5 ways to understand complexity

For many leaders, the word complexity is not new.

Nowadays, everything is complex, to the point it's almost lost its meaning.

Complexity, in this case, refers to the type of dynamics that describe the system, and this offers us clues as to how to lead in a complex environment.

According to David Snowden, author of the Cynefin Framework, there are 4 types of systems - Simple, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic. And it outlines a way to understand and act in each one.

In a complex system:

1. You need collective intelligence: harnessing the power of groups and taking on many different perspectives to diagnose problems and form solutions

2. Understand cause and effect rather than jump to solutions

3. Understanding can only be done retrospectively

4. Be patient and be comfortable with ambiguity and failures

5. Take action in the form of 'nudges' towards the goal and observe what happens to validate your actions. There are no silver bullets.

Why is this important?

The type of leadership styles and practices you use will help you to understand and adapt, for example.

Command and Control is one of the most overused styles. This is a good style in chaotic systems, where fast actions without consultation are beneficial.

However, a visionary, democratic and influencing style in a complex system has many more advantages. These styles require vulnerability, trust and time invested in building connection, consensus and a lot more listening than telling.

Situational leadership has been around for decades. However, it is most often discussed when leading people. Over the last three years, it has become clear that it is essential when considering the types of problems to be solved.

In complex systems, there are no silver bullets, no utopian dreams, just a commitment to improving each day.

Image courtesy of Francisco Carcamo

The 4 levels of listening for the modern contact centre leader

One of the most valuable skills the modern leader has is to listen.

Having the ability to sit and quietly pay attention, withhold judgement and be open to possibilities will lead to better solutions, stronger trust and connection.

Listening well combines good self-awareness and self-management. Firstly, to know when our biases are coming up and secondly, the ability to set them aside.

Listening well requires silence. Letting those moments stretch out will allow time for thought, and that tension will bring out the right conversation.

Listening effectively requires intention, and to add to the complexity, you can't listen without thinking and feeling.

According to Otto Scharmer, there are four levels of listening.

🛫 Level 1 - Autopilot.
We filter, discard and dismiss. This reinforces our current way of seeing the world. At this level, we are like the algorithm on YouTube. We only take in the same type of content, the content we like, rather than the content that might stimulate our interest in different directions or even give us divergent views and ideas to expand our understanding.
This way of listening discards a lot of information you might need to innovate, explore ideas and build genuine connection and trust.

🧠 Level 2 - Open Mind.
This is where we can take on new information and actively look for alternatives and opposing views to consider what else might be possible.

💙 Level 3 - Open Heart.
We listen empathetically, and we appreciate the perspective of the other person. We don't need to have felt their emotions, but we believe their perspective completely and we do this without judgement.

🙏🏼 Level 4 - Open Will.
We give up our preconceptions about how something should be done and allow control to be passed to the other person. We can act as coaches at this moment, and we don't impose ourselves on the outcome.

It's important to note here that this is not linear. You can move back and forward between these in one conversation.

So where do we start to be more intentional about moving between these levels of listening?

Start to reflect every day on where you have been using listening. Then think about what helped or hindered you in moving to a level that could have helped get a better outcome or better connection.
Do this for a couple of weeks, and you should start noticing that you catch yourself in the moment and adjust your listening in real time.

How to create psychological safety in the contact centre

Psychological safety is the glue that holds the most successful teams together, and it's only as strong as the safety experienced by the people who need it most.

And it's the responsibility of the people who feel the safest, who have positional or social power, to work hardest to lift it. The sting in the tail is that the people that feel the least safe, are the least likely to speak up about it.

So, where do you start?

1. Encourage open communication and active listening: Foster an environment where team members feel comfortable speaking up and expressing their thoughts and feelings. Encourage everyone to listen actively and show that you value their contributions.

2. Promote a culture of trust: Trust is an essential component of psychological safety. Take steps to build trust within your team, such as being transparent and following through on commitments.

3. Support diversity and inclusion: Creating a diverse and inclusive team can help to build psychological safety. Encourage team members to bring their unique perspectives and experiences to the table and create an environment where everyone feels valued and respected.

4. Establish clear expectations and guidelines: Having clear expectations and guidelines can help team members feel more secure and know what is expected of them.

