How the senior leaders of the water sector can learn from contact centre agents – Hannah Cook, Lead HR Business Partner at Echo Managed Services discusses
New research from the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) has found that 50% of employees feel their CEO and board don’t listen to the feedback of their customer-facing staff, resulting in missed opportunities for improved customer service.
While this research polled employees across all sectors, the water sector can, and should, take note of these findings to ensure it is not missing chances to improve processes and its approach to customer care. Often, leaders may feel they have the processes in place to listen and learn from employees, but what really matters is that their staff feel this is the case, and if it isn’t it may be time for a rethink around whether processes and policies are truly effective.
With Ofwat recently putting license modifications in place that include customer-focused principles for all water companies, it is a good time to redefine organisational customer service levels. Water utilities can use the ICS findings alongside their own insight to take a closer look at current internal feedback processes between the different levels of hierarchy within the organisation to make sure a diverse set of perspectives are considered.
By implementing effective multi-level feedback systems in an organisation, water utilities can improve service levels and customer satisfaction, as well as ensure customer-facing staff feel listened to by their employer.
Integrating multi-level feedback systems into an organisation
Integrating multi-level feedback systems into an organisationA multi-level feedback system involves collecting, analysing, and acting on feedback from various organisational levels and functions, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of customer service challenges and opportunities. This allows customer service staff, those who interact with customers daily, to feed into new policies and ways of working.
Feedback can be collected through surveys and suggestion boxes situated in the workplace itself. An organisation can also use digital platforms and apps to gather real-time feedback from employees on the ‘customer-facing front line’. More detailed feedback can also be collected during in-depth focus groups and interviews, allowing qualitative insights to be gathered. At Echo, our annual employee engagement survey, allows all team members to share their feedback on various aspects of the business including the impact on customers. From this, the senior leadership team develops a set of improvement plans to drive positive change. Whilst engagement surveys are common, what’s important is that leadership teams don’t lose focus on driving actionable improvements to completion; employees will only continue to give feedback if they feel it is being listened to.
Technology can also play a part in this process. Not only can it be used to gather the data, but it can also analyse and identify trends in the quantitative feedback. Sometimes however, the audience focus for these reports is leadership teams, to be more effective, these reports should be distributed to all levels of the organisation not just in the C-suite, giving everyone visibility and an opportunity t to understand and feedback on customer service performance
In order to ensure feedback and ideas are listened to and actioned, committees should be in place which comprise of representatives from different levels of an organisation to discuss the feedback and prioritise any resulting actions. This gives employees in every department an opportunity to influence the customer service levels that are critical to water sector success. At Echo, this is achieved through regularly held employee voice forums. All staff are encouraged to attend the forums to raise any concerns and new ideas with the leadership team.
Ensuring customer-facing staff feel listened to
Even with a formalised feedback system in place, client-facing employees may not feel listened to. Organisations need to ensure their staff feel valued and heard. To make them feel heard, water utilities can regularly communicate with client-facing staff and those who input into customer service processes in the field and back office functions. If staff do not feel comfortable speaking openly in front of their colleagues, water utilities should also implement an open-door policy. We pride ourselves on encouraging feedback through our Improving Together policy, helping employees see that everyone has a stake in the company’s development and how we, as a trusted service provider, help our water utility customers to drive service excellence. It is important that employees know how they can give feedback and feel comfortable to do so
Organisations can also use employee recognition programs to incentivise employees who provide valuable feedback that leads to service improvements. Feedback should be publicly acknowledged to reinforce that feedback is valued and acted upon by the C-suite. Awards are another simple way to encourage this behaviour. Nominating team players, those driving the future of the business and those that go above and beyond, will highlight to employees the reward that comes with sharing their thoughts and being more involved.
Employees can also be trained in how to give constructive feedback and how their input will be used. It may be the first time that some staff members have had the opportunity to feed into policy creation and may not have the confidence to do so.Similarly, leaders can be trained with the skills to actively listen and respond empathetically to feedback from their teams. It may also be the first time that leaders have been given feedback from other levels of an organisation.
Leaders play a crucial role in helping employees understand how their work contributes to the organisation’s overall purpose. This can be achieved through regularly communicating the organisation’s vision and how each employee’s role contributes to achieving it.
Involving employees in setting and understanding organisational goals and their role in meeting these targets helps them engage with collective team goals.
Engaging employees in strategy development
Inclusive strategy sessions can help the entire team feel involved and ensure they buy into the organisational goals.
While strategies are being implemented the C-suite can also provide transparent progress updates. These can be internal grades and external measures such as Ofwat’s C-MeX scores.
This will help illustrate the impact of the client-facing team’s contributions.
Leveraging organisational culture for great customer service
Finally, organisational culture is a key part of delivering exceptional customer service by creating a customer-conscious environment. This should embed customer service values and behaviours into the workplace culture through good training and leadership examples. Echo does this successfully through its series of employee development initiatives, including its Boost programme and management development programme, to Advance Capability in Echo.
By identifying customer service champions within the business, empowering employees to be the stewards of best practices and brainstorming sessions, water companies can foster a culture of continuous improvement. Establishing a continuous feedback loop where customer service practices are regularly reviewed and improved based on feedback also leads to continuous improvement. Customer preferences change over time as new generations become billpayers and new technologies and channels of communication are introduced. Without feedback on how customers are interacting with changes, uninformed decisions can often be made.
In conclusion
Implementing multi-level feedback systems can significantly improve customer service levels and satisfaction in the water sector. Ensuring that customer-facing staff feel listened to and valued by their employer can also lead to better service outcomes. It will also aid staff satisfaction and retention. Additionally, aligning employees with the organisation’s purpose and leveraging a customer-centric culture are key strategies for delivering exceptional customer service.
The recent findings from the ICS highlight the importance of listening to feedback from all levels of the organisation, particularly in light of Ofwat’s consultation new customer-focused licence conditions. By redefining organisational customer service levels, water utilities can ensure they meet and exceed customer expectations and set the standard for customer service across industries at a time when the sector finds itself in the spotlight.
Hannah Cook is Lead HR Business Partner at Echo Managed Services
Echo Managed Services is a specialist outsourced provider of complex multi-channel customer contact services, comprehensive debt recovery solutions, revenue protection services and the developer of the multi-utility, Salesforce-native billing software, Aptumo.
Echo combines best-practice technology and processes with highly skilled and knowledgeable people to provide public and private sector organisations with end-to-end customer contact capabilities.
For additional information on Echo Managed Services visit their Website
