The challenge
West Bromwich Building Society has a busy call centre that answers up to 1,000 phone calls a day. Customer service has always been at the heart of what they do but they felt their old method of gathering insight via a mystery shopper had grown staid and ineffective. Rather than using a tickbox model, they wanted a tool which would allow them to gather and respond to customer feedback in real-time – and provide them with authentic, accurate insight that they could use to influence change at the company – and reward staff.
The solution
In August 2012 West Brom enlisted the services of Rapide and their Rant & Rave solution to gather real-time feedback from their call centre customers. Now customers are given the option of being transferred through to the Rant & Rave recording line where they are asked to rate their experience on a scale of one to five and then verbally record their reasons for leaving the score. Around 15% to 20% of callers generally agree to complete the survey – amounting to approximately 200 people a day. All feedback is analysed in real-time by Rapide’s state-of-the-art text analysis technology and presented to West Brom on their Rant & Rave dashboard. Members of the call centre have access to the dashboard, enabling them to log in and view the comments made about them, therefore inspiring staff to do their very best to ensure their customer leaves positive feedback. If any negative feedback is left or if someone rates their customer service as one or two, key personnel are alerted and their issue is dealt with promptly before it becomes an official complaint.
Nigel Owens, Head of the Contact Centre at West Bromwich Building Society says:
“We already had very high levels of customer satisfaction but Rant & Rave has given us independent, impartial evidence of this. It has helped us to maintain this standard, ensuring that we never drop. It’s also been an invaluable motivational tool that has helped us celebrate the great work that our staff in the call centre does. Not only does it give us a great quality of information but it’s confirmation that we deliver a great service to our customers. We use the feedback to celebrate the great work our team have done and to reward them for it.”
The benefits
By alerting staff to negative feedback, West Brom are now able to respond to their unhappy customers promptly, dealing with their issues in a timely way that they wouldn’t have been able to do before.
Being a company that rarely receives negative feedback, the key benefit has been around employee engagement. By seeing their customers’ feedback on the Rant & Rave dashboard, staff feel compelled to continue to work hard and encourage more customers to leave positive feedback.
A buzz around the office is created where they have inter-team competitions, judged by the dashboard, which helps to keep morale high. The most important result of Rant & Rave has been the ability to respond quickly to any dissatisfaction.
Key Facts:
1,000 calls answered per day with a 15-20% response rate.
The Average satisfaction rate has remained a consistent 4.8 out of 5.