5. Encourage risk-taking and learning from mistakes: It is important to create an environment where team members feel comfortable taking risks and trying new things, even if it means making mistakes. Encourage a culture of learning from mistakes and use them as opportunities for growth.

6. Provide resources for mental health and well-being: Make sure team members have access to resources such as mental health support, stress management techniques, and work-life balance support.

7. Encourage regular check-ins and feedback: Regular check-ins and feedback can help team members feel connected and supported. Encourage team members to give and receive feedback in a constructive and respectful manner.

8. Praise and reward people when they take risks: This will set the scene for further risk-taking in the future. Risk-taking can be speaking up, sharing an idea, or questioning someone in a position of power.

It's only when leaders and those with power start to let go of that power and actively engage with every member of the team to understand the unique forces that reduce their safety that they will be able to build cohesive high-performing teams.

Credit: Amy Edmondson for her research and thought leadership on this important subject

Purpose is the new black

Almost every organisation has a purpose, the aim is to unify people and provide greater meaning to the work they do.

It’s also a very powerful motivator, according to the Harvard Business Review 9 out 10 people would be willing to sacrifice 23% of their lifetime earnings to have more meaning at work. This is staggering.

Dan Pink, author of Drive, goes a step further, he calls out three things to truly motivate people to do their best work. Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

The common thread between these is that it unlocks and reinforces the intrinsic motivation to do your best work.

Where do we start?

Bringing purpose to life is the key, posters on the wall or being tucked away on your intranet aren’t enough. According to PWC, Millennials, the most purpose-driven generation yet, want to hear stories about how purpose comes to life, directly from their leaders.

It’s the social connection between people that reinforces and strengthens the meaning, so find customer stories and share them in team meetings and town halls.

The power of purpose goes even deeper. Rutgers University say two thirds of Millennials look for employers where they can make a positive contribution in the world so leading with purpose can get you more engaged people from day one. They go to say that once they are with you they are 5 times more likely to stay when they have a strong sense of connection to purpose.

Once you have created an environment where your people are intrinsically motivated you must set up the system of work to support it.

Think of the system of work like a garden. The plants need the right soil, water and sunlight to grow, if some of these elements are out of balance, plants won’t grow, but get all of them right and they will reach their full potential. This is no different with the eco-system your people work in everyday.

One part of the system of work are KPI’s and rewards. In contact centres, metrics play a big role in aligning people to purpose, and when they out of whack the gap between what your teams are here to do and what they actually do becomes really obvious.

According to a study by Bain & Co employees and teams truly inspired by purpose are 225% more productive than those that aren’t. They go on to say that 79% of leaders say purpose is critical to success, yet only 32% align rewards and performance measures to purpose.

Organisational purpose is important, but it’s even more important that your contact centre teams understand their own purpose. Get your team together and ask each person to explore what truly motivates them to work, and then align their goals at work to this. It also acts as a powerful motivator to overcome setbacks and challenges.

The gauntlet has been thrown down, to provide purpose-driven work places with meaningful work that keep people engaged and able to bring their best self to work.

How the network effect can help your culture thrive

At Neu21 we have a practice, where each quarter someone in the team takes on the role of coach for someone else in the team, and in the last rotation, Gus Balbontin took on the role of my coach.

I asked Gus about how he thinks about growing a business, and what he told me was not what I thought he’d say, and it’s one of the most valuable pieces of advice I’ve ever received.

He talked about connected networks, not just the number people that follow you on LinkedIn, but the quality, diversity and health of those connections.

He was referring to the network effect, the phenomena that powers the internet and social media, but it’s equally powerful for humble folks like you an me. And even more powerful when unleashed within an organisation, or contact centre.

Here’s how we are thinking about it. Kudos to Hannah Gee’s also at Neu21 for her articulate words.

Internally, externally and within our own relationships, we are a Networked Ecosystem.

An ecosystem’s health is measured the same way as the health of a network.

This means that to establish a healthy, thriving ecosystem of people, contact centres, businesses and knowledge economy initiatives, we need to focus on increasing four elements:

1. The number of nodes.
   The first indicator of how healthy a network is can be found by counting the number of nodes that make up the network.

