Scene Setting
Scene Setting
I’ve decided to write a series of posts featuring organisations I rate as being at the front of the customer service transformation train. The first is Shop Direct. Best known for its Littlewood and Very brands with revenues just under £2bn.
It’s an organisation that has kept pace as retail habits have transformed from paper catalogues to a pure play digital retailer with just under 80% of customers now ordering via mobile over Christmas.
The Group Customer Operations Director at Shop Direct is Mark Billingham. He has co-developed a powerful strategy to meet the never-ending expectation of ‘better CX at less cost’ that forms the core challenge of service leadership.
Last year I witnessed the way in which his team was using the value irritant model to optimise their contact mix. This provides high level direction for work streams in automation, self-service, ‘digital first’ live assistance and elimination of unnecessary contact. The strategy articulates the intended customer experience and outcome for each work type.
Shop Direct currently has 2,700 customer service people in the UK and South Africa engaging over phone, chat and social channels. These are deployed partly via their outsourcing partner Webhelp that serves Shop Direct’s customers from Glasgow, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and partly through their own in housed operations.
The reason I’ve chosen to feature Shop Direct is that it is an excellent example of how to organise and execute omni-channel customer service. Cloud based infrastructure, CRM, knowledge management, apps and conversational AI are increasingly on everyone’s shopping list and of course there is always a need to choose wisely in terms of technology and partners.
But what matters even more is the mindset and method that generates momentum for transformation and creates a structured journey with annual milestones. Technology as we frequently seem to forget simply enables. In contrast, Shop Direct has a plan that puts voice of the customer and continuous improvement into the heart of what they do.
Why A Customer Closeness Centre?
The story begins with Mark recognising on his arrival at Shop Direct that customer service had drifted from the organisation’s attention. Consequently, the customer’s voice had also become too distant in terms of the brand hearing and meeting their service needs.
In response, the Customer Closeness Centre (CCC) was created. It’s a collaboration between Shop Direct and Webhelp, Shop Direct’s strategic customer management partner that drives key transformational initiatives, alongside gobeyond, Webhelp’s specialist CX transformation consultancy partner.
The CCC’s core role is to identify the biggest customer pain points or opportunities, find solutions and work with Webhelp and Shop Direct operations to implement those solutions successfully. The respective roles are defined as follows:
The CCC is front and centre of Shop Direct’s Liverpool headquarters and really stands out as you enter the building. It looks great.
If you have not visited the site then imagine a wide walk way that cuts through the ground floor with open plan teams, mannequins and racked clothes on either side.
Both sides of the walkway are decorated with the proud history of innovation and ongoing change that has kept the brand(s) alive. To illustrate that point, Shop Direct is now rebranding to The Very Group, part of its future identity. Although I’ll stick with the more familiar ‘Shop Direct’ for this report.
The centre’s layout was designed by David Gray who Mark recruited to develop the concept with gobeyond and set up the centre. In conversation, David remarked how much fun it had been to work with the internal facilities team to design the space.
Best way I can describe its impact is to say it draws you in and packs in half a dozen discreet work spaces in a small area. The vibe is good.
One of my long-term mantras is that the customer service industry needs to pivot. From just working harder to working smarter. Ever rising customer expectations for low effort, service effectiveness cannot be met by simply doubling down and working harder.
It requires a highly structured approach to insight, design, test and learn. Followed up with change orientation, embedding new service workflows and behavior, then customized metrics and feedback to track the impact on customers and advisors. In other words, getting smarter requires dedicated resources and an appropriate methodology. Shop Direct is blazing a trail in this respect.
How Does The Customer Closeness Centre Work?
I started my visit with an in depth briefing on how the centre worked. But before going any further I need to introduce my hosts for the day in addition to Mark who joined for key parts of the discussion.
Sitting next to me in the back of the CCC is Trudie Everall, Agile Delivery Manager at gobeyond, Daryl Wilkes, Head of Transformation at gobeyond and David Gray, Head of Change at Shop Direct. All very experienced in their respective roles. It’s worth noting that this is the level of leadership experience needed to run such an operation successfully.
I asked Trudie to explain how the centre is organised to work. Here is her summary.
There are two zones. The customer zone and the agile zone. The core team of fourteen is split equally between the two zones of activity. They rotate. Two weeks on. Two weeks off.
Currently it is taking three sprint cycles to complete a ‘theme’ e.g. the returns customer journey or reducing the need to transfer a customer between specialist teams.
The team tackles each new theme as you would expect. Exploring customer feedback. Understanding current processes. Analyzing what is and is not working. Workshops with SMEs. Then designing an improved version and defining the benefits.
Every other Tuesday is swap-over day beginning with the current sprint review. The presenting team might demo what it has been designing or share proposed next steps for approval.
Stakeholders are invited to attend. A rolled -up version is offered two days later for those who would prefer just an overview with less detail.
Tuesday afternoon sessions provide the team with an opportunity to review the sprint in order to improve the next time they run one. It’s also an opportunity to catch up on the status of previous sprints.
Meanwhile, the customer zone team engages with customers over voice and web chat. Its job is to prepare for the next sprint. With that in mind, the team gathers insights from customers, tests hypotheses and feeds back outcomes to the agile team and anything picked up from customers that it believes is worthy of further investigation.
Their activity is supported by the insight team who influences forthcoming sprint agendas with new ideas together with quality managers who line manage the teams and assess the impact of new ideas being tested with customers. Here’s a summary of how the insight and agile teams work together.
