Transforming a Customer Care Organization
The Customer Care organization at this global tech company needed an overhaul. Customer issues took too long to resolve, live support was spotty in some regions, and customer satisfaction wasn’t what it should be. Instead of helping sales, the company’s sales reps saw their customer’s support experience as an impediment to sales.
Rather than attempt to patch the holes, Lucy, the recently hired Global Leader of Customer Care opted to transform her entire organization from the ground up. “Nothing is off the table, and none of us knows what our job may look like in six months,” she announced to the 25 or so folks sitting around the circle in the hotel conference room just outside of London on a freezing and wet February day.
Silence. It was the kick-off meeting of the Customer Care transformation initiative. Sitting around the room were managers and support analysts from each of the main product groups and global regions, as well as marketing, finance and customer care operations people. It was the first time many of these folks had ever been in the same room together and some had never even met before.
We spent the entire morning of that first day just setting context and asking questions: Why was this change effort necessary? What problems were we really trying to solve? What would happen if things didn’t change? What was expected of the people in this room and why were we invited? What would a world class Customer Care organization actually look like, feel like, act like? What were meaningful, but achievable stretch targets for the new Customer Care organization? And many more questions.
Some of the questions could be answered on the spot. Others needed data or input that wasn’t available. Still other questions were unanswerable because the answers would only be known over time, as the change process unfolded. Like the burning question: What did Lucy really mean when she said that none of us knows what our jobs will look like in 6 months? Was she just being dramatic? (as in “I’ve been working here for 16 years with good performance reviews– she couldn’t be talking about me…could she?”) And so on.
Lucy clarified: What she meant was that the priority for this organization and for this change initiative what was best for the customer. This meant that no position, no organizational structure, no reporting lines, nobody’s job was exempt from thoughtful scrutiny and redesign. And any process, position or person that did not contribute to a stellar customer support experience would likely not be part of the organization by the end of the year.
Our commitment in this change process, which we stated up front in that first meeting, was to have candid, straight-talking conversations and to listen to each person’s perspective regardless of their role or status in the organization.
Whenever feasible, decisions would be made by the group, but some decisions would likely be made unilaterally by Lucy or some subset that she designated. Lucy promised to be completely transparent with the group about which those decisions were, so that nobody would find themselves wondering whether they were struggling to reach decisions that had actually already been made.
The commitment to redesign the entire Customer Care organization around the customer’s experience was one of those unilateral decisions that Lucy would make. As it turned out, Lucy made far fewer of these decisions over the course of the transformation than even she anticipated. Almost all of the major decisions wound up being made by the full working group or some variation of the group, with continual input from the rest of the Customer Care organization as well as folks from other departments. Built into the change process were conversations with many different people to get feedback, test hypotheses, refine plans, and build commitment to the changes.
Over the course of that initial three day meeting, the team examined performance data and industry practices, exchanged theories about what was working and what wasn’t, and began challenging assumptions. It also started weaving together a shared vision of a transformed Customer Care organization that the team members found inspiring. This led to the drafting of what we called “design principles” to guide the change initiative.
It wasn’t until the next team meeting a month later in Amsterdam before the design principles were finalized (with lots of research, planning and data collection happening between the two meetings). The design principles the group agreed upon were:
- Resolve customer problems on first contact – 100% of the time, which was above and beyond the company’s published Service Level Agreements with customers.*
- Make it easy for customers to prevent and solve their own problems whenever possible via self-service support features
- Put the most knowledgable and skilled support analysts closest to the customer (which challenged the existing 3-tiered support model currently in place)
- Provide live customer support in every region for every product group, 24/7 (“Follow-the-sun”).
*Agreeing to resolve customer cases on first contact 100% of the time was a major challenge for the team. The conversation spanned many weeks, radically opposing views, and volatile emotions. At the heart of the issue was the concern about declaring a performance target that everybody agreed was probably impossible to achieve given the technical complexity of customer cases. At the end, the team came together on the 100% target, agreeing that the possible “negatives” of never hitting their target was outweighed by the positive focus and “pull” that such an audacious target would have on every aspect of the organization (not to mention on the design of the still young transformation effort).
Even once they agreed on these design principles, folks still didn’t know how they were going to achieve all of them.
Over the next nine months some variation of this steering team would meet in person at least monthly, with many ad hoc teams meeting in between to gather new data and work on specific projects and deliverables. Throughout this period, every individual in the Customer Care organization was engaged in the change process in some way. There were one-on-one conversations, product group and regional meetings, workshops and all-hands presentations, training sessions and other activities in which people throughout the organization provided input and ideas, and helped identify and solve problems.
Not all of the conversations were easy. Some, like the “Resolve on 1st Contact” conversation, were messy and contentious. Emotions often ran high and the path forward wasn’t always entirely clear to anyone. In facilitating many of these conversations, we encouraged folks to raise and explore opposing perspectives rather than avoid them or rush to closure on issues prematurely.
To support the learning process, we incorporated educational sessions on collaboration, managing performance under pressure, and other themes into the various team meetings, and also provided coaching to select individuals. By the time the major structural organizational changes were completed (roughly 9 months or so), the conversations that people were having together were fundamentally different. As Lucy said, “Because team members learned how to express and discuss their different perspectives (and even disagree vehemently with each other at times), the decisions we reached were much stronger then if one or two of us had just tried to ram our views through.”
Within 12 months of that initial meeting in London, the Customer Care organization was unrecognizable. The traditional 3-tiered support model was replaced with four global “Product Groups” made up of technical experts from every region and skill level. Focused training programs have continued to “up” everybody’s game, both technically and in the “soft” customer service skills.
As for the data…
- The unresolved case backload dropped by 30%, while the same number of customer cases has remained steady.
- The department’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), jumped from 39 to the 70’s, and has continued to climb (not factoring in a new product line and support analyst group that has been incorporated into the Care organization during this period).
- 60% of all cases were now being resolved on first contact. Keep in mind that Customer Care provides support for literally scores of highly complex, technical products and product combinations, on multiple platforms. While Resolution on 1st Contact was not measured prior to the transformation (most of the measures prior to the change were internally focused), consensus within the organization is that 60% is orders of magnitude higher than before the transformation, because now customers are connected immediately to the most skilled experts, instead of being “handed” off to a Tier 2 or Tier 3 expert to get help.
- Four of the six leaders in today’s Customer Care organization have been promoted from within the department or from elsewhere in the company, with a similar percentage of the newly formed Technical Management Team also stepping up to significantly new leadership roles and responsibilities.
Customer Care has gone from being a backwater that people left in order to pursue career opportunities elsewhere in the company, to a place people are now transferring into in order to be a part of this high performing, energized organization.
The performance numbers continue to improve today. And not insignificantly, the entire Customer Care transformation involved zero increase in budget and no interruption to customer service, even while simultaneously integrating a major new technology platform and a major new product line and customer base into the organization.