ServiceMark

Since starting out from founder Jeremy Hyams’ front room in 1996, Claims Consortium Group has become something of a success story. Now employing nearly 300 people, primarily at their offices near Taunton in Somerset, the company provides property claims handling and claims workflow technologies working with the majority of the UK’s blue chip insurers. They specialise in claims for property damage from perils such as storm, flooding or fire. Integral to the group’s success has been a focus on customer service. You only have to read a short way down the homepage on their website before you come to the statement: ‘Customer service is the foundation of everything we do.’

Matt Brady, Group Managing Director, explains: “We’re very conscious that the customers we deal with are in a situation they didn’t want to be in. They’re often stressed and, having placed their policy with a blue chip insurer, have high expectations of service. So we put the emphasis on service right from the outset. For example, we ask our call centre staff to score a customer’s happiness from their very first call. This individualises the customer and places the focus on customer satisfaction straightaway.”

Service through the supply chain

However, customer service is not only delivered by Claims Consortium staff themselves, but also by the company’s network of partners, the contractors and surveyors that they employ to assess building damage and carry out work. As a result, the company works very closely with its partners and delivers customer service training to them through regional workshops. “We have a multi-layered operation and we need to get our supply chain to work in the same way as us,” Matt says. “In many ways, the most difficult part is getting the service ethos embedded into businesses that are not ours , so we work very hard at that.”

Linking it up

The majority of customer interaction is over the phone, but online is also growing fast as a channel. Overall, about a third of customers mainly use online, and for one insurer client, this rises to around 50% of their customers. Claims Consortium has developed a unique social media style portal called TrackMyClaim through which customers can communicate with parties involved in the claim and track the progress of the claim and repairs in real time. They can use it as an information source only or proactively post messages or add photos. An extension of this is Synergy, the company’s multi-enterprise software platform that brings all parties (not just the end customer) involved in the claims process together in real time, linking up everyone in the chain. “We’ve had around 1.5 million uses of Synergy so far since we launched it in 2015,” Matt says. “We think it’s a step-change in the industry. The system has also garnered outside recognition , such as winning the Institute of Customer Service’s Customer Satisfaction Innovation award in 2017.

Institute membership

The system has also garnered outside recognition, such as winning the Institute of Customer Service’s Customer Satisfaction Innovation award in 2017. Claims Consortium Group has been a member of the Institute since 2013 and, in 2016, achieved ServiceMark accreditation. They also use The Institute’s FirstImpressions customer service people development programme, run by their in house Learning and Development team.

Matt reflects: “Key to our business strategy is to invest in and develop our staff. We don’t have a ready market of insurance specialists around us here in Somerset so it’s essential that we train our people well ourselves and can retain our talent. We already had insurance qualifications that staff can do (through the Chartered Insurance Institute) but we needed something on the customer service side too, and the Institute fits the bill perfectly.”

Motivation and validation

The company didn’t rush in to doing ServiceMark, but ran the staff and customer surveys first to benchmark where they were before deciding to go for accreditation. Carly Eggar, Head of Accreditation and Certification at Claims Consortium, says: “We didn’t want to just chase badges and we realised that ServiceMark is not about badge collecting. We learned a lot through the surveys, of both our staff and our customers. For the customer surveys, we surveyed both our insurance company clients and their policyholder customers to get the fullest possible picture. A lot of the learnings related to the communication piece. It became very clear that although we were doing many of the right things as an organisation, we were at times failing to ensure that our staff and customers were kept as engaged as they should have been with changes we were making and the reasons behind them. This is something that we have worked extremely hard to address over the last few years and is an ongoing commitment.”

One of the biggest impacts of doing ServiceMark was internal, as Carly explains: “Staff found it really motivational to see that we were serious about benchmarking ourselves against the best. It gave them a greater sense of ownership too, that their views were being asked for and listened to. Gaining accreditation is like a validation, a sign of their efforts being recognised and rewarded. Since we did ServiceMark, staff have asked me when they’d be doing the survey again, so keen are they to be involved!”

When the assessor came in as part of the accreditation and interviewed around 25 staff, many of them were fairly nervous and didn’t know quite what to expect. But you could see their enthusiasm afterwards and how inspired they were. Meanwhile, First Impressions training has become part of the company’s on-boarding process and some 65 staff have been through it. Claims Consortium is also piloting the Institute’s more advanced Level 3 qualifications which were launched to the business as part of their National Customer Service Week celebrations and have received great levels of interest so far.

A ‘tie-breaker’

But it is not only on the internal side that the company has seen the benefits of its work with the Institute. Matt Brady says: “There has been at least one instance where we won a contract with an insurance client and our ServiceMark accreditation was one of the deciding factors. It was the tie-breaker if you like, that tipped the contract in our favour. Of course, winning new contracts or retaining existing ones is usually the result of multiple factors and complex scoring systems, but having the accreditation and being members of the Institute certainly helps” Matt also values some of the materials that the Institute produces, such as the ‘Customer of the Future‘ report which, he says, “helped me to think further about customer behaviours and therefore service strategies.” In the end, the goal as Matt sees it is quite simple: to provide a joined-up, professional service that satisfies the customer and therefore the end client. “The best we can do in fact is hardly to be noticed,” he says. “Our greatest compliment is when it’s been so effortless for the customer that they don’t even remember who we are or what we did!”

