Slater Gordon Contact Centre Improves CSAT and NPS
The Challenge
SGSM didn’t know what ‘good’ looked like. With CSAT and NPS as the core metrics, using a manual paper-based customer feedback approach they were unable to get valuable insights to make improvements that had a more immediate impact.
Advisors were unaware of the impact they had on the customer experience and the business didn’t know how customers were really feeling.
The Solution
SGSM implemented Bright initially to do a baseline survey over two weeks before rolling it out across the business. Advisors have access to their individual scores and team leaders can build relevant coaching sessions quickly based on individual performance. The team were taught how to interpret the results and use them to greatest effect.
The Results
Within one-month CSAT improved by 9% and customer effort rose by 6%. After six months NPS had increased by 15.5 points. Evidence shared with a car hire partner was used to increase NPS for that partner from 55.3 to 71.1 within one month.
Advisors are more engaged and are self-correcting their approach to achieve higher scores, with attrition down by 10%. Countless hours have been saved in administration. SGSM is benchmarking above the UK contact centre industry and its peers in insurance and has used the evidence to win Outsourced Contact Centre of the Year at the Call North West Contact Centre Awards.
Behind some of the biggest names in insurance sits Slater Gordon Solutions Motor (SGSM). SGSM provides full claims management solutions to insurance brokers, motor insurers, motor dealerships and bodyshops giving them access to a 24/7 150 strong customer service team that handles everything from first response, to dealing with hire cars and repairing vehicles.
Quality is central to everything SGSM does; for its insurance customers and for those that interact with the service. From the suitability and speed of delivery of a hire car, to getting a vehicle repaired by a British Standard Kitemark approved repairer, SGSM recognise that the standard of service provided must be world class, every time. So, measuring the quality of every interaction with claimants is fundamental to achieving this.
Building Service Excellence
The business had set out five core objectives that focused on measuring CSAT (customer satisfaction) and the NPS (net promoter score) performance of advisors in each claims team.
The aim was to improve the performance of front-line teams, track the trends of NPS across multiple journey touch points, increase employee engagement and use intelligent analytics to identify customer frustrations and tackle them.
In 2016 the business was measuring quality through manual paper surveys. Each survey was three pages long with twenty questions. They were posted to customers at the end of the process and it could take months to have them returned. With a low response rate, dated information being received and a highly manual process to administer the responses, the customer feedback had limited value.
“NPS is our core measure, but we didn’t know what good looked like,” said Stacy Hayhurst, SGSMs Business Transformation Manager. “We had no idea how we stacked up against others in our sector. We had to benchmark where we were, create a clear vision of where we needed to be and through a gap analysis understand what we needed to do to know that we are delivering excellence in every interaction.”
That’s when SGSM approached Bright. The business was looking for an independent auditor of the customer experience. Bright provides a total customer satisfaction and employee engagement solution and enables industry benchmarking using the Bright Index.
Getting A Baseline
Stacy divulges how they introduced the solution: “First we did a baseline survey over two weeks without informing the users so that we had a real benchmark to measure against. With this intel under our belt we launched the first phase to the business. Once advisors knew about the new approach to customer feedback, and we gave them access to their scores in real time, we saw a marked improvement in the first month alone as they started to self-correct their behaviours to increase their CSAT and NPS scores.”
Jo Johnson, SGSMs Customer Escalation Manager, reveals the results: “general satisfaction increased by an incredible 9% to 88%, recommend (whether a customer would recommend SGSM) went up 4% and we made it easier to do business with us as we saw customer effort scores increase by 6% to 91%. The first month also demonstrated that there was a greater degree of consistency in the quality of the service being delivered.”
With the help of Bright, SGSM set up surveys across eight different aspects of the customer journey. The intention was to monitor the impact of SGSM interactions and the experiences customers were having with partners. For example, SGSM survey the car hire experience and the repair experience separately. Not only does this deliver statistical information at a detailed level, but the team can also analyse the verbatim feedback to appreciate a single interaction or deep dive into a particular aspect of the customer journey.
Improving The Performance of Partners
The depth and breadth of the analysis also enables SGSM to manage its supply chain performance more closely.
“Our partners have been delighted to get this feedback as they are then able to implement improvements to benefit their other customers and increase loyalty. Here’s an example: one car hire company had an NPS of 55.3 at the start of the programme and just one month in this had increased to 71.1 by giving them the insight they needed.”
“To help monitor and improve partner performance SGSM created a leader board for repair and hire partners. They all know where they sit and are driven to improve their results, which is great news for us and importantly great news for our customers. The impact is that the relationships with our partners are getting stronger and stronger.”
Learning From The Evidence
Every quarter SGSM meet with Bright to review the results.
