How to Increase Sales through Excellent Customer Service - with Phil Skingsley

Dan Cooper is the Head of Digital at Spark NZ. He’s been working in the contact centre industry since the late 90s. Over the past few years, Dan’s lead the transformation of Spark’s customer care with digital adoption.

Today, he shares the details of Spark’s digital adoption journey, the mistakes they made along the way, and their exciting next steps. All so you can shortcut your organisation’s digital adoption journey.

Over the past few years, the approach Dan discusses has lead to significant improvements in Spark’s customer interaction NPS score and their employee NPS score. As well as a 45% reduction in human assisted interactions.

You'll Learn:

• How Spark now starts all of their initiatives, instead of the common practice approach of starting with a commercial assessment (02:43).

• Dan’s core philosophy regarding improving customer experience (03:04).

• What was wrong with the KPIs the contact centres had in place when Dan arrived (which might be true of your KPIs too), and what he did about it (03:20).

• The complete flip that Dan made with regards to customer journeys, which has allowed Spark to be more successful (04:26).

• The proactive approach Spark now takes, to reduce the problems customers experience (04:40).

• The management restructure that was done in the contact centre, which has been crucial to streamlining contact centre operations (05:32).

• The continuous improvement approach Spark takes to reduce customer friction (06:21).

• Why their first attempt to transition customers to use self-service options failed, and the successful approach that followed (08:29).

• Which digital initiative Spark has launched in the last 12 months, which is going gangbusters (15:15).

• The changes that Spark are are making to their internal systems, which will dramatically reduce the time taken to bring new hires up to speed (16:28).

• The ‘unified front line’ approach that Spark is about to embark on, which will enable frontline team members to flow to wherever the customer needs them to be (18:03).

• The subtle changes they made to the contact centre KPIs, which has resonated extremely well with staff (23:09).

• A summary of Dan’s advice for contact centre leaders who are deciding to go down the digital adoption route (28:48).

   

See the full show notes.

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Justin Baty is the Auckland Cars Regional Manager at Turners Auto Retail.

With 9 years’ experience in the business, he’s seen firsthand how the company’s supportive performance management process is highly effective at getting people back on-track and reaching their full potential.

Today, he shares what it is.

You'll Learn:

• The details of the Performance Improvement Plan which Turners puts people on to support them to reach their potential, which you can swipe and deploy (02:31).

• How managers structure their catch-ups, to ensure their team stay on track (02:55).

• How team members can get daily coaching, in real-time (04:11).

• The stunning success rate of the Performance Improvement Plans (05:18).

• Just how quickly individual performance turns around with this approach, and how it motivates the rest of the team as well (06:21).

• How this approach can be applied across the entirety of your business, including management (08:25).

   

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David Stone is a Senior Vice President at the conversational AI startup, Curious AI.

With 30 years’ experience in the call centre industry, he’s spent his career working both in contact centre, for outsourcers, and for industry vendors.

Over the past 10 years, he’s seen the evolution of AI in contact centres. Today, he shares how the next generation of conversational AI can revolutionise your centres.

You'll Learn:

• How David gets asked all the time by senior and CX leaders how their centres can take less calls from customers, and his unexpected answer (02:01).

• The way conversational AI can be a bridge from your voice to your digital solution, at a lower price, and deliver better customer experience than an agent (03:11).

• The 3Ps of this new wave of conversational AI, that allows for powerful customer conversations at scale (03:41).

• Why traditional ‘conversational AI’ is neither conversational, nor overly intelligent, and why the next generation of the technology is vastly different (04:26).

• How this next generation of the technology can be deployed within 10 days as opposed to months like traditional conversational AI, at a 10th of the cost (05:57).

• Dave’s mantra for which companies will win in the digital age, and how you can join the winning side (08:21).

• How you can tell when customers are likely to need to call your centre and proactively reach out to them, instead of needing to be able to take voice calls (08:48).

• How conversational AI helps agents be even better, and will never fully replace their role (11:00).

• How Curious Thing was able to able to deploy a solution for a government agency in Australia in 4 days, to make 1.5 million personalised calls (15:19).

• How conversational AI is able to drive a constant loop of innovation, helping you gain better customer insights, and provide more value to them (17:07).

   

Full show notes

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Alex Mead is the Chief Customer Service Experience Director at a start-up digital bank in Bahrain.

With 20 years experience in this role at organisations across multiple industries, Alex has discovered many organisations have got fundamental parts missing from their customer experience equation, leading to poor outcomes for customers.

He’s developed a framework in response, which when implemented, is the secret to customer service success.

Today, he shares what it is.

You'll Learn:

• The industry change that happened more than a decade ago which has compromised customer service experience ever since (01:29).

• The 2 very separate parts of customer experience which have been forgotten (02:40).

• The outdated view that many leaders have of customer service (04:22).

• What Alex’s ‘EPIC’ framework stands for, which includes what organisations should always provide to customers in their service experience, but is commonly missing (05:24).

• What your agents require to deliver on the needs of customers, which is summarised by Alex’s ‘TIME’ framework (07:58).

• Why customer effort is king when it comes to world-class customer service (09:47).

• What Alex is putting in place in his current role, to ensure it’s seamless for customers to move from self-service to talking with an agent (11:31).

• Why most chat bots aren’t providing the level of customer service they could, and what to do about it (12:45).

