Streamlining Internal Communication to Improve Customer Service

Results

Streamlining Internal Communication to Improve Customer Service

ROI Communication helped a statewide membership organization with large call centers streamline and strengthen its internal communication to improve customer service.

Challenge

A large, statewide membership organization selling insurance and travel services was struggling to overcome “information overload” among its 1,500 call center employees, who regularly reported confusion, frustration and a lack of necessary tools to deliver good customer service. Specifically:

The call center organization was swamped by the volume of non-business information communicated through competing channels. Under the weight of massive emails, key business information was getting misunderstood, lost in the shuffle or ignored altogether.
Business demands and metrics conflicted with a strong need and desire for face to face communication between employees and supervisors, resulting in limited interaction.
Multiple, disparate systems for posting and accessing information interfered with call center employees’ ability to navigate through information consistently to help customers.
Organizational communication processes were inconsistent and hard to manage.

Solution

Recognizing that addressing these issues would require restructuring the way it communicated with — and within — its call centers, the organization brought in ROI Communication to help guide the transformation. The ROI team worked with the client to:

Create a Contact Center portal, integrating multiple contact center sites into one coordinated intranet designed specifically for call center employees.
Establish email guidelines for call center and associated communicators, including how to take advantage of Microsoft Outlook features.
Develop a core set of communication vehicles, including a call center e-newsletter, brown-bag lunch meetings, daily and weekly huddles, and location-based messaging boards that employees can trust to provide relevant and up-to-date information.
Create standardized templates for communication planning, project timelines, presentations and tool kits.
Develop communication baseline metrics to evaluate ongoing success.

Results

To accurately gauge the effectiveness of changes, call center employees were designated as either “huddle” teams or “non-huddle” teams. Both types of team received the benefits of the e-newsletter, brown-bag lunch meetings and messaging boards. However, only the huddle teams participated in the daily and weekly communication huddles with their managers. After six months, a survey found that:

More supervisors now feel they have the time to communicate effectively (83% in June compared to 13% in January).
More call center employees are now satisfied with communication from their supervisors (88% in June compared to 77% in January).
80% of huddle teams felt the meetings improved their ability to handle member calls and requests.
Huddles have improved results in two key performance metrics: promoting member benefits and first call resolution. Members of huddle teams showed 13% improvement in resolving customer issues on their first call. Non-huddle teams improved 6%.