“Bright challenge us on what the results are saying,” admits Stacy. “They really made us think and look at the results in a more analytical way; not just the metrics but the verbatim comments too. They have coached us in how to read the insights, interpret the results and deal with the information most effectively, turning them into actionable improvements to continuously enrich the customer experience.”
Motivating Advisors
“A key change for advisors was how we started to use the feedback positively,” says Jo. “Of course, we looked at the negative feedback and how we could use that to improve the customer experience either team-wide or by individual, but it was the positive feedback that gave us the biggest shift in behaviours. We use the positive comments and scores to show the team what ‘good’ looks like, so they have a vision of what they could or should be doing during an interaction. We have a Team Performance Matrix that plots where each team is in a grid; to show teams under-performing to over performers and stars. We have seen underperforming teams progress through this grid and it’s great to see how proud the teams are when they reach star performance.
“What has had a huge impact is giving advisors direct access to their performance results,” explains Jo. “Previously advisors were blind to how well they were performing. We were unable to give them direct feedback and coaching was based on gut feelings and limited evidence. Now all advisors have access to their scores they can see where they are not performing and, more importantly they can see where they are having a really positive impact and this is turning out to be incredibly motivating for them. They get immediate feedback and are self-correcting in order to get the feedback that makes them feel good.”
The objective to improve employee engagement was fundamental to improving the customer experience – happy people, happy customers. SGSM has conducted two full employee surveys using the Bright tool and is using the evidence to inform an advisor strategy and to create a new vision.
Saving Time
“When we implemented the coaching module we saw another uplift in the results and an improvement in employee engagement,” says Stacy. “It used to take a team manager 30 minutes to prepare for a good coaching session. Now, with each individual performance in Bright they have the tools to create a coaching session in a fraction of the time and deliver more focused and relevant learning using the most recent insights.
“One of the most valuable aspects of the Bright solution is its performance management; the ability to access key operational metrics down to agent level in real time, at any time. This has saved us so much time where we used to gather data from several different sources, having to manipulate it to deliver something meaningful. We have integrated our other data sources into Bright and at the touch of a button can see progress against the key metrics we measure in our balanced scorecard, from productivity and hold time to service bookings and task completions.”
Know More About Customer Behavior
The Bright solution doesn’t just provide simple evaluations against key metrics. It is possible to build much more detailed pictures of what is going on. Jo explains:
“Working with Bright we have discovered a series of correlations. For example, we exposed a correlation between professionalism and recommendations within the repairs aspect of the journey. For customers that scored 1 or 2 on professionalism, they always gave a score of 1 on recommend. We have also found that there is a strong negative correlation between hold time and knowledge; the longer someone is on hold the less likely the advisor will be seen as having the knowledge to deal with the call. This in turn impacts the recommend metric suggesting that a reduction in hold time may result in an increase in the recommend score.”
The most recent functionality that SGSM switched on was text analytics. This is delivering much greater insight into sentiment; text alerts are sent when certain words are spoken so that the team can pick this up immediately and deal with the situation. Word clouds are used to assess how customers are feeling.
“This functionality has had one of the biggest impacts since implementing Bright because we can really see how the customer experience has changed and has brought us more insight into who our customers are and what they really want,” says Jo.
“The next phase is to use the insight to build a new customer journey. Now armed with more relevant and up to date information we have instigated a project that will see our customer journey take a further leap forward so that we can continue to delight our customers as behaviours and expectations change.”
Impact On Business Performance
The success of the project has meant that the business has now started to deliver the surveys in other languages. A full suite of surveys entirely in Polish is helping to measure engagement and NPS specifically for this scheme.
“Our ability to demonstrate our service level has led to us being able to extend our commercial relationship with our referrer and take on more responsibility for managing their clients,” says Jo.
“The fact that the analysis breaks the data down by team means we can see how well we are servicing specific clients, and therefore make the necessary improvements to retain that client. For example, in that first month we could see that we were delivering 100% excellence for one client but our knowledge for another client was at 72% so we increased the training effort to improve those scores.”
The evidence and insight that SGSMs adoption of Bright has given is being shared with the senior management team. Not only does the contact centre have much greater understanding of their own performance, but the business leaders can also see how the performance and insight within the contact centre is having an impact on overall business performance and commercial success.
Recognising Success
SGSM is now reaching new heights benchmarking above the rest of the UK insurance market and the general UK contact centre industry across customer effort, empathy, knowledge, recommend and understanding.
The team has used the evidence to enter awards winning Outsourced Contact Centre of the Year at the Call North West Contact Centre Awards in 2017 and 2018 by demonstrating a genuine focus on the customer and their experience.
“The insight is simply invaluable,” says Stacy. “To break it down, using Bright has delivered an increasing response rate, more relevant data that we can analyse to make more informed decisions and we are using the insight to look at the entire customer journey; the processes and the emotions. Above all, we can prove the value of the contact centre to the rest of the business.”
For additional information on Bright visit their Website or view their Company Profile