2. The diversity of nodes.

   The second indicator of how healthy a network is can be found by looking at the diversity of nodes. If everyone in the network, or ecosystem, is the same, growth will be severely limited. Efforts should also consider customers, suppliers and vendors, contractors, support services and other relevant ecosystem players.

3. The number of connections between nodes.

   The third indicator is one of the stronger ones, if you have a healthy and diverse number of nodes but they are not connected, your network or ecosystem will definitely not be healthy. Building connections is the most important focal point and efforts.

4. The quality of the connections between nodes.

   The final indicator of network or ecosystem health is the quality of the connections between the different nodes. Nodes might be connected but if the connection is of low quality, this might mean nothing more than an email back and forth. For a healthy, thriving ecosystem to get established, these connections need to be of an extremely high quality. This means that the various nodes (or business, support services and other ecosystem players) know of each other, know what they can do for each other and have a low barrier to engaging with each other, like being able to pick up the phone at any time.

I’m now being more intentional about the connections I have within my network, not just for my benefit, but for everyone else in it.

Here’s what I’ve learnt so far.

The common enemies of a connected network:

1. Siloes - the first barrier to break down inside the organisation, it stops collaboration and learning and the ability to get important work done.

2. Scarcity mindset - fearing competition, reach out to other people who do work like you, in your category. Leaders can share their experiences and learn from each other without giving away trade secrets.

3. Self-awareness - not thinking you need to build a connected network, I can speak from experience that the best and most valuable connections I have are those I never expected I would need. Think about the network they have not just the connection you have with them, this opens up huge opportunities.

4. Sameness - we surround ourselves with people like us, and we do this unconsciously so take an inventory of your network and work on building it up with people that have different views, experience, backgrounds, gender. Aim to make your self uncomfortable and be open to having your strongly held views, changed.

For cultures to thrive they must adapt, and the quality of it’s networks will be a major factor in its success with being able to succeed in a volatile, uncertain and complex world. And it all starts with how we foster connection.

Failure Demand - The key to improving employee experience, customer experience and reduce operating costs

Imagine if 70% of the work you did every day was unnecessary, the result of something that had gone wrong, and your job was to fix it.  

What an incredible waste that would be.

This number is real, up to 70% of all calls are due failing to do something or do something right for the customer.

Let’s talk about why this happens every day in contact centres.

Improving what we call the triple bottom line in contact centres (customer experience, employee engagement and operating costs) often starts with ways to reduce AHT and improving first contact resolution.  

The logic is that shorter calls are better than longer ones, this saves money, creates capacity and customers can get on with their lives, but they still had to make the call. 

Better FCR means more customers are getting what they need in one call, but it still means they had to call.  

Neither AHT or FCR fixes the root cause of the issue, and surely the goal should be to prevent the call in the first place.   

Up until now, we haven’t had the language and mindsets to get to the heart of the issue, so we have dealt with the symptoms and not the cause.

By removing these calls we are not suggesting the end of the contact centre, we’ll never remove all the failure demand, this is about repositioning the role of the contact centre from cost centre to value centre.  

What does Failure Demand look like?  

• Incorrect bills and statements  

• New features or plans not applied to an account  

• Password resets 

• Staff shortages, causing processing times to blow out, driving customer calls

• Call backs not made, prompting the customer to call back in

• Follow ups on the status of an application 

• Statements not sent / sent to the wrong address  

• Bonuses or benefits earned, not applied to the account  

• Incorrect information given leading to the wrong expectations being set 

By now, you are probably thinking about the types of Failure demand in your contact centre. Start making a list.

If you imagine yourself being a customer in these situations, you will have felt frustrated at being forced to put in effort because of something out of your control.  

If you imagined yourself being at the front line in customer service, you will also feel frustrated, and you are also feeling burnt out, due to high call volumes and dealing with unhappy customers, call after call.  

This is the reality in every contact centre, day in and day out.  

These issues put enormous pressure on the people providing service, leading to unplanned absences, rise in mental health issues and in the worst case attrition.  

When the root cause of failure demand is not treated, employees begin to lose trust in the organisation to live up to their vision and see it as a failure of leadership to prioritise what is most important. 

