The role of a frontline leader can be summed up in two words: Continual Transformation.

Achieving customer service excellence requires on-going cultural change and productivity improvement. This means that frontline leaders need to be strong enablers, creating an environment that allows individuals to succeed as a team.

This environment, like that of any team in any field of endeavour, begins with recruiting people who possess the right capabilities and skills—and in the case of a contact centre, the ability to provide excellent customer service. Next, the successful leader retains staff through succession planning, career development and other proven mechanisms. They enable efficient customer response by ensuring team members readily have access to knowledge and information, and they grow the potential of their team and motivate its members, individually and collectively, along with a trajectory of continuous improvement.

Helping Leaders Transform Teams from Good to Great:A Focus on Contact Centres

Leaders at every level of the organisation understand the importance of high-performing teams, and no leaders more so than those responsible for building, fine-tuning and maintaining a call centre – a critical component in any business’s customer relationship management (CRM) strategy and its aim to win and keep clients through service excellence. Every organisation has a call centre in its own form.

As the people responsible for the central management point of practically all customer contacts, and what is a major differentiator in a competitive marketplace, frontline leaders in contact centres face a constant challenge of creating a culture of excellence, and training, motivating and retaining team members while ensuring it delivers on critical business metrics.

1. Recruit with greatness in mind

To transform teams from good to great, goodleaders everywhere begin by attracting staff whodemonstrate the capability, or the potential forexcellent customer service. That is, they are and can easily become:• Great listeners• Passionate about service excellence• Able to (1) identify and (2) anticipate customer

needs• Concerned with treating customers with respect

and sincerity• Searchers – finding ways to help customers

above and beyond their remit• Experts at dealing with problems immediately• The type of team member who willing accepts

feedback and suggestions

Sound familiar? If so, you understand that in practically every respect, the skills and techniques that a call centre manager searches for in their potential team members are certainly not unlike those required of employees in any business, anywhere in the world. Getting this type of person on board any team is, to be sure, a good start toward greatness.

In the world of customer service, successful leaders always look to recruit people who will influence great customer service across team and within it. People who are passionate about service, who without being told look for ways to improve and make things easier for customers, invariably play a leading role in shifting the entire team toward greater performance.

2. Retain the right people

Having recruited the right people, a major challenge for leaders everywhere is to retain staff, to build teamwork and trust, and to ensure a more even spread of talent and workload. To help retain staff, frontline leaders invest heavily in succession planning.

Now let’s look at these key steps in order:

3. Access to the right information at theright time

As you will see in our case study, a constant barrier to customer service excellence is inconsistent, unresponsive, inaccurate and inadequate information. This is something that we as consumers and customers have no doubt all experienced; the frustration of being placed on hold for extensive periods, or having to tell and re-tell our story countless times to different people on the other end of the phone.

Successful contact centre leaders ensure their customer service processes are streamlined. They give their team speedy access to one source of accurate, reliable information. Many studies show that the inability to access correct information is the primary source of frustration to customer service provider and clients alike.

Successful leaders remove any barriers that may stand in the way of their team’s ability to give great, not just good, customer service. Knowledge sites are planned and designed so that information that is needed is not only available but also logical, ordered, clear and consistent, and in a form that lets staff easily navigate in order to deliver the fastest possible service.

Having access to good customer intelligence also helps customer service staff know, and even anticipate the customer’s needs and expectations.

4. Grow the team’s potential

To achieve this, successful leaders ensure they build and develop a team environment in which members:• Trust one another• Are commitment to team decisions,

processes and actions

• Hold one another accountable for delivering actions and results

• Focus on results• Participate and contribute to open, healthy

debate, without fear of conflict.Lencioni’s model for five dysfunctions of a team is an excellent foundation to review and develop the health of any team.

5. Motivate and continuously improvethe team

Transforming a good team to great means continuously looking for ways to improve. Leaders need to ensure their team members share ideas, are innovative and that they discuss and learn from any mistakes. Teams that are led with honesty and transparency by leaders are more likely to share both good and bad customer experiences. And because call centre staff deal with customer issues and difficult work situations on a daily basis, their leaders need skills and strategies to help motivate members and to collectively build a positive work environment.

6. Influence stakeholders

Frontline leaders need the ability to understand the needs of, and influence other stakeholders in the organisation in order to establish streamlined communication avenues and data for sharing customer problems, issues and solutions.

Whitepaper

Every organisation’s customer service value is demonstrated by its willingness to invest in the greatness that is inherent, but often untapped, in every team. In a contact centre in businesses and organisations across the globe, transforming a team from good to great requires not only great leadership, but also strong skills in planning, developing and managing the work environment.

