Customer service principles and practices

Motivational Call

Greenstar Application to Irish Contact Centre & Shared Services Awards 2009

Background to Greenstar's Customer Care:

Greenstar is committed to the highest degree of excellence both where its service is concerned and in terms of the personnel whom it employs. To ensure that it remains a leader in its field, it has directed much of its attention to establishing a positive and efficient Customer Care capacity. Its relationship with the Customer Service Call Centre in Millennium Park, Dublin is the engine for its great success in this area. Fielding as many as 32,000 calls a day, our 17 person team represents Greenstar with enthusiasm, compassion and good humour. This is the attitude which allowed us to weather the challenges of consolidation last year, centralizing Greenstar's 5 disjointed call centre depots into our single agency. It was under these circumstances that Greestar became the proud recipient of the Best Small or Growing Contact or Shared Services Centre for 2008.

As we worked to streamline our operation under a single set of standards, procedures and expected results, we were delighted that CCMA recognized our efforts and achievements. Today, however, presents both Greenstar and the Customer Service Call Centre will a distinctly new economic reality. Though the economic environment of the last year is notably different from that which benefited us in 2008, we have succeeded in continuing to increase our market share while simultaneously working to refine our processes, procedures and methods of quality assurance. This has allowed to us to remain focused on the positive opportunities before us as many of our contemporaries struggle for a foothold in the new economic reality.

Previously, we have addressed the key responsibilities which are expected to be met by our personnel, which include addressing customer inquiries; the administration of such documentation as new contracts, customer applications and payments; implementation of the Casual Skip Hire Service; processing of service requests, issues and complaints; and the fielding of general inquiries.

In addition to these key responsibilities, we are today driven by the range of objectives comprised by the new economic reality and our own nature stage of organizational development. These include the following:

A full review of all procedures and processes

Staff retraining ensuring a focus on providing exceptional customer service

Preparing the staff the better content with the new economic reality

Greenstar Customer Care Induction & Training Program:

Greenstar's business has continued to grow and thrive on the strength of the spreading consensus on its singular excellence in the service which it provides and its maintenance of the same standard in the area of customer care. This demonstrates a determination to remain invested in its customer's best interests as we face a changing economic climate. These changes would precipitate the focus of our care induction and training programs, which would work to channel the priorities of customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention into agent strategies tailored for today's market place.

Therefore, we took the following actions which have allowed us to remain competitive and vital in a challenging environment:

Retraining would focus on the fielding of complaints. Our philosophy, and one that we stress in our agents, is that complaints are an educational gift; a virtual textbook from which we draw essential lessons.

Training would emphasize the skill of listening to the customer and choosing appropriately worded responses, apologies, expressions of empathy and demonstrations of understanding. Specific strategies would include repetition of details, explicit indication of the plan for grievance resolution and a promise to understand not just what the grievance concerns but to determine why the grievance has arisen.

Training would provide direct instruction on dealing with the bargain hunting customer. This would include instructions on how to address Skip Hire situations, how to work with customers who are negotiating with our competitors and how to ensure that those customers who are shopping around for better prices are ultimately locked down. These processes are underscored by detailed reports to the centre's director.

Complaint handling would also be sent to the director, who would use daily, weekly and monthly reports as a tool for evaluation of agent performances.

A major and defining feature of retraining would concern induction of desired attitude traits to match the positive atmosphere maintained at our Call Centre. Namely, we have trained agents to find ways to turn negatives both for themselves and for callers into positives; to probe customers in a thoughtful and effective manner; to engage co-workers and callers with confidence and assertiveness; to remain in a position of control with respect to the direction of the call; and to show personality during calls as a way to energize the caller.

Discouraging absenteeism and indicating to agents that this behavior is closely monitored and addressed decisively where necessary.

As we have worked to implement these ambitions in our personnel, we have found that taking small steps toward our goals helps all members of the customer service team to establish and take on tangible goals. This is reinforced with the receipt of daily, weekly and monthly feedback from supervisors, which is supported by documentation, performance reports and recorded copies of all calls.

Working Environment:

A key to our success has been our emphasis on a positive orientation in all things. For our agents, this is a must to be a part of the team. We are a distinctly fun and enthusiastic team, and we expect that all newcomers will demonstrate the same qualities of being outgoing, tolerant, patient, sensitive and genuine. These are qualities that help team members to fit into the culture at the Call Centre as well as to conduct their job responsibilities with greater effectiveness.

There are a number of policies which we have adopted as a way to maintain this environment. Among them:

We remain in close communication with the staff, using daily motivation emails and dispensing positive quotes throughout the day. This is underscored by a daily morning meet-and-greet in which we speak to one another face-to-face and with candor about our satisfaction on the job.

Performance is managed closely by supervisors, who work to eliminate unnecessary absenteeism; to praise individual performance; to gauge company wide performance in the face of economic challenges; to monitor and report daily call logs; to provide constructive feedback to individuals where needed; to address agents who are not performing or behavior according to expectations, and; to provide morning reports on the previous day's individual and collective performances.

We engage in various fun activities that build warmth, a sense of camaraderie and team orientation. Fridays have been renamed Happy Fridays, and all team members are invited to dress casually. We engage in various fun motivational activities on Fridays and we find that team members tend to look forward to this day. Other activities include morning coffee breakfasts in which different team members bring breakfast treats from home; and the celebration of office-wide holidays with decorations and themes.

Results Against SLA's:

The growth strategy for our Call Centre has been simple. We pair the highest quality of customer care with a concerted interest in ensuring that the customer leaves a phone call feeling positive about the experience and about Greenstar as a whole. Therefore, we supplement the various fun parts of our operation with very detailed techniques of micromanagement and agent oversight. This helps to produce a continuation in the trends of growth. The diagrams featured to the left illustrate a rate of growth since this time last year that seems to contrast the implications of the new economic reality. It is thus that we continue to monitor the work of our personnel with respect to specific goals of quality management through the following methods: