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The 4 Key Phases of Our Approach in Customer Relationship Centres

Create a customer relationship centre approach to unleash the human spark!

At Prométhée Consultants, we help organizations grow and thrive sustainably. To do this, we help illuminate the human spark, with both customers and employees, to have a lasting impact on outcomes. Investing in your customers and teams is the right thing to do. It turns out it’s also a very effective strategy for achieving results, both short and long term.

The benefits are clear:

– Cost reduction

– Revenue increase

– Strategic differentiation advantage

– Greater capacity to face crises

Once the need for change is recognized within your organization, we guide you through a four-phase process.

The 4 Key Phases of Our Approach in Contact Centres

1. Clarify Your Intentions

Any growth and improvement process begins with the intention of the leadership team, what drives it, and what it aims to achieve.

Specifically:

– The short, medium, and long-term objectives you’re pursuing

  – In financial and operational terms

  – In strategic terms

– The pursued strategy and the reasons for supporting it

– The vision of the experience and relationship you wish to create and for which customers

– The benefits you hope to reap

A clear intention is the source of all constructive work and is only the beginning.

2. Mobilize Hearts and Minds – Illuminate the Spark

What changes with strategies aimed at developing the relationship with customers is the search for specific shared emotions with customers: security, trust, happiness, belonging.

Much can be done by improving “physical” elements: products, prices, store locations and design, website design, the appearance of emails, choices offered in phone menus, etc.

We map customer journeys, identify irritants, improve processes and systems, and establish new standards for teams to apply.

Creating emotions requires more: employees must also demonstrate certain ways of being with customers. They need to be welcoming, curious, committed, grateful, and empathetic. These ways of being cannot be imposed. Employees must display them voluntarily and authentically.

The original intention must be embodied by the teams, translated into everyday attitudes and behaviours. This is true for those in contact with customers as well as those in support. It often begins with a traditional communication exercise. However, it’s necessary to go beyond, as knowing and understanding the intention is not enough for its implementation.

Illuminating the spark, means mobilizing hearts and minds to align the collective actions and attitudes of everyone towards realizing the vision.

This involves alignment exercises:

– of roles and responsibilities,

– talent selection and recruitment methods,

– training programs,

– recognition,

– and compensation forms.

3. Align Practices with Speech and Vision – Fuel Commitment

The widespread adage that “happy employees automatically make happy customers,” unfortunately proves to be false. In practice, employee engagement is essential but not enough. For the fire to ignite, actions must follow and align towards the vision. Work processes, systems, and work organization must be developed with the goal of embodying customer relationship development.

Nothing is more frustrating than systems that make customers and employees go in circles, prevent them from taking the right actions “because the system can’t,” or require unnecessary efforts. This also means that these systems and tools must support employees in creating the targeted experience, not by controlling them but by giving them the opportunity to embody it, exercise their judgment, and be themselves.

4. Highlight the Achieved Impact: Make the Results Visible to Employees and Customers

It is then, when the intention meets the teams and manifests in daily gestures, that magic happens. The passion and pride of employees are matched only by that shown by customers. This results in higher scores in surveys and customer experience metrics (NPS, CES, C-SAT) or employee experience. This magic also translates into very concrete behaviours whose impact on financial results is cumulative:

– Customers who promote your brand, return, and repurchase from you

– Employees who promote your company and stay longer

By Guillaume Delroeux

Guillaume is president and leader of customer experience practices at Prométhée consultants and helps organizations with customer relationship centres make the most of their technologies to maximize their impact and create legendary customer experiences.