The Art of Customer ExperienceHuman conversations are our business

FactIn the past

five ye ars 50% of the ICS top

10 best brands for customer

service have been the same five

companies

78% of people are willing to pay more for better service

Blue Sky’s research found that only 21% of respondents rated the UK as ‘excellent’ in terms of ‘feeling human’ and interestingly, a whopping 78% of these people would be willing to pay

more for better service.

If there is a single common theme in all of our conversations with today’s leaders, it’s the quest for the holy grail of how to deliver a world class customer experience. Most leaders can describe a great experience when it has happened to them - but ask them if they’ve managed to create a business that delivers ‘great’ over and over again, well that’s a different story.

Customer Experience: the new holy grail

A focus on customer experience makes sense financially, there’s definitely room for improvement and most leaders just want to know how.

Companies with

high advocacy

grow three times

faster than the

norm and a one

point increase in

NPS correlates

to an additional

£9million

increased sales

(Source: London

School of

Economics)

Fact Fact

We are all now living on a super-connected, omni-channel planet. Customers want to choose how, when and why they connect with the companies they buy from and they’re just a couple of clicks away from information that helps them choose whether you’re hot or not – in today’s economy, reputation is like a flash mob; it spreads fast.

Customer Experience has changed beyond recognition

1The vast majority of sales and service teams still use conventional ‘delight’ strategies to try to wow and woo their customers. However, all the latest research* shows that delivering on basic promises matters much more to customers than bells and whistles. Exceeding expectations does not measurably increase loyalty – but making it easy does.

*Research based on CEB: The Effortless Experience and Customer Contact Council (HBR July 2010 Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers) and validated by survey of 4,000 respondents by a major Telco client.

2 Put simply, whether they are buying, enquiring, needing help or complaining - if you make it e asy and human, customers reward you with boundless loyalty.

Beyond meeting expectations there is limited additional loyalty to be gained and customer effort is by far the best prediction of long-term loyalty. Fact

A 2015 Harvard Business review article shared a piece of seminal research by CEB that would change the way large companies view their customer service interactions. They discovered that making it feel easy for customers relies to some degree (35%) on the steps in the process to get what customers want, but a whopping 65% of my perception of how easy you are to deal with is down to how you make me ‘feel’ when I interact with you.

The old ‘soft’ skills are not enough

3There are a specific set of customer interaction skills that drive a perception of ease, a sense of confidence and a very human feel to the experience – these are the things that are simply not showing up enough in every conversation.

2015 was the 4th consecutive year when customer experience levels have fallen (Dimension Data 2015).

4Fact

Changing the customer experience starts with changing the conversations that are happening between customers and your front line teams. Out with the old, in with the new

Change the conversation: at every level in your business

If being world class at customer experience were as simple as exposing front line customer service teams to some new skills, we’d put them all on a training course and then watch and wait for the rise in rankings and the awards to come flooding in. But it’s not that easy, which is why so many customer experience programmes fail.

There is specific work to be done with each layer of your business: The tone is set by the top Leaders create the climate for people engagement and customer experience to thrive 1st and 2nd line managers have ‘in the moment’ coaching conversations... ...so that where the rubber hits the road truly human conversations happen over and over again to create loyal customers

3

12

4

Where to focus: it’s a bit like paint by numbers

At Blue Sky, we’ve been working with best for service brands (as well as those trying to get there) for the last 18 years so we are very clear on where you need to focus to transform customer experience.

You get the customers you deserve – the top 100 customer experience companies have done the work to ensure their customers are at the heart of everything they do.

The areas of focus to separate the best from the ‘meh’.

It’s not rocket science so in the end it boils down to how much you want to do it, not whether you have it in your corporate bones

Know what you stand for

Define your intent and visibly take action to show you mean business

At the heart of a customer focused business is a clear customer ethos. This defines the stake in the ground, the spirit with which we look after our customers that everyone can inhabit easily and guides everything we do. One organisation’s ‘make it easy’ is another’s ‘be a dream maker’ - the key is to be really clear on what good looks like Blue Sky work with you to deliver what your organisation stands for and build the narrative that sets the tone for customer culture right from the top We then work with the top team to create some cultural signatures that all people can see and demonstrate we mean business

3

1

2“I really liked the fact that the solution was built on the foundation of the skills being demonstrated by those who are

most successful”British Gas

Principles or standards

Permission culture

Compelling ethos,

purpose and story

Symbolic

Acts Cultural signatures

The nine things are...