Pressure on collaboration 

Most failures are complicated, something has not gone to plan and this requires some diagnosis and problem solving. Contact centre teams, IT, Product and Sales need to work together to find out where it went wrong and fix it.  

Ownership of the problem is often hand balled around and these failures are often repetitive, so they are dealing with the same issues day in and day out, and tensions can escalate quickly between teams. 

How does failure demand happen? 

Sometimes, failure demand is inadvertently designed into the system, is hidden, and only becomes exposed due to high customer demand. Rather than wait for this to happen, a proactive and intentional approach to the service design must be taken from a customer’s perspective.

Sometimes, when we become aware of failure, we are unable to make fixing it a priority, and we have no choice but to accept failure as part how we work. 

When this happens our service, support and sales teams become the band-aid, the work around, and the experience they have at work suffers, just like customers, this erodes the confidence and trust they have in the organisation to support them. They feel a dissonance between the reality and the vision. 

We’ll never remove all failure demand, the fact is we need growing companies to get to market and learn about what their customers need, failing is necessary part of this process.  

What we need to do is to understand how to design failure ‘out’ of the system when we find it and take measures to eradicate it.

Let’s break it down 

The impacts on the employee experience 

• Employee’s say that the growing complexity of the work and spikes in demand account for 50% of the reasons they consider leaving an organisation. They also say that the challenging nature of the work, particularly during busy times, is the key driver of unplanned absences. Anything over 85% occupancy is the burnt-out zone and people can’t stay here for long. 

• Unplanned absences increase abandon calls and 50% of customers that abandon a call will attempt to call back within the same day, compounding already high occupancy levels. 

• 20% of contact centres Team Leaders are on the phones, 22% of the time. This is a staggering number. And it’s the number 1 reason they consider leaving the organisation, it also takes them away from coaching and development activities which they rate as their number 1 priority and the area they wish they had more time to invest in.

• It is well understood that high occupancy leads to higher AHT, as employees who are under the pressure of back-to-back calls look for ways to get a break, by using hold or wrap time. This makes achieving service levels a nightmare.

In some cases, employees will find other non-productive ways to get a break during the day, gaming the system to get some respite.

Do you know the true cost of Failure Demand on your employee experience?  

The impacts on operating costs 

• Staffing costs 

The average contact centre salaries have risen 10-15% since the pandemic and this rising month on month with the competitiveness in the labour market. Then add in the cost to super, leave provisions, recruitment, and training. 

If we take a conservative estimate of failure demand being 35%, this means you are carrying 35% more cost in staffing costs than you need to. Do the sums, it’s a big number. 

• Facilities costs 

Fixed costs like this are a big part of the budget and the more failure demand you have the more people you need to answer those calls which is more square metres of office space. This is the least flexible part of the cost stack (the cost stack is the breakdown of expenses required to run your contact centre) 

• Equipment and hardware 

Headsets, dual-screens, computers, ergonomic workstations at home and in the office. This has doubled since the pandemic as we set our teams up to work in office and at home. 

• Technology licensing costs 

Most technology used in contact centres is now charged based on the number of seats you need. This could include a KMS, WFM, Telephony solution, LMS and perhaps you have a payroll solution as well. The more failure demand you have, the more of all these you need, and your cost stack skyrockets.  

Do you know how much failure demand is contributing to your operating costs? 

Impacts on the customer experience 

• According to Qualtrics, high effort interactions are the main driver for customer attrition. In some cases, customers may not leave due to high switching costs, but they certainly won’t buy more from you, and they definitely won’t recommend you. In fact, they are more likely to go to social media and tell others about their poor experiences. 

Further research by Bain and Co. Shows that by increasing customer retention rates by just 5%, can increases profits by between 25% to 95%. 

• Channel switching, most often from a lower cost channel like the web or chat to high-cost voice channel is a common outcome of failure demand. Forrester put the cost of channel switching in 2021 at $22m for the retail sector alone.

• The most well-known CX metrics like FCR and NPS hide Failure Demand, in fact I’ll go as far as to say FCR is ineffective, in many cases the problem can be fixed on the call, but the root cause remains, meaning many other customers will have the same experience. This is another example of building failure demand into the system, these calls become part of the forecast and front-line staff are tasked with trying to get irate customers off the phone faster. 