In the example of the contact centre team, the solutions that follow from careful investigations and scoping invariably include, but are not limited to:

• Capability frameworks and succession planning

• Information and Training Needs Analyses (TNAs)

• Change management• Knowledge management• Design and development of

documentation, such as user manuals, websites, quick reference cards, policies, processes and procedures

This also includes development of Frontline Leadership programs designed to meet the organisation’s specific needs. These cover a

range of topics focusing on leading self, leading others and leading the organisation including:

Communication styles - Knowing your audience is key to effective communication. For example, the 4MAT model is widely used to recognise different communications styles among team members.Assertive communication - Understanding the importance of being assertive, the art of saying “no” graciously and practising making effective requests.Developing operational team plans - Identifying team goals, KPIs, contingencies, making adjustments and securing agreement.Team dynamics - Building on communication styles, recognising the importance of differences within a team and building synergy within it.Team development - Tracking team performance in the Tuckman’s team development model: Forming, Storming, Norming and PerformingEnabling high performance - Using the four elements of team performance: purpose, roles and responsibilities, process and relationships.Thinking strategically - Using Edward de Bono’s six thinking hats to help generate innovative strategies. Using criteria-based evaluation techniques to help validate ideas.Emotional intelligence (EI) and resilience - A definition of EI, enhancing EI within the team, and promoting team and workplace resilience.

Team health checks are also important and range from:360-degree feedback - whereby feedback is given to person/people from all levels of the business (manager, peers, subordinates)DISC - Dominance, Inducement, Submission, Compliance - a personal assessment tool used to improve work productivity, teamwork and communication. DISC is non-judgmental and helps people discuss their behavioural differences.MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) - the widely used personality inventory, or test, employed in vocational, educational, and psychotherapy settings to evaluate personality types.Lencioni’s - 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. Bestselling business author Patrick Lencioni once again offers a powerful and instructive leadership fable. Throughout the summary, Lencioni reveals the fivedysfunctions that go to the very heart of why teams, even the best ones, often struggle.Good to Great - the bestselling methodology set out by author Jim Collins about team commitments and getting your team from being good to great.

Using these and other proven learning and professional service solutions, MCI works to enrich people and enable performance throughout the entire organisation, helping it to increase efficiency, improve effectiveness, reduce risk and, above all, to grow.

Inherent, but often untapped potential

In addition, the contact centre had an existing knowledge site consisting of 500 Q&As listed under product groupings, and which didn’t include adequate information for the operators to answer client questions quickly and intuitively. It was found that up to twenty other sources of information needed also to be used, and as a result, answering questions was time-consuming, laborious and fraught with the risk of inaccurate information.

Instead staff went to supervisors for assistance. In a financial institution receiving 60,000 client calls a month, and with some 1,800 of those calls being referred to supervisors, it became essential to build more excellence in the team by empowering team members and reducing call ‘on hold’ times, thereby better utilising its supervisors in true training and support roles.

A Case StudyTransforming a contact centre into a high-performing team

MCI has worked closely with a contact centre in a financial institution where the focus was on inbound calls from clients, agents, employers, and on providing service on a range of wealth-management products including investments, superannuation, pensions and life insurance.

The organisation’s senior management felt that the contact centre was not achieving its full potential – not only was staff turnover high at 30 per cent, the time it took for a new operator to come up to speed on the products meant that sustainability of the team was under threat. Plus, exit interviews indicated staff did not feel they had a career path, which in turn was impacting motivation and retention.

A two-pronged approach was seen as a way of achieving this:

1. Retain staff by providing a career path2. Redesign the knowledge site so that staff could have the information they needed quickly and that there was a single source of truth

MCI conducted a discovery exercise that looked at the contact centre “as is” and “to be”, followed by a solution that involved the design and development of content and delivery of training. MCI’s solution included:

• Stakeholder analysis• Project management plan• Designing and testing a new taxonomy, or hierarchical classification to capture calls and responses based on subjects and terms• Glossary of acronyms and a proposed menu structure, or site map• Training staff to develop content using MCI designed templates• Design of a capability framework showing the career path for entry-level operators, team leaders, managers and even senior managers and

highlighting professional development and training requirements.

About MCI Solutions

This case study is but one example of MCI’s experience in transforming teams. MCI has 15years of experience in working with key stakeholders of every type of organisation, analysing existing environments and challenges to understand the business requirements before recommending proven solutions.

If you are interested in learning how MCI can help transform your team, please do not hesitate to contact 1300 768 550, email us at info@mci.edu.au or visit www.mci.edu.au

And the results?

As a result of this project, the contact centre has indeed become great in every sense of the term. It’s achieving its customer service targets, including a substantial reduction in ‘on hold’ time. Staff turnover has decreased as team members have become more engaged and motivated by their leaders, and the new knowledge repository is used almost all of the time as the single source of information, further eliminating potential barriers to team performance.

Perhaps more importantly, customer experience surveys results are now nines and tens out of ten because the contact centre is giving clients what clients want, including efficiency and accurate information. Eighty per cent of all enquiries are answered within two clicks due to better training and an improved information source.