The overall flow of work is managed by business analysts who prioritise according to the state of the backlog and current capacity, keeping everyone focused on the most valuable workstreams. Funny how there is always a backlog in every service centre. Even an agile one!
Redefining the Advisor
One of the strategic intents for the CCC is to understand the new emerging advisor role. It’s an interesting job for sure.
The team recruited has impressive customer service experience and whilst all are gobeyond employees, they are fully integrated into the Shop Direct business. They came with some problem solving or process improvement experience which has been enriched with further trainings such as agile.
Their skills are augmented with expertise from the broader Webhelp team to tackle specific themes.
Although the team only came on board in November, it has matured rapidly in terms of focusing projects, identifying value, running workshops, working with SMEs and presenting back to the business.
As you can see, I caught them in a team session preparing to present their findings the following day (a Tuesday). Having had a quick look at the quality of their work as shown on the wall and in the laptop presentation and quizzed them on a few topics, I’d say they were a smart, motivated group, proud of what they were doing.
In terms of improving the recruitment process next time around, David and Daryl highlighted mindset as the number one criterion. In particular, flexibility in embracing how work is organised – which can be unusual for recruits coming from a traditional contact centre background. Also simply having a curious mind that questions the status quo and is therefore brave enough to challenge stakeholders. In other words, finding folk who are a bit iconoclastic by nature!
Achievements To Date
So, what has been tackled so far?
Using an insight led approach the team has focused their efforts on the biggest customer pain points e.g. returns, goods not received, and payments processes. The team then focuses on finding the sweet spot between reducing customer effort and business benefit.
It’s already seeing clear benefit from rising touchpoint NPS (Shop Direct saw its best ever score last week), improving FCR, alongside delivering c£600k of cost saving already. The team has also built a strong backlog and pipeline of opportunities with potential multi-million-pound benefits over the coming 12 months. Demonstrable success for Shop Direct, as well as the gobeyond and Webhelp teams.
Lessons Learnt
Team organisation
The teams used to revolve daily. A morning and afternoon shift moving between customer engagement and improvement planning. This proved to be too chaotic. It was also expecting advisors to flip between two mindsets too often that did not allow them enough time to immerse themselves into the role.
It has now evolved to two weeks shifts that switch every other Tuesday, the team has seen a huge improvement and established a good rhythm.
Trudie admitted that any way you organise it has its challenges. The downside of a two-week shift is getting back into the previous sprint. I suggested there could be value in using some kind of ritual to help move from one zone of being to the other. Maybe a mindfulness session to help the transition. It’s a question of finding the optimised trade-off.
Team Focus
I asked about the overall focus of the sprints given my long-term view that most contact centre activity is caused by upstream activity elsewhere in the organisation. Did this cause an issue in terms of persuading others to change? Was it hard having ongoing visibility of improvement initiatives once they were handed off to others?
I picked up two points from the subsequent discussion. Sprints tend to focus on things that are ‘within the gift of the customer closeness centre’. In other words, they can be directly redesigned by a sprint team and then rolled out across the Webhelp estate. This is a pragmatically sound choice.
I did ask Mark if he ever found himself in the role of senior influencer nudging colleagues to ‘do the right thing’ when improvement opportunities were surfaced outside the centre’s immediate sphere of influence. As we know collaboration across tribal boundaries is never a given in organisational life.
Mark had the best answer an organisation can hope for. A customer obsessed CEO! Henry Birch arrived middle of 2018. His teamwork strategy is simple. Improved brand NPS is part of your bonus. Motivation to collaborate with the CCC around making process and policy more customer friendly is therefore established. For instance, the whole product returns process has just been completely rewritten. And the approach is working. Brand NPS has moved from +30 to +55 over the last eighteen months. Meanwhile touchpoint NPS has moved from -30 to +30.
Mark also confirmed that he intends to keep an ongoing register of improvements as part of the overall annual review of the value being created. To my mind this is all part of demonstrating that working smarter is the way to go and that customer service has strategic value to the rest of an organisation once it is set up in this way. PR on that point is vital to change perceptions.
While we are on the topic of motivation, it’s important to mention that gobeyond, Webhelp and Shop Direct share the commercial benefits of the improvements, otherwise the traditional BPO seats-based pricing model could cause friction.
What We Can Learn
Team collaboration matters since it takes many helping hands to get things fixed. To that end the whole operation operates on a refreshing level of honesty and willingness to learn from mistakes and try something new. In my experience, the standards set by the leadership group are essential in this respect and they are clearly doing a great job at Shop Direct.
Getting smarter only happens by design. It needs investment and a clear way of tackling things that operates adjacent to the pressures of day to day operational service. The net result is rapid ROI as customer journeys are made more effective and simpler for customers.
This sets the scene for optimised omni-channel engagement. In other words, the ability to use live assistance correctly (focused on emotional, complex and loyalty use cases) while expanding self-service and proactive service on top of simplified journeys with conversational AI and automation.
The big question though is should all contact centres and customer services operations work like this? I hope the answer is obvious. But just in case my vote is not crystal clear, the answer is a resounding yes.
In fact, I cannot think of a reason why any contact centre would not want the benefits this model offers. If all you target is cost reduction, it’s a no brainer. If you are more inclined to seeing service as a CX differentiator it’s the same answer. I see this as universally applicable.
My reason for writing this is hopefully inspire more service leaders to develop a similar approach. It really is the only way to solve the service leadership riddle of reducing cost and improving CX at the transformational speed now being expected in a world of disruptor brands.
