CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
INSIDE VIEW
HOMESERVE USA
BY SUSAN HASH
“If you consistently go above
and beyond the customer’s
expectations, you will build longterm relationships and keep your
customers for life.” p. 2
OCTOBER 2015
INSIDE VIEW
SUSAN HASH
HOMESERVE USA
A CULTURE OF ENGAGEMENT AND CUSTOMER-CENTRIC CORE
VALUES DRIVES WORLD-CLASS SERVICE DELIVERY.
BY
SUSAN HASH, Contact Center Pipeline
In recent years, some service providers have subscribed to
the theory that companies should strive to provide a level
of customer service that is just “good enough,” and should
not spend the effort or resources trying to delight their
customers. Customers will be satisfied if you just get the
basics right, they say.
ROB JUDSON CHALLENGES THAT NOTION.
“If you consistently go above and beyond
the customer’s expectations, you will build
long-term relationships and keep your
customers for life,” he says. “That’s a far
better business model. It might cost a little
more, but it supports our culture and our
core value to put the customer at the heart
of everything we do.” Judson is senior vice
president of contact center operations
at HomeServe USA, a leading provider
of home emergency repair service plans.
The judges at the 2015 Stevie Awards
for Sales & Customer Service seem to
agree with Judson. Impressed with the
organization’s successful development of
a specialized team of frontline reps whose
main goal is to deliver a “wow” customer
experience, they recognized HomeServe
USA with Gold Stevie® Awards for both
Frontline Customer Service Team of the
Year and Telesales Team of the Year.
Extensive Training and
Support for Frontline Staff
HomeServe USA has a long reputation for
delivering high-quality customer service
with consistently high ratings (98% overall
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customer satisfaction following a service experience
and 98% mystery shopper score on call center rep
performance). That’s not surprising when you consider
the care that goes into selecting and developing the
customer service team.
What does the ideal customer service candidate
look like? Technical capability is only a small portion
of what it takes to deliver a world-class experience,
says Judson. Individuals who are a good fit for the
company’s core values and culture have a serviceoriented attitude as well as an aptitude for learning,
are enthusiastic, open to coaching, and have the
passion to do well and to grow within the business.
Once onboard, the company invests heavily in
learning and development to ensure each new-hire’s
success. The center’s extensive induction training
program lasts for five to seven weeks. It begins with
ROB JUDSON
Senior Vice
President of
Contact Center
Operations,
HomeServe USA
classroom training to learn about products, tools, technologies and various types
of engagement skills. Senior management
support is demonstrated from the beginning. Judson makes a point of spending
time with each training class to talk with
new-hires about the company’s core values, the importance of a customer-centric
attitude and shares advice from his own
experience working on the phones.
Once new-hires graduate from the
classroom, they move into a transition
training bay. The bay provides a highintensity learning environment with a
much lower trainer-to-trainee ratio (around
1:4), Judson explains. Reps begin to take
customer calls in phases—a few calls at a
time followed by additional coaching and
feedback. As their skills and confidence
grow, they migrate into full shifts.
“We have some great coaches who
spend time engaging the reps and working with them to hone their skills, build
their confidence and ensure that they feel
comfortable on the phones,” he says. “We
want to make sure that, from the first call
they take, the customer experience that
they provide is the same as someone
who’s been here for years.”
Frontline training is not a once-anddone event. The center provides ongoing
skills development training as part of its
career-path program. “We continuously
up-skill our people and cross-utilize them,”
Judson says. “It’s a huge reason why we
have such high engagement and a highly
skilled workforce.”
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Judson also credits the center’s training and
development approach in part for the center’s
remarkably low attrition (approximately 2% per
month). “That’s a testament to the engagement
and the support that we give our staff from the
first day that they join us,” he points out.
A True Measure of Exceptional
Service: Customer Feedback
Despite its high Csat and mystery shopper
ratings, the contact center is constantly looking
for opportunities to improve the customer experience. That continuous improvement mindset,
along with employee feedback, is what led the
leadership team to explore an unconventional
approach to managing frontline performance:
What would happen if they dropped traditional contact center metrics, such as average
handle time, schedule adherence and sales
conversions, and focused solely on customer
feedback to determine rep performance?
