can see the return on investment

M&S has been a member of The Institute for the last five years, and has just renewed that membership for a further four, to gain further assistance as the business continues to move with the times. Being a retailer with one foot on the High Street and one foot in the digital space brings its own particular challenges. “Online is a faster moving environment” says Jo. “How do we act in a more agile and responsive way on customer feedback particularly in regard to social media? They are ahead of us in terms of multi-channel; customers think multi-channel just as a matter of course, and how we join that experience up is really important.”

Jo believes the best approach is to take a broad view, using insights from The Institute to spot examples of good practice wherever they may be. Meanwhile, the company’s own training materials are accredited by The Institute, to ensure they always reflect the latest research. “It’s essential to look outside your own sector” says Jo. “The Institute gives us an independent, UK-wide perspective on customer service. And it’s valuable to get that external review and verification on how our people are trained.” Ultimately, it was Jo’s decision to renew M&S’s Institute membership “ it wasn’t a difficult choice. I can see the return on investment from the work we’ve done so far” she says. “I was happy to sign that budget off.”