"This was one of the highlights of my career, I was having the most fun with this radical change...we created a fantastic team with an amazing culture and a great brand”
Welcome to Podcast #2 featuring special guest Lauren Reid, formerly the Head of Direct Service at MLC Life Insurance now the Manager of Member Services at ESSSuper.
In this conversation we cover:
Harnessing the collective strengths of your people to improve CSAT and engagement through collaboration and shared accountability.
How different personal and leadership styles can flourish in an agile environment.
The importance of telling the story of your agile journey to the rest of your organisation to engage and influence, in particular, how agile contact centres demonstrate customer value to stakeholders to get things done.
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Show notes
-Structure of the team, the environment at MLC at the time the work began (1:15)
-Giving the team a voice to improve the customer experience and how to set the environment up to support this (4:34)
-Lauren discusses her personal style and how the changes being made challenged her leadership style, confidence and what she learnt about being vulnerable (7:13)
-Learning that the agile principles can be applied in many different ways depending on the goals you want to achieve and trying to implement a solution from another contact centre isn’t necessarily going to be the right solution for you (10:19)
-Understanding that all personalities and skills have a place in an agile contact centre, from creative to very structured types (14:02)
-Servant leadership and the importance of direction and purpose and how this change in mindset changed the way they leaders supported their teams to give them a voice (15:55)
-How this fostered an environment of collaboration and teamwork which lead to peer to peer coaching to leverage the strengths among the team (18:17)
-This leads on to a discussion around shared KPI’s and we deep dive what the ‘System of Work’ is. Lauren talks about removing AHT as a KPI and what that meant for forecasting and budgets (21:00)
-Lauren discusses the pros and cons of CSAT vs. NPS as a metric and the shift to using CSAT as a shared KPI. How this improved the customer experience and lead to greater ownership of the customer which resulted in a huge improvement in CSAT and engagement (26:43)
-How the teams were empowered to coach and support each to improve CSAT and build a strong culture of teamwork (33:02)
-A detailed discussion about how the team told their agile story to the rest of organisation and promoted the new ways of working. How they used metrics everyone understood and how this was driving real business value. Giving the teams a role to run tours and present to other teams at on what they were doing and how this engaged other teams to support initiatives to improve the customer experience (36:27)
- Lauren wraps up by talking about what to do if you were thinking about embarking on a journey to reinvent her contact centre and the leadership mindset to adopt to support you in doing this (50:57)
