Learning Launch – Juan Velasquez

Challenge

I am currently the senior supervisor for the Resolutions department of a cruise vacation  company. The Resolutions department gives internal support to all customer service  and sales agents, helping with any questions or taking over escalation calls if  necessary. The Resolutions agents (agents that report to me) are both the most  capable and tenure agents on the Company, and that’s been mostly what’s given them  the opportunity to be in that position. As a senior supervisor for the department, my job  is to not only make sure the day-to-day tasks are met, but also make sure that we’re  aligned with the company’s policies and interests, as well as make sure that the  Resolutions agents deliver the best possible service. Unfortunately, the best service is  not always delivered by our Resolutions agents, and sometimes they miss key  empathetic communication factors, such as a good tone of voice, empathy, verbalize  willingness to assist, etc. Because of time and call volume, we’ve not been able to get  all the team together at once, to come together with action plans that will benefit all of  us. At the same time, we’ve gotten comments from the agents and customers we assist,  with areas of opportunity about the way interactions are handled. This time, we’ll focus  on first, identifying the critical areas of opportunity by reviewing the service expectations  of the agents that call us, and then uncover the reasons why we’re not being able to  deliver what needs to be delivered. In some cases, because of the service provided,  customer service and sales agents don’t contact us because of the service received,  and ultimately causes financial and loyalty impact to the company if wrong information is  given to our external customers.

Selection

All Resolutions agents already know what the expectations of the job are and have  already gone through training sessions in the past to be knowledgeable and deliver  reliable information. With this, we’re planning to show how both internal and external  customer satisfaction can be improved by following specific actions and how the overall  experience and perception of the department can be improved with these changes and  make it easier for everyone, making it a more open and collaborative environment. With  the learning launch, we’ll test our idea: customer satisfaction (both internal with agents  and external with customers) will be improved by focusing on improving the quality of  our interaction, by adding value to the brand of our department through personalization,  and ultimately reduce financial and loyalty impacts in the long run.

Application

First, we’ll start by meeting with diverse groups of customer service and sales agents,  and open discussion about the service expectations they had when contacting the  Resolutions department, and of course, any actions/attitudes they don’t like and have  experienced when contacting the Resolutions department. With this, we started to get  some of the feelings we anticipated and some of the behaviors we had anticipated too,  as customer service agents were feeling rejected and in some occasions preferred not  to call because of the service they received.

With this findings, we decided to gather some of our team members and started to get  their input to also detect the reasons why the best service was not being delivered. We  got some comments about not feeling supported enough on the agent’s end as they  were not willing to collaborate. With this, we decided to launch a WOW Service  program, in which we put specific guidelines for our interaction: focus on the branding of  the department, increase our tone of voice from a friendlier interaction, and personalize  our interactions by calling everyone by their name, inquiring about how their day’s  going, and genuinely generate interest and bonding. Applying this, we obtained a  significant improvement in the customer satisfaction scores, as well as in the way our  Resolutions agents and customer service agents felt about the interactions themselves  and the people they had to work with, as genuine interactions created a better work  atmosphere and a sincere want of doing things better. With this, we also got  recommendations from the team members that participated in the WOW program of  some other things that could be included, such as the use of specific phrases to  incentivize the use of a more “positive” vocabulary in all the interactions.

Insight & Approach

By applying the learning launch tool in this specific scenario, we were able to confirm  some of the assumptions we had and even got input from the different agents in both  departments, which confirmed once again the positive outcome this was having: more  positive interactions, greater bonding, proactiveness in finding ways to provide a better  service, etc. I’d say our results were actually even better than predicted, as we only put  it into place and it grew with time and input from the different stakeholders. With the  results obtained in this program, we’ll look into applying this to different departments  that work together or even for frontline agents with external customers.