Create the climate

There are things that leaders do in ‘best for service’ businesses that create the climate for a great customer experience to thrive.

We’ve spent 18 years obsessively finding out what they are, we’ve bottled them and by sharing them we’ve been able to help big teams, divisions and companies step change their customer experience and grow value at every point of contact.

We bring a toolkit of activities, insights and science to each of the nine areas to inspire and encourage leaders to create the climate for success.

Engage People - inspire your people to join you in the revolution

Shift and reframe (negative thinking) - learn how to be a genius at getting people to see a different perspective

Create a permission culture - everyone needs to know how empowered they really are

The nine things are...

BEST

+There are nine things that leaders need to do every day

Symbolic action - visibly demonstrate your commitment to customer

Show up - get up close and personal, proximity is everything

Clear the path - create the space for people to do it the way you’re asking

Create accountability - you get what you ask for and what you spend time talking about: make sure it’s the stuff you want

Encourage customer focused behaviours - encourage the behaviours, don’t ‘manage’ them

Create a culture of positive critique - catch them doing it right

“It has been an absolute pleasure to work with a group of like-minded people. The Blue Sky team really do put words into actions and worked with us to turn our vision into reality.”

EDF Energy, Customer Service Director

Encourage the new behaviours to show up

Team leaders hold the keys to success. It’s that simple. They need to encourage the specific behaviours that drive great customer experience and human conversations to show up every single day.

We have some strong beliefs informed by our extensive experience in successful transformation programmes:• Line managers must 100% know what good looks

and sounds like in the art of a conversation with a customer and be able to demonstrate it with their teams

• Coaching is not an activity that takes place remotely with a form to fill in and some boxes to tick - it should be happening every day and looks like lots of different things (28, to be precise) and done well, can drive a different conversation in the very next call

• Skills coaching is different from behavioural coaching.We’ll use our 28 coaching cards to drive the skills in the conversation

• Line managers can create the space to coach their teams every week if they take control of their environment

You’ve got to know what good looks like and get it to show up every day

“I do more pop up coaching than ever; I praise people regularly. As a company we focus on negatives. Can’t be doing that anymore. Doesn’t work. We have to lift these people…and everything will fall into place. Make them valued.

Listen to them.” Severn Trent Water

Changing manager behaviour requires ‘in situ’ coaching, in the operation and over eight weeks. They don’t just change because you tell them to. Our solutions provide an eight week operational embeddding approach to be sure the managers really shift and embed the behaviours. We call this ‘live conversations’ and it has delivered significant improvements in many organisations.

Live conversations

New skills for a new experience

Make it human

If you want to create an effortless and human experience, there’s a bit more to it than you’d perhaps think. Having spent years analysing the mindsets and behaviours of top performing customer service advisors, we’ve built our NPS boosting solution on five key mindsets and nine essential skills that drive the real difference.

To engage people in the ‘why change’, our pearls of wisdom harness the best of the neuroscience, human behavioural psychology and customer experience research to bring the ‘why this stuff works’.

Find your ninja:le arning that is totally relevant

advocating

labour inclusion

C-Sat 1 Average C-Sat 5 Average

next issue avoidance

In the past three years alone we’ve worked with over 50,000 customer service advisors for some of the biggest household brands. The role’s the same, the context is always different. For one big bank, being human, present and accountable was key to the shift, for a water company it was ease, warmth and occasional surprise that shunted them up the rankings. We use our expertise to help you find your ninja to drive the difference.

We work with you to find the ninjas that drive results in your environment and design learning to bring them to the heart of what you do and how you do it

N

Embedded Learning Methodology:how you actually get people to change behaviour

We apply our Embedded Le arning Methodology to all of our le arning programmes and the result is that the le arning sticks, behaviours change and results improve.

Sustainability is at the core of our approach

+“I loved that the session was a mix of talking, videos and participation. I am now more open minded and curious than before and eager to practice.”Virgin Media

We’ve got a trailblazing rocket of really cool stuff that we bring to help you stimulate, invigorate and motivate long after the initial big change.

Case studies

“I have worked with Blue Sky on a number of successful programmes. They are dynamic and cre ative in their approach, plus they deliver with passion and pride, as if they were part of our own organisation. They understand us, our challenges and our culture as an organisation.