Only one third of Australian contact centres are achieving their service level

standards to customers. 

Do you know the true cost of failure demand on customer experience?

Scalable Growth  

• One of the biggest blockers to growing your contact centre efficiently is failure demand, unless you are willing to invest in more and more people to answer calls and this is not a scalable solution.

• AI has come a long way in the last few years, but for now it is more effective with simple transactions. Take chatbots as an example, throw failure demand at a bot and it will struggle to resolve the problem, most of us have experienced how frustrating this is and we then look for a person to talk to.  

• Choosing the right application for AI automation is important for the customer experience but also the successful adoption of AI more broadly, right now we aren’t that confident it can do what it says on the label but that can change with the right service design. There is a rising trend in companies looking to use these low-cost channels to manage failure demand, this may be a lower cost option for the budget, but it’s still high effort for the customer when they switch channels.

• High growth companies must invest in the service design capabilities so that everyone in the organisation is able to visualise and understand the entire customer lifecycle, through the eyes of the customer.

Do you have the mindsets and skills to design scalable customer experiences? 

  Do you know which technologies and more importantly, the right use cases to help

you scale quickly and deliver world-class experiences? 

Reputation and Brand Risk 

• In 2021, AFCA the complaints ombudsman for the financial services industry in Australia managed 70,000 complaints resulting in over $240 million dollars in compensation, and a further $32 million from issues relating to systemic failures.  

  Failure demand can go wrong in a big way and when it does it can cost more than money, reputations are hard to build but can be damaged very quickly. 

  Do you know the true cost of dispute resolution?

What about Value Demand? 

The other side of the demand coin is Value demand. 

These are interactions your customers want to make, like buying new products or services. 

Imagine if your servicing teams had more capacity to invest in Value demand interactions. Have you ever wished you could offer more value by making outbound calls to support the customers onboarding journey or to cross sell other products? 

Or being able to redirect budget to invest in AI and automated solutions to provide self-serve options to customers? 

The dramatic rise in the implementation of Customer Success teams shows that the early part of the customers journey with organisations is critical to focus on if you want to support long term relationships, solving for failure demand creates capacity to invest here.  

Sadly, this is not even on the radar for most contact centres, but value creation could be part of the strategy. 

There has never been a better time to fix Failure Demand. 

How can we help?  

• We can coach and educate leaders on customer demand.

• Show you how to identify and visualise failure and value demand in your contact centre. 

• Help you understand your unique cost stack to reveal the true cost of failure demand so you can build a business case to fix it. 

• Develop ways of working so you can identify the root causes and then prioritise the solutions to realise the benefits. 

• Up-skill teams with the latest service design principles, tools, and mindsets so they can build value-based customer and employee experiences. 

We find the best place to start is to get a conversation going.  

• Book us in for a chat with your leadership team, with no obligation, we can run a knowledge building session to educate the team on customer demand and tell you how you can get started quickly and easily to uncover failure demand in your contact centre.

We have over 20 years’ experience in contact centres and have led successful failure demand programs at organisations like ME Bank, Real Estate.com, QSuper and MLC Insurance.  

Credit must go to John Seddon for Customer Demand, and for his work in the field with his company, Vanguard. Without him we would not have the language and means by which to understand and deal with Failure Demand. Much thanks. 

All data referenced in text is taken from the SMAART Recruitment Best Practice Report, 2022

5 ways you can build an adaptive, agile contact centre

Being agile is no longer enough, we believe the agile principles will always have a place in the ways teams work, but it should be one part of a much broader approach to how we lead the modern contact centre.

The world today is best described as disruptive, best laid plans are often turned upside down and yet we still have goals and aspirations that we want to fulfil.

So how do we achieve our business goals and successfully deal with the unexpected events that throw us into firefighting mode?

The answer to become adaptive. It’s a way of designing, working and leading contact centres that focuses on building the capability to thrive no matter what the change is.

The best way to think about this, is like the automatic software updates on your phone.

With each update you get a better, more capable phone, faster, longer battery life, and ready for all the new features. All this is achieved with very little downtime.

So, if this was your culture, you would have an advantage, you would always be ready. Now being ready, may not sound that exciting, but it means that no matter what change, disruption, or goal you have, your team will be able to sense, adapt and respond faster and with greater success.