“Our employees have been delivering against
those types of contact center metrics for a long
time. While management may use the data,
it doesn’t tell you a lot about the customer
experience,” Judson says. Similarly, standard
quality monitoring approaches tend to take
an inside-out view of the experience. “Why use
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T
HomeServe USA’s award-winning
WOW team’s sole objective is
to put the customer first and
deliver an exceptional customer
experience.
a QA function to second-guess what the customer’s experience was or wasn’t?” he points
out. “Why not ask the customers to rate the
experience and let them be the true measure
of whether we’ve delivered world-class WOW
service or if we have opportunities to improve?”
The leadership team decided to test the new
approach with a group of employees. Named
the “WOW” team, their sole objective was to
put the customer first and deliver personable
customer service—a WOW experience—that differentiated the company from its competitors
and customers from other types of service
experiences. Realizing that this type of aboveand-beyond service required frontline staff
to be fully empowered, the leadership team
rolled out a separate training program for the
WOW team members that focused on taking
ownership of the customer’s issue, accountability for first-contact resolution, and how to
live the company’s core value of putting the
customer first.
The pilot program was launched. Reps were
encouraged to have real conversations with
their customers without being restricted to
time limits. While the staff was still required
to adhere to industry compliance regulations,
their service performance was measured solely
by customer feedback via a post-call survey.
The post-call survey consisted of a single
question that asked customers to rate their
recent call on a scale of 1-to-5, with one being
completely dissatisfied and 5 being completely
satisfied or wowed. Management found that
customers were more than willing to offer
their feedback (70% participation rate). In
the 13 months since the program launched,
the WOW team’s overall performance proved
to be outstanding—98.3% of customers rated
their experience a 5 out of 5, and to date, the
team has never had a 1 or 2 rating.
The pilot ran for three months at HomeServe’s
Chattanooga, Tenn., contact center. After the
first four weeks, says Judson, it was pretty
clear that the WOW concept was going to be
successful, and management began a phased
rollout across applicable teams in the contact
center. The positive customer experience in the
U.S. business has also caused the U.K.-based
HomeServe to
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INSIDE VIEW | HOMESERVE USA
test the WOW team concept in its European
subsidiaries.
The WOW Team in Action
So what is a WOW experience? Judson
describes a recent customer interaction with
WOW team member Greg Gent. The customer
was struggling with a short-term financial hardship. Although it was temporary, this customer
was accounting for every dollar and, to squeeze
by over the next few months, the customer
felt that her only option was to cancel one or
more of HomeServe’s repair service plans. The
customer realized that it was a risky move—she
would be exposing herself to a deeper financial
crisis if faced with a repair emergency during
that time.
Gent worked with the customer to set up a
payment holiday to temporarily suspend plan
payments for the next few months—until her
financial situation stabilized. During the conversation, the customer joked that, “We really
need to keep all of the warranties, so I guess
our family will have to cut out the Klondike
ice cream bars.” At the end of the call, the
customer was grateful that she didn’t have to
cancel any of her plans in order to get by for
the next few months.
The next day, the customer was surprised
and delighted to receive delivery of a Styrofoam
container filled with Klondike bars—and a note
from Gent that said, “We don’t want you to go
without your Klondike bars.”
The customer was so moved by the gesture
that she put her head down on the box and
cried. Then she immediately wrote a letter to
the customer service operations’ leaders about
the experience and to request that Gent be
commended and rewarded for his performance.
“To us, this is what the customer experience
is about,” Judson says. “It made us incredibly
proud to see how a simple gesture touched
our customer.”
After receiving the customer’s letter, the
leadership team brought in Klondike bars
for the entire call center operation and held
“Klondike Day” to celebrate the entire customer
service team. As Judson explains: “When you
have these moments of feedback that affirm
your values and vision, it’s important to share
them to make sure that the encouragement
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T
Employee teams compete
in the annual HomeServe
USA Olympics.
continues and people truly understand that
we are that customer-centric business that we
focus on all the time.”