This is of major importance in delivering a solution that will engage with our people, our customers and ultimately make the difference in our performance.”

More Th>n wanted to become a truly customer-centric organisation and make every customer interaction as effortless as possible. In line with its vision and in partnership with Blue Sky, the company launched ‘Good to Great’, as a test and build programme, to gather robust feedback around the service transformation needed.

Based on a significant uplift in customer advocacy following the pilot, a full roll-out of the programme was delivered to 1,085 front-line customer managers and 86 team leaders. Pilot delegates have been encouraged to act as service champions and a train-the-trainer has taken place to ensure further training can be achieved via internal resource.

The project involved multiple suppliers and demanded rigour around open and clear communication and real commitment to delivering results across the whole business.

77%QA incre ased from

to 87%53.9%NPS up

from

55.1%to

56%Home centre retention up

from

to 75%

The Great People programme set out to change how people operated across the organisation.

STW aspired to improve their SIM (OfWAT measure) position by taking steps to improve customer experience. For them this meant reducing the number of repeat and abandoned calls, managing complaints effectively and improving customer experience. It was also about creating a cultural shift, giving people the skills to be more customer focused in the moment and raising awareness of the importance of being accountable for creating better customer experiences.

Programme sustainability was built into the solution in two key ways:

Internal trainers worked side-by-side with the Blue Sky team during delivery and are now responsible for working with new starters Processes and practices have been re-balanced to establish coaching as an essential day-to-day activity

12

Following a review of their customer satisfaction and employee engagement results, it was clear to O2 that a significant service transformation was needed to retain their customer base. This would require tackling the attitudinal and behavioural issues that had historically driven sales, but impacted the customer experience and loyalty.

Blue Sky were chosen as their partner to deliver ‘Stay Connected’, an innovative and engaging customer service solution attended by front-line staff, their managers and the internal L&D team. Stay Connected addressed individuals’ awareness and understanding of the service delivered by their competitors, their mindset and behaviour towards the customer, how they could better connect on an emotional level and be empowered to make decisions in their best interest (through removing unnecessary bureaucracy).

27%Incre ase in customer satisfaction

7%Improvement in call quality

7.4%Reduction in

customer churn

The results have been outstanding and include a reduction in churn that represents an incremental net financial benefit in excess of £2.5 million per annum on the bottom-line, translating to a ROI in excess of 500%.

Having separated from Lloyds Banking Group in September 2013, TSB was created to bring more competition to the UK Banking market and ultimately better banking for all.

With a clear vision for becoming the ‘local bank for Britain’, they wanted to create a customer service experience that was uniquely theirs and train in a set of customer service experiences and principles that would embody a distinctly TSB way of giving customer service and of dealing with customers.

Blue Sky were asked to create the training content and to deliver the training, to upskill all leaders and front-line colleagues in TSB’s branches and call centres. TSB’s vision was that training design and delivery would happen in parallel, with the early scenarios being trained out, whilst later ones were still being designed.

Events were held across the UK to recruit the best customer service representatives, known as ‘trailblazers’, in the business, who then completed a five-day training

course and were provided with a training toolkit ‘in a box’. 12 of the trailblazers then became coaches, who played a major role in cascading and embedding service values across the bank.

Customer profiles and life-size room props were designed and created to illustrate and differentiate customer communication preferences and with local venues being used for learning sessions, the programme had a real community feel.

The programme has been accredited by the ICS, who have praised it in all areas, highlighting that ‘it was extremely strong and consistently referred to links across all of the competency areas’. They have also acknowledged its simplicity of message and have awarded it the highest level of recognition.

“The whole experience was different to any other TSB training I have attended; everything was re ally active and not in a way that would embarrass

anyone. Having the quizzes and different interactions re ally helped my le arning and to see the benefit

of it”

Blue Sky partnered with Barclays Africa and ABSA to design and deliver a Complaints Transformation programme, to reduce the volume of complaints and handle those that do occur brilliantly. The ultimate goal was to become the best bank for customer service in Africa.

Barclays Africa identified that with a company as geographically complex as it was, there would be challenges around transferring information, as well as handling and logging complaints.