And it goes one step further, adaptive teams are constantly learning about how to adapt. And this is the real gold, resulting in continual updates to their operating system, making them even more adaptive over time. So, when a disruption hits your your team, rather than being derailed, you keep moving towards your goals, happier and healthier.

And we believe that happier and healthier can coexist with the achievement of business goals, rather than having to being traded off.

These are the key traits of an adaptive culture:

1. High trust, psychologically safety teams who can call out mistakes and share ideas with confidence.

2. Transparency – data, information and feedback are shared freely.

3. Autonomy – the people that do the work, own the work and are given the control to make decisions in the best interests of customers.

4. Collaborative - everyone wins and loses together, siloes are broken down.

5. Authentic – everyone can be themselves, not just a version they need to be for work.

6. Curiosity and learning – they are always learning, adaptive cultures cannot survive for long without constant input. They look outside and inside for better ways of working.

7. Creative – they explore ideas no matter who raised them and rather than saying no, they have a ‘yes, and’ mindset.

8. Experimental - failure is celebrated and when new ideas are tested they make it safe to fail.

9. Focus on personal development – they recognise that the energy and motivation for work, comes from what motivates and enriches you outside of work.

Adaptive teams don't have these as posters on a wall, they are woven into the fabric of how they work, relate and think. This is more messy than it is orderly, less planned than you might like, but the result is hands down, the best culture you can work in.

 The key benefits are:

-       The ability to adapt quickly to change, change is seen as a positive and embedded successfully, resulting in greater business and customer benefits.

-       Higher customer satisfaction and loyalty as a result of removing unnecessary calls.

-       Higher employee engagement and lower attrition as a result of employee experiences designed around your unique value proposition.

-       Higher performance through better collaboration and a shared view of success.

-       Lower operating costs due to fewer calls, less rework, lower recruitment costs.

 Creating this culture combines a range of sustainable practices and mindsets that create the ability to adapt rapidly to change.

 5 things you can do today to build an adaptive, agile contact centre:

1.    Flexibility: provide as much choice as you can on where and when your team can work. This will reduce absenteeism, attrition and help you attract the best people in the market.

2.    Learning: run Retrospectives regularly to uncover improvement opportunities. Teams that are more engaged in how to improve the environment they work in, feel more accountable, leading to better performance.   

3.    Trust: increase psychological safety, do a quick pulse check to see how comfortable people are in speaking up to share ideas, report mistakes and provide feedback up the line. Cultures with high psychological safety perform better because they talk about mistakes openly, so they can course correct faster and take advantage of new opportunities that come from sharing ideas.

4.    Protecting time for connection: in a busy contact centre the first thing that will be traded off, is time for people to come together, 1-1’s, team meetings and socialising. The ability to come together and get personal is one of the most valued activities, it prevents isolation and shows that you value your people for what they can bring to the culture, rather than simply doing the job.

5.    Increase feedback: in particular, peer to peer feedback on what people do well. The modern contact centre is a busy place, and customer interactions can be tough, making it critical that your people can bounce back quickly and safely. Providing positive feedback has been shown to improve retention and employee satisfaction by up to 30%, it works by giving people the energy and reason to overcome challenges they face every day.

Bringing to life the traits of adaptive cultures is at the heart of an agile and adaptive contact centre, it’s an ongoing commitment from leaders to create a humanistic, customer-centric climate that values the worth of every person.

How to create the contact centre leaders of the future…..stop training them!

the return on investment is not worth it. 

For the most part, the learning doesn’t lead to better organisational performance, because people soon revert to their old ways of doing things - Harvard Business Review

The number one reason training fails is implementation. And the contact centre is particularly susceptible to this, and it happens for a few very valid reasons. 

1. Being busy, this busyness distracts leaders from being present and intentional about building new patterns of behaviour.  

2. Not having a structured and supported plan to embed the new skills and mindsets that supports forming new habits.  

3. Leaders of leaders are not on the same journey and aren’t clear on what it is their learner needs to do, back on the job. 

It is fair to say that contact centre leaders are the busiest leaders in the whole organisation. They have 10 to 15 direct reports to build relationships with, manage complaints, create reporting, provide coaching, recruit new team members, the list goes on.  