Culture Drives Employee
Engagement
For HomeServe USA, having a customer- and
employee-centric culture is the foundation
for driving world-class service. “Culture is the
heartbeat of the contact center. It’s the single
most important thing to drive,” says Judson.
“Our customer service philosophy and our cultural engagement go hand-in-hand to delivering
the service.”
Importantly, the company’s culture is driven
from the top. Every member of the management
team—from team leaders to directors—shares
Judson’s views. In fact, when hiring for a call
“Our customer service
philosophy and our cultural
engagement go hand-in-hand
to delivering the service.”
—Rob Judson
center management position, he spends a
substantial portion of the interview discussing culture with every candidate. “They can
have the best skills in the world, but if they
don’t have an appreciation for how important
culture is to managing a center and to engaging employees, then they’re not a good fit for
HomeServe,” he says. “Everyone has to be on
board—from the CEO to the frontline rep. Our
CEO is willing to stand and deliver back-to-back
presentations to groups of 15 employees at a
time because he wants to have that type of
personal engagement.”
At HomeServe USA, a lot of thought and
effort goes into creating a fun, engaging workplace. Judson is quick to point out that it’s
not your run-of-the-mill “pizza and a couple of
balloons fun, but wacky, off-the-wall engaging
fun that makes coming to work a pleasure.”
For instance, imagine taking part in a human
foosball tournament during World Cup, or competing against other teams and locations in the
HomeServe version of the Olympics.
“In the past week alone, we had a grill competition to kick off football season, and today is
‘Make a Hat’ day. Why? Well, it’s Tuesday… why
not?” Judson says. “That’s our culture. We do
it because, if our employees have a smile on
their faces, if they feel valued and if they feel
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T
like we care about them, that’s going to radiate through every call that they deliver and the
customer is going to feel a different experience.”
In addition to fun activities, top performance is regularly recognized and rewarded.
Employees who display exceptional performance can be nominated by their supervisors
for a President’s Award. Every quarter, nominees
at each corporate location attend an awards
dinner where the winners are announced. The
winners receive an all-expenses-paid trip to
New York City during the holiday season for
shopping, tours and dinner with the company’s
executive leadership team.
Caring about and for employees is a key
part of HomeServe’s culture, and one which
management takes to heart. This past winter,
when a snowstorm in Chattanooga made driv-
HomeServe’s Chattanooga
contact center leadership team
(from left): Jimmy Patterson,
WOW Supervisor; Rob Judson,
VP, Contact Center;
Bryan McAnally, Inbound
Manager; Steve Bemis,
Process Improvement Manager.
ing conditions hazardous, management hired
four-wheel-drive SUVs to pick up the staff so
they wouldn’t have to drive themselves. They
also put up employees at a nearby hotel so
they wouldn’t have to take unnecessary risks.
Multiple Touchpoints
to Collect VoC Insights
The ability to drive customer-centric values
and culture requires insights into customers’
needs, expectations and desires. HomeServe
USA taps into the voice of the customer via multiple touchpoints along the customer journey.
In addition to the WOW team post-call phone
surveys, the organization collects voice of the
customer (VoC) data via independent phone
surveys at different stages in the customer
lifecycle, as well as post-service surveys, realtime onsite surveys to get feedback about the
experience provided by the field technicians,
and online surveys. More recently, the contact
center rolled out speech analytics tools to capture and analyze customer insights from calls.
Charged with transforming customer data
into action and goals is a Voice of the Customer
Committee that meets monthly and includes
representatives from senior leadership—including the CEO and members of the executive
team—as well as operational stakeholders
across the organization. The VoC Committee
members act as “the guardians of the customer experience,” Judson says. “The committee
makes sure that everything we do is aligned
with our customer promise.
“The insight that we collect is so rich and
valuable—it helps us to shape our customercentric culture,” he adds. “Constantly putting
the customer at the heart of everything we do
is one of core values, and it’s really central to
everything we do within the organization.”
Susan Hash is the Editorial
Director of Contact Center
Pipeline and
Blog.ContactCenterPipeline.
[email protected]
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