National Customer Service Week : We Loved It!

Why do you think National Customer Service Week is so important?
It’s a fantastic opportunity for us all to reflect on the key elements of customer service – which are essential to our business. It can be easy to forget what it feels like to be a customer when we’re on this side of the transaction, so taking the time to reflect on what’s important to a customer is great. It’s also brilliant to have a platform to recognise customer service excellence and those that go over and above, day in day out, to provide it.

How did you engage the team to get involved?
The whole team in Bristol were very much part of the planning process and many of the activities that we ran throughout the week were suggested by the team. We also made sure that everyone was able to get involved, regardless of their shift pattern (we’re a 24/7 outsourced contact centre) or which client campaign(s) they work on, by making the activities as flexible and inclusive as possible.

Ensuring ‘fun’ was a key focus of the week also encouraged more people to get involved and we arranged a series of activities including daily competitions based around key customer service themes, team competitions, kick off breakfast sessions and of course an all-important red carpet award ceremony! We shared regular updates so everyone knew exactly what was going on and what was coming up next.

What did we as a company, our people and our clients get out of National Customer Service Week?
I think we all got the same out of it – a great sense of pride and achievement and recognition of all the hard work that goes on and all the care and dedication that our teams, at all levels, show in order to deliver a great service on behalf of our clients.

As a company we really got to see how passionate our people are and how much they care about delivering the best possible service to our clients and their customers – that was really rewarding! Again, it’s easy to overlook things like this as ‘business as usual’ as we go about our normal day to day jobs, so it was great for the management team to really see how much work goes into delivering great service and recognise the efforts of individuals.

It’s also fantastic to be able to showcase some of the great case studies that came out of the week to our clients – reminding them of how seriously we take customer service and reassuring them that our teams always go above and beyond.

At the beginning of the week, each team identified an area in which they felt they could further improve the excellent service already delivered. This focused activity led to some great results over the week for our clients including reducing already low call waiting times and improving CSAT scores further.

For individuals, having the opportunity to demonstrate and be recognised for their natural skills and to be able to recognise one another was really rewarding too. Many have fed back that they really enjoyed the week and that the energy in the contact centre was really positive and upbeat which made coming to work all that more pleasant!

What was your favourite moment from the week?
This is so hard to choose! I loved being on the judging panel and listening to all of the calls submitted for the daily competitions and reading the award nominations that were submitted too – it made me so proud to see so many of our people nominated by their peers and to read the wonderful things that they wrote about each other. I think though that my absolute favourite part of the week was the award ceremony – having everyone together, clapping, cheering and celebrating each other’s success was wonderful – it was such a great ’team’ moment and each and every one thoroughly deserved the praise they received!

Are you looking forward to next year?
Of course! I’m counting down the days….

Victoria.