Creating the Ideal Call Centre Experience

Virgin Mobile Australia found their outsourced call-centres were struggling to meet customer expectations. Having previously partnered with us to redesign other customer touch-points across their business, they asked us to step in and co-design the ideal call centre experience that would add the human touch back to their customer interactions.

Virgin's call centres were processing 500,000 interactions per year, which we saw as half a million opportunities to create new customer advocates and increase overall caller satisfaction, without affecting call-efficiency or increasing cost.

To understand what was preventing Virgin's call centre staff from delivering the perfect call centre experience we immediately realised we would need to be on the ground with them, working hand in hand with staff to resolve the problem. To facilitate that level of dialogue and interaction, we dispatched a team to Manilla, to work directly with the call centres and better understand their insights and concerns.

Drawing on our experience of working with Virgin to create positive and satisfying customer journeys while redesigning a number of their other significant touch-points, we deployed a number of customer research tools, focusing on customer interactions and operational processes.

We swiftly ascertained that to add the human touch back to their call centre interactions, Virgin would need to simplify their 41 point phone call checklist. Constrained by the number of items on this mandatory checklist, staff were unable to use their initiative or use their own interpersonal skills to build a positive relationship with the customer. We also found that quality scorecards did not reward problem resolution, but instead focused on other criteria that could detract from the ideal customer experience, such as needing repeated onerous levels of verification when calls were transferred.

To give Virgin's call centre staff the toolset they needed to provide the ideal call centre experience, we worked with Virgin to create five broad guidelines that would help staff craft warm, rewarding customer experiences.

These guidelines drew on our understanding of the customer journey and the results of our in-depth research, to create a framework that guided customer interactions without impeding the staff's initiative or their ability to connect with the customer on a personal level.

To ensure full integration of the new guidelines, we developed a 6-month training program which showcased ideal call flows, introduced customer experience scorecards with grading standards and included a range of explanatory videos that communicated the benefits of the new system.

This mentoring process, coupled with the clarity of the new guidelines, created immense staff engagement and resulted in Virgin exceeding their customer service targets. Not only did our new, customer-focused solution succeed in bringing back the human touch to the customer experience, it's efficient design also drove down service costs by 20% over the next 12 months.