• The one (controversial) thing Alex recommends organisations do to improve the customer service experience they provide (13:20).

   

Full show notes

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Gabriel Mendez is an auditor and senior consultant in customer experience processes and technology applications.

Based in Mexico City, Gabriel has decades of experience in contact centre data and voice technology, and has been a judge for industry awards in Mexico and Colombia.

Today, he shares how to increase customer loyalty by reducing customer effort.

You'll Learn:

• The 3 key metrics you need in place to measure and track customer experience (04:00).

• How customer effort is the biggest determinant of customer loyalty, repurchasing and spending you can measure (04:59).

• The common reasons why customer effort is higher than it should be (07:17).

• Why many IVRs don’t create as much value as they could for customers (10:26).

• Technologies which can reduce customer effort, and the common pitfalls when deploying them (13:02).

• Why Customer Effort Score should replace NPS as your primary customer experience measure (15:52).

   

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Immanuel Joseph is the Reporting Manager at Allianz Australia.

With a master’s degree in IT, Immanuel has worked in the Allianz contact centre for the past 4 years to modernise their reporting.

Today, he shares tips from the journey Allianz has been on to modernise their reporting, so you can do the same, and empower Centre Managers and Team Leaders to make better decisions.

You'll Learn:

• 3 critical problems with using Excel for reporting (01:34).

• The 2 key steps Immanuel took to migrate reporting to being live and online, which reduced costs and increased buy-in from managers (04:39).

• The way the contact centre has created a scalable framework so they can produce any number of reports with the same ease (08:15).

• Why having people with an IT background in your contact centre can save your centre money, and solve your problems quicker (10:49).

• Tips on a better approach for using Excel for reporting (12:05).

   

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Stephanie Riordan-Edmonds is the Head of Customer Service at Southern Cross Health Society.

She’s been in the contact centre industry since the mid 90’s, and loves making a difference to customers and her people.

Today, she shares they maintain a positive work culture through values at Southern Cross, and changes they’ve made as a result of lockdown.

You'll Learn:

• The 4 things Stephanie did when she first started as Head of Customer Service (02:05).

• The 5 functions of a team, which formed the basis of a workshop Stephanie ran to foster trust and a positive culture (02:36).

• The 2 common areas her Team Leaders realised they needed to take action in (03:23).

• The 5 things Southern Cross has done to help the health and wellbeing of staff in the Covid lockdowns (04:09).

• One of the aspects of Friday standups which people find really motivating (05:29).

• The 5 ways they embed the organisation’s values at Southern Cross (07:26).

• The 4 steps Stephanie suggests Senior Leaders can take to improve the psychological safety and engagement of their people (09:47).

   

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Marc Carriere is the creator of the 7 Pillars for Creating Amazing Team Leaders course.

With 35 years’ international experience in the contact centre industry, Marc has managed contact centes, owned one, won industry awards, and consulted with businesses, coaching and mentoring their Contact Centre Managers and Team Leaders.

Today, he shares how to create amazing team leaders.

The approach Marc takes when training Team Leaders:

1. Ensure they know their role and responsibilities, with respect to being a Team Leader, and the interactions they have with their Centre Manager. Otherwise, it can be unclear who’s supposed to do what, when (06:44).

2. Have them stop doing activities which an admin person or HR person should be doing, so they have the time needed to train and coach their team (08:11).

3. Teach them how to give effective training and feedback to their team (09:08).

4. Create a coachable call structure, that sets out the steps of a call, which Team Leaders can coach to (09:23).

5. Have them monitor recorded calls, which they score and give feedback on (11:09).

6. Have them run pre-shift meetings, to get their people prepared and focused for the shift ahead (12:05).

7. Have them do skills audits to identify what areas their agents need help with (12:55).

You'll Learn:

• Why Team Leaders are the backbone of any contact centre operation (02:56).

• How most Team Leaders are missing fundamental skill sets to be effective leaders (05:01).

• The key to effective time management (13:52).

• How a coaching call structure differs from a quality guidelines (15:15).

   

Full show notes: https://bravatrak.com/marc-carriere-podcast 

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Get Marc’s free course, 7 Pillars For Creating Amazing Team Leaders Who Coach, Nurture And Lead Winning Teams

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Michael Clark is the Principal Consultant at CXTT Consulting.

He has more than 20 years experience in the contact centre industry across both the private and government sectors. This year, he started his consultancy, focused on helping organisations with their transformations in the customer experience and technology space.

Today, he shares the essential steps to take when implementing your strategy.

Michael’s Top Tips For Successful Strategy Implementation:

1. Build interdisciplinary teams, so there’s common ground and collaboration between the departments involved (01:49).

2. Strategy implementation falls apart when it’s top-down only. You get the best results from engaging with the frontline. You’ll have a better chance of getting their buy-in, plus, you’ll uncover roadblocks implementing change (07:45).

You'll Learn:

• What Michael did to reset expectations with work-from-home teams due to COVID, which helped lower everyone’s stress (04:03).

• The style of leadership Michael finds best to empower employees, give them ownership, help get their buy-in, and help them deliver change (09:02).

• What design thinking is, how it’s helped Michael tackle all sorts of business problems, and how it can help you too (12:46).

• The key thing to consider in your business, so you remain relevant in a world disrupted by COVID (16:58).

   

Full show notes: https://bravatrak.com/michael-clark-podcast 

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