They are often inexperienced with 1-2 years of leadership under their belt and so don't realise how important being intentional is, they are left to their own initiative, which is not a bad thing, but it means they will make common mistakes and they inevitably fall back into old patterns. 

Once you deal with the challenges of implementation, how do you ensure that leaders keep learning and improving?

Contact Centre Leadership Training programs often miss these critical pieces of the puzzle. 

• Peer-to-peer learning – leadership is an emergent practice, and as leaders face old problems with new mindsets, they discover solutions they never knew existed. Sharing these experiences is one way to accelerate learning, build positive morale among leaders and build cross functional connections, but it’s often overlooked. 

• There is no time for 1 to 1 support, everyone learns at different speeds but in classroom training everyone is expected to finish at the same place. Training does not build in 1 to 1 coaching to ensure everyone is supported and many trainers aren’t equipped to uncover the root cause of leadership challenges. 

• Access to adaptive leaders – hearing directly from leaders about how they lead in the real world, the challenges they face and how they have overcome them.  

• Access to site tours of contact centres that have implemented adaptive ways of working - the chance to observe practices first hand and talk to the people who are doing the work is one of the most valuable ways to learn about adaptive leadership. 

There are no contact centre training offerings in the market that offer all of this.  

An investment in building leadership capability should have one goal to build better leaders, who thrive on complexity, lead with trust and purpose and build high performing teams. 

This won’t happen in a training course. 

Classroom based training should be one piece of the puzzle and it should be complimented with a range of interventions, and it should do this in the following ways: 

> By building in skills and mindset practice well beyond the time in the classroom, the 90 days following training are critical to build new habits and practices. 

> By engaging the leaders of the leaders so they know the role they need to play, these are the mentors and role models of these emerging leaders and must be as engaged as the learners.

> By supporting ongoing reflection and sharing of experiences so that peer to peer learning becomes part of the culture.  

>Having a community of support and that opportunity to be connected to experienced leaders who can mentor them. 

> By measuring progress from multiple perspectives, seeking feedback from team members, peers, and leaders. 

> Review and develop goals, regularly and build in the flexibility for the leader to dial up or down the focus areas based on the demands of the role. This means they can keep momentum going even through the busiest of times.  

> Provide access to leaders and contact centres who are the best in our industry who role model adaptive leadership. 

Building leadership capability is an infinite game and to truly build better leaders takes real intent and an integrated approach. 

Contact us to find out how we can partner with you to build better leaders

6 ways to improve the customer experience in your contact centre

To us, it’s what your customers feel and think when they interact with your products, services and people. There is a big emotional part to it, built on expectations we have promised and comparisons made to exemplar experiences they have in the world.  

The CX movement has rapidly grown over the last decade or two thanks largely to big tech companies like Apple and Google who have reimagined what ‘value to customers’ looks like by wrapping amazing experiences around their products.  

Now think of that in terms of your contact centre, do you exist to simply answer calls or do you exist to deliver value to customers?

Before we get into the 6 ways it starts with you, the leader of the contact centre.

We think about Leaders as ‘Designers’ – reimagining your role as the person that is responsible for creating the right conditions for a CX culture to flourish. You think about every part of the contact centre and align it as closely as possible to what customers need. Without this mindset you’ll probably find yourself stuck in the weeds, fighting fires, a position we have all been in at one time or another. This new mindset won’t be developed overnight, it starts with action, taking action leads to a new perspective and that is what develops a new mindset.  

Here are the 6 things the design-led leader does to improve CX:  

1. Communicate a clear vision and purpose – this acts as your compass, guiding the team’s decision making and motivating them when times get tough. You'll need to reinforce this through everything your team does.

2. Ensure people have role clarity - it should be clear to everyone how their role contributes to bringing the vision to life, and if there is anything getting in their way find out what it is so you can remove it.

3. Develop a system of gathering customer feedback, in the form of Failure Demand, showcase this to your key stakeholders and get their buy in to fix it. This highlights areas the customer experience needs to improve and shows the value that you can bring as a team.

4. Define your metrics – this is big, focus on customer outcomes and consign output metrics like AHT and GOS to your forecasting discussions, know that they are not what defines success for customers, instead focus on metrics like CSAT and NPS, and if you don’t have these metrics, make the initiatives that remove failure demand the measure of success.

