Toolkit

Within a specific team, a housing association realised they were seeing increased staff absence and lower average tenure than across the organisation.  The team’s role were tenancy case officers meaning they were dealing with challenging and stressful situations for example neighbourhood disputes and anti-social behaviour matters.  Many staff appeared to suffer with poorer wellbeing and were feeling burnt out after 3 or 4 years in the role, subsequently leaving the profession.  Rather than simply just recruiting new people and accepting the additional recruitment costs the housing association decided to look at the operating model.

They put in place a mandatory half-day off each week for the team where there was an expectation to utilise the time away from work to do something to help well-being such as a hobby or exercise.  The team reported coming back into work more refreshed, with better resilience to manage difficult interactions.  As a result, staff absence reduced, retention of staff of the past few years has vastly increased and customer satisfaction amongst the tenants involved improved.  Additionally, the average time to resolve cases has reduced.

A housing association realised that the majority of the issues or problems being reported to them were coming from a minority of customers.  This was causing extra work but at the same time they were actually struggling to solve the customers’ issues due to the complexity or sensitive nature of them.  New roles were created to address these specific customers which called for employees with a heightened skill set and experience of social work, mental health and social housing.

Before putting the new roles in place the housing association conducted research into the number of hours being spent handling interactions with this customer group as well as exploring with the customers what the underlying issues were including measuring their overall life satisfaction/happiness levels, which were only scoring on average 3 out of 10.  By putting in place this dedicated team for the specific customer group the housing association were able to free up resource and time across all other departments, also saving them money.  They remeasured the specific tenant group’s happiness levels and these increased to an average of 9 out of 10.

In an approach to improve the customer experience and increase conversion rates for holiday bookings, a Tour Operator invested in upskilling staff and building upon already high levels of employee engagement.  Cosmos already understood that many direct and trade customers would conduct their own research on a range of destinations and experiences but would phone the contact centre with more complex questions and requests.  This was an opportunity to convert the enquiry into a booking rather than simply handling queries.

Through a programme of training, and coaching sessions with agents, inbound phone calls became a vital part of the customer journey by building a connection with customers, actively listening to them excitedly talk about their holiday plans.  The existing coaching culture in place at Cosmos has enabled them to resolve customer contacts on the first call and upsell further holiday add-ons.  The plan was also to help differentiate the organisation from competitors.  So far, Cosmos have increased conversion rates of phone queries to booking by 6.6 percentage points.

Further by-products of this investment in their people has led to Cosmos see an increase in employee retention, engagement, happiness levels and customer satisfaction.   Coaching staff has further fostered a supportive team culture.

Introducing imagined scenarios of creating connections with customers into the recruitment process has further helped to attract new talent. Prospective employees are able to see at interview stage that the role is a lot more enjoyable and rewarding than a standard customer agent position.  Cosmos’ advice to other organisations is not to view a positive and memorable buying experience for customers as a nice-to-have but make it essential to running your business.

Zurich has developed a global Customer Programme that is underpinned by investment in customer experience and data capabilities. Key elements of the programme include launch of customer apps and portals that enable customers to manage their data and connect with agents more easily; customer segmentation to improve approaches to selling products and the relevance and targeting of campaigns; and customer empathy training to further improve the quality of engagement with customers. Significantly, business leaders and employees are targeted in meeting improvements in a range of customer KPIs, alongside financial targets, and where in some cases, customer and financial targets are weighted equally

Customer feedback indicated to Zurich that connecting with customers is especially important in an intermediated industry where information about products often includes technical information. Agents were trained to be more mindful about the impact of their interactions with colleagues and customers, and vary their approach in different situations to be more attuned to individual customer needs. The training led to significant increases in customer perceptions of the helpfulness of agents, customer satisfaction and net promoter scores.

Zurich’s Customer Programme has helped the organisation increase market share from 8 to 10% in key life insurance markets and has created a platform to support sustainable future growth.

At a leading insurance group, a senior executive led a transformative effort to embed customer orientation at the heart of the business strategy, grounded in rigorous analysis which clearly demonstrated the link between high levels of customer satisfaction and retention.

Through extensive data modelling spanning six months and involving multiple service areas, the team showed that for each 1 point increase in NPS, a corresponding 3% increase in retention occurred. This insight not only validated the correlation but created the business case needed to galvanise internal stakeholders, shifting stakeholder perspectives whereby customer experience could be viewed as a measurable investment rather than a cost.

To operationalise these insights, the organisation implemented a three-tiered customer experience strategy, covering signature propositions (such as car repairs completed in seven days), tactical improvements to hundreds of identified pain points, and cultural changes including the use of daily personal NPS tracking for customer-facing teams.

Critically, the company tied 20% of managers’ bonuses to top-level NPS results, aligning individual incentives with customer outcomes. Over four to five years, these initiatives improved NPS by almost 16–17 points, driving measurable gains in retention, customer base, revenue, and overall profitability.

An automotive organisation was able to prove the ROI of a proactive outbound customer contact following a marketing campaign. Customers were contacted by a trained sales team and their conversion rates and customer satisfaction compared to similar groups of customers who did not receive outbound contact. The ROI evaluation included the cost of deploying an outbound team and the relative value of sales they generated, compared to a group of customers who were exposed to the marketing campaign but did not experience a follow-up contact.

Things to consider: This metric is more straightforward to measure where customers interact with organisations through a relatively small number of channels. Where there is a volume and complexity of buying channels, it is likely to be harder to evaluate the impact of an intervention though one channel as customers may subsequently make a purchase in another channel.

An automotive organisation gave customers the opportunity to book a remote video appointment with a sales person in a showroom rather than have to visit the showroom in person. The objective was to provide a convenient and comfortable way for customers to view the vehicle they are interested in, discuss their requirements and seek advice. The company found that customers who gave very high satisfaction ratings for this experience were more likely to buy a car, additional items, make a future car purchase, and use the physical outlet for servicing. The roi of this initiative was demonstrated by tracking conversion rates and future spend of individual customers according to their level of satisfaction, over a 3 – 4 year period.

Things to consider: Requires tracking individual customer buying behaviour over a defined period, e.g. 3 – 4 years, in order to evaluate the relationship between the quality of the sales / buying experience and future purchasing behaviour.

An automotive organisation sought to improve resolution times of customer issues and used the internal lever of showing reduced level of financial compensation paid in refunds, goodwill gestures or discounts on future purchases to gain support. The organisation had found that the higher the volume of issues and the longer it took to resolve them, the higher the compensation costs. Issues were categorised by their relative complexity to resolve. By speeding up resolution and resolving as many issues as possible at first point of contact, the organisation was able to reduce the financial amount paid in compensation. The ROI of the service improvement was calculated by comparing compensation costs by time to resolve to show the financial value of quicker problem resolution.