Creating a more human contact centre experience
The Challenge
Buying a new home is one of the most stressful periods in our lives. With the move to remote working, HSBC found its Mortgage contact centre was prioritising compliance and felt unable to act in a human way. The team needed to reconnect with its customers, to be more empathetic, and to bring humanity back into customer conversations.
Services: Customer Strategy : Customer Proposition
The Impact
100%
The Elev8 programme achieved 100% satisfaction rating from HSBC advisors
15
A 15 point increase in NPS, sustained across the next twelve months
17
The training programme rolled out to 17 countries globally
The Outside-in Perspective
To get to the root of the problem, we immersed ourselves in the colleague and customer experience to understand what was going on - mystery shopping, interviewing advisors and team leaders, listening to live and recorded calls and interviewing leaders from outside the finance sector. We also took the time to understand current learning approaches within the team, what worked, and what didn’t.
The Insight
To start, colleagues had forgotten what a good, human conversation sounded like, surrounded by scripts and processes and expected to multitask. This was made worse by ‘The Curse of Knowledge’, with them being so familiar with the Mortgage process and terminology that they’d forgotten what it was like not to know.
Working remotely was exacerbating the situation, with people unable to easily learn from their colleagues or observe what good looked like.
The Solution
We designed a training programme focussed on creating a visceral connection between colleagues and their customers, reminding them what a normal, human conversation looked like.
The programme was built around a four-stage ‘Conversation Cycle’. Starting with a week of self-assessment - the first time many had listened to their own calls - it was followed by a week of ‘act and learm’, with four ‘sprint sessions’. Each session involved real customer calls, underpinned by core principles of behavioural science.
The final stage involved team leaders doing two weeks of intensive coaching with their team whilst they practices embedding the principles they’d learned.
“The Foundation understood what we were trying to achieve from day one. We wanted something visceral that would create a compelling and memorable end-to-end learning journey for our people. What John and the team designed was different, creative and thought-provoking. We got an in-depth assessment of what was working and an honest appraisal of what wasn’t.
We set a very high bar for the quality of the end-to-end learning experience. The benefits realised in the 6 months since we deployed the training to 700 mortgage colleagues have exceeded expectations and won cross-industry acclaim. We’ve seen extraordinary improvements in customer feedback and colleague engagement but also moved the dial on things we previously thought were ‘immovable’.”
Martin Baker, HSBC