5. Provide autonomy, control and flexibility for everyone – give your people the flexibility to act in the customers best interest even if a process or rule is in their way. You have set a clear vision and provided role clarity, use this to foster a trusting environment.

6. Explore how technology can remove effort for your people, there is some amazing and accessible tech at your fingertips that can give your teams superpowers.

It’s important to know where to start, often capacity and competing priorities are your biggest enemy as a contact centre leader. So we recommend starting by getting a handle on failure demand and this will do two things.  

1. It highlights your biggest CX opportunities are by identifying failure demand, immediately you are the customer's biggest advocate, and you’ll feel a sense of progress.  

2. This will remove calls that customers shouldn’t need to make, improving the customers experience and creating much needed capacity for you and the team. Giving you more time to design the contact centre around the customer. 

If you would like to talk about how we can help you redesign your contact centre, get in touch  

Future Fest - Transform your contact centre

In this video series we explore the future of contact centre work with Jacob Drake-Potts.

He shares the journey that UniSuper has been on to build a more adaptable and resilient contact centre.

We cover

• Strategic Planning

• Lean Change Management

• Shared KPI’s

These are just three of many elements within your contact centre design that can improve engagement, productivity, prioritisation, collaboration and communication.

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STRATEGIC PLANNING

LEAN CHANGE MANAGEMENT

SHARED KPI’s

The 3 key ingredients for a world-class customer experience

A common question customer service teams ask themselves is "how we can become for adaptable, resilient and responsive to customers?"

In our view, it's not about new tools, frameworks or rituals. Sure, they can help and are part of the mix but alone they won’t give you the operational agility you seek unless you also have these three key ingredients:

1. TRUE CUSTOMER FOCUS

Most companies and teams have this in some shape or form as one of their main values and goals. Every service organisation has some sort of customer satisfaction statement on its website, as part of their marketing campaigns, or in posters around the office. But the reality is that many organisations still fail to achieve this objective.

There are two main reasons for this. One is that organisations skew the purpose of the customer service function towards lowering costs, so what we find is managers creating a system of work that runs too lean, focused on reducing handle times, and putting pressure on people to do more with less without the right structure, implementing new technology without properly designing the service experience leading to more customer interactions when things don’t go as planned.

The second reason is the way servicing teams are traditionally structured. Teams are segregated in front and back office, in most cases, leading to different areas of the business working in isolation – functional structure causes silos. What you then start to see is teams setting their own goals, targets, and KPI’s without understanding the impact of those for the company’s customers.

For true agility, we believe that service organisations and teams need to use a Systems Thinking or a Design Thinking approach to the way they structure and organise themselves, starting with the customer first.

2. KEEP IT LEAN

By keeping it Lean, I mean build a culture in your organisation or team where the focus of everyone is on: eliminating waste, adding value for the customer, and improving the flow of work.

This culture will then flow through to the way people work, that is, an organisation where SIMPLICITY is well regarded and seen as a key competitive advantage. This involves looking at the way products or services are designed, built, and delivered to customers and also the way internal processes, meetings, and collaboration tools are designed and run.

A service organisation or a team where an iterative approach of working (plan, do, check and adapt), a continuous improvement mindset are used by all teams, and metrics and goals are set with what matters to the customer in mind will be gain the advantages of operational agility.

3. BRAVE LEADERSHIP

The third key ingredient to achieve agility is having brave leaders across all levels of the organisation.

None of the previous two points will work or even be considered by an organisation if their leaders are not willing to take some risks and do things differently. To challenge the norm in the way most teams and organisations are being managed.

So, what makes a brave leader? In our view, brave leaders are servant leaders. They relinquish power in favour of the team. They are there to remove roadblocks. They set a vision and let the smart people they hire to do their work. Only to intercede when there is a need or the vision is not being met. They feel a tremendous sense of achievement through others achieving.

Brave leaders also cultivate a culture of trust and develop other leaders; and above all, brave leaders are vulnerable. They are willing to take imperfect action and are not afraid of admitting they don’t know all the answers.

Interested in learning more? Head to our tools page to get started.