an improvement in customer service processes would help the company, using a
series of graphs that left the middle managers cold. Nothing changed.
The PwC team suggested that these middle managers visit the company’s
customer contact center, where they listened in on calls with unhappy customers.
Once they heard real, live dissatisfied customers, the managers saw the pressing
need for change and discussed their own ideas to improve the way the center
worked. Over time, team productivity increased by 70 percent, and customer
retention rates improved. As neuroscientist Donald Calne has said, the difference
between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action, whereas reason leads
to conclusions. Graphs and data have their place, but they can also remove people
from reality: The real power comes in integrating emotional motivations with
rational reasoning.
- Reinforce the objective. Every transformation needs an objective. For the
customers of the U.K.’s Sage Group, its decision to transform from a subscription-
based software licensing service to a cloud-based service was driven by a business
imperative in a competitive market. If Sage was going to maximize revenue, it
needed to increase customer renewal rates. That meant that its customer service
teams needed to reach as many key decision makers as possible. This wasn’t
going to work unless the customers were engaged and informed — and the
responsibility for achieving that lay with the middle layers of the company,
those who acted as the contact points for customers. The metric measured was
the level of customer engagement.
We introduced Sage to our digital performance management tool, which
drives new behaviors to improve efficiency. As part of the approach, teams
“huddled” for 15 minutes every day to talk about their individual performance
metrics. This allowed them to see clearly whether they were on track to deliver the
objectives of the customer program, share their milestones with their colleagues,
and ask for help or advice if they needed it. These huddles showed staff that
their performance was making a real difference to the business, and reinforced
the point that customer engagement was the key metric by which they were
measured. After 16 weeks of our working with the company, the teams were
talking to 70 percent more customers than before, and customer renewal rates
had increased by 2 percent.
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