The solution Blue Sky put in place started with its senior leaders and their role in making change happen through sharing their compelling stories. Our solution had to really drive a hearts and minds approach, be portable and quickly cascade across a huge estate, in line with their ambitious targets. Right from the word go, there was a buzz about the programme and people really felt it was something different. Hundreds of people, in as many branches were touched by the programme, which were

9% Reduction in escalated complaints from the front-line

branded with teaser campaigns that were high energy and fun. We worked with people to have better conversations and be accountable for their customer experience, in an effortless way, from end-to-end.

Prior to the programme commencing, Barclays Africa was not in a favourable position with the Ombudsman, due to the number of complaints they had received; they are now the bank with the lowest number of complaints - an incredible achievement. On a more personal level, a common language has been established for employees, which empowers them to do the right thing for the customer and there has been a noticeable increase in staff morale.

18% YTD reduction in customer complaints

36% YOY reduction in customer complaints

44% YOY incre ase in customer compliments

Blue Sky were first engaged by BT in 2013 to transform customer experience and ultimately NPS in a division of the business that was suffering from a legacy of low accountability, a minus 40% NPS, a long tenured workforce who had lost faith in their ability to actually make a difference and were creating a culture of ‘shunting’ customers and repeat contact.

Whilst skill development was needed at the front-line to reconnect people with the brand and drive better customer experiences, the real work had to be done at a leadership level, to equip them to lead change and to re-build trust. High challenge/high support leader events focused on driving accountability for the changes required and creating an environment for building a customer-focused mindset. Leaders were also coached on how to drive a greater sense of purpose in front-line customer interactions and creating an elevated responsibility for solving customer problems. 200%

Improvement in agent sat over and above the control

group

37%Improvement in

FCR

The programme was such a success that we have since gone on to build BT’s Customer First Academy, with content servicing seven lines of business with 20,000 members between them.

Part way through the build, BT launched a new tone of voice led by their internal Head of Brand. Our materials didn’t align, so we rebranded every piece of collateral and re-wrote every piece of material, including facilitator guides to meet the new standards. The brand team were delighted and we continue to be a long standing partner, based on our good work.

More recently we have delivered live online training via WebEx using interactive whiteboards, virtual breakout rooms (with audio) and other interactive tools, which differentiates itself from just video conferencing.

Blue Sky were engaged by Virgin Media in early 2015 to provide a sales and service transformation programme for 5,000 of their onshore and offshore agents in Manilla and Bangalore. With an inconsistent approach to managing performance and a desire to grow the business, the leadership team had a number of objectives to deliver against; specifically they were looking to raise the value in every customer conversation through cross-selling, upselling and reducing downspins to improve their overall service experience.

As a client, they had experienced lots of different learning programmes, so wanted an approach that was totally unique and offered fresh thinking - it needed to be full of energy, high impact, brilliantly engaging, fun and funky. We delivered largescale events for approximately 200 people at a time, starting with managers, using new engaging ideas, such as graffiti table cloths and giant mind maps, along with video content and questionnaires.

In any service transformation programme we design, Blue Sky appreciate that the simplicity of the messaging is crucial, especially when you are working with large, diverse populations. The messages were clear and simple; be curious, notice more, be imaginative. These mindsets ran throughout the programme and its collateral was designed around them.

A coaching blitz to embed the new skills is now in operation, supported by coaching cards designed by Blue Sky, to help embed the coaching techniques.

The results show the programme has been a great success. Virgin Media have seen a continued reduction in downspin between May 2015 and January 2016. This was particularly pleasing in January, as it’s always a challenging month, due to price changes and seasonality. We have highlighted some of the other results here.

40% Reduction in downgrades75% Incre ase in

upsell

The Old Malt House33 The StreetShalfordGuildfordSurreyGU4 8BU

t. +44 (0)1483 739400e. hello@blue-sky.co.uk

www.blue-sky.co.uk

Ready to rock?

At Blue Sky we are passionate about people development and changing behaviour to drive results. We provide a combination of coaching, consulting and training for senior leadership teams, first-line managers and front-line sales and service staff - all geared towards improving business performance.

Visit www.blue-sky.co.uk to discover how you can benefit from our approach and learn more about the results we have achieved with our clients.

The Old Malt House33 The StreetShalfordGuildfordSurreyGU4 8BU

t. +44 (0)1483 739400e. hello@blue-sky.co.uk

www.blue-sky.co.uk