As the power behind energy efficiency, IMServ provides energy data and metering services to a range of customers. They include the energy suppliers, organisational energy users (companies) and energy management partners such as energy consultancies or brokers. Monitoring around 275,000 metering points remotely and covering 25% of the UK’s electricity consumption through its network, the company collects approximately 80 billion units of energy data per year. IMServ provides multi utility solutions, gas, water and electricity, with its key expertise within the electricity industry.

Headquartered in Milton Keynes with 350 employees, the company has been operating for 25 years now and is one of the leading players in the complex business of energy consumption data and analysis. The Energy industry is increasingly a highly competitive market, undergoing significant change, meaning that levels of customer service can be an important differentiator.

Service on the agenda

It was about five years ago that senior management at IMServ realised they needed to do more around the service agenda. Steve Brown, Managing Director at IMServ, explains: “We got to a point where we were conscious that our levels of both customer service and employee engagement were not where they needed to be. Anecdotal comparisons with competitors showed that we weren’t necessarily any worse than them, but we wanted to be better than the average of a mediocre bunch!” So it was that, in 2012, the company became members of the Institute of Customer Service and began to work towards ServiceMark accreditation.

“We were particularly keen to improve employee engagement levels because we understood the link between engagement and customer service and wanted to create that virtuous circle, which could then help differentiate us in the market,” Steve says. “So we were clear about what we wanted to do, but we didn’t have the framework to deliver it on our own.” The Institute and ServiceMark provided that framework. That was the real value add. The company achieved ServiceMark in 2013 and has recently been reaccredited for a further three years to 2020. Satisfaction scores have improved in both the Business Benchmark survey of customers (from 72.5 to 78.7) and the employee survey (from 79.6 to 80.6).

Culture shift

The process, which Steve describes as challenging, generated a number of key insights and changes. “We realised that we needed to shift the culture slightly because we had a very operational mind-set,” Steve explains. “But sometimes the customer doesn’t care as much about operational nuances as we think they do. They just want to know what their data shows, not so much the technical detail behind it. So it was about aligning our operational delivery with customer service more effectively.” There were also some significant internal changes that came about as a result of ServiceMark and the recommendations provided by The Institute as a result of its independent assessment. Firstly, in order to improve collaboration between teams, IMServ reorganised how the teams sat in the office to reflect the’virtual data production line’ of their services to the customer.

Staff empowerment

Secondly, they introduced a system of management business information boards that showed the KPIs for the operational teams and performance against them and started a schedule of regular team talks in which these boards were discussed. “This improved performance awareness and collaboration between teams,” Steve says. “Importantly, the KPIs were not the Board’s KPIs, they were derived by the teams themselves, according to what mattered in their own roles. So there was an empowerment process at play in giving staff the ability to shape what was measured and managed.

Another area of focus was on improving two-way communication with the company’s meter technicians and readers, remote workers who represent nearly one third of the workforce. “Their engagement scores were low. Improving their engagement also improved their efficiency, so there was a double benefit,” Steve observes. In addition to ServiceMark, the company has also undertaken some of the Institute’s ServiceFocus training programmes after learning and development came out with low scores in the employee surveys. IMServ has also appointed its own training manager to help in the development and delivery of training.

Top quartile

The result of all these efforts is that the company is now in the top quartile for service amongst its peers, meeting their original objective. “It’s not exaggerating to say that there has been a complete turnaround in employee engagement and customer satisfaction since we began the process,” Steve says. “We already had things we wanted to change, but working with The Institute has significantly helped us on the way and enabled us to really put a focus on it.

Working with our Client Development Director has helped us think differently and more broadly as a management team.” The payback of all these initiatives has been palpable. Having lost a major retail customer a few years ago because of service issues, they have recently won them back and the customer is very satisfied with service. IMServ hasn’t lost a major supplier or energy management partner in the last three years. “We grew revenue by 10% last year and it’s up 20% this year to date. It’s difficult to establish a precise link of course but I have no doubt that if you create that virtuous circle of engagement and service, it feeds off itself,” Steve says. The company now also runs two major projects every year, one on the customer side and one on the employee side. This year’s customer project is around installing a new CRM system and also dealing with complaints more effectively, while the employee project involves the company’s internal ‘WeEngage’ team running Food For Thought sessions to air any issues and ideas amongst staff.

“A few years ago if you walked around the office, you could sense that things could be improved,” Steve reflects. “Now, walking round you can sense an energy and a feel-good factor. We know we can’t ever afford to ease up, that if you stop continually emphasising service things can go backwards, but we’re certainly on the right path.”

As autumn advances and the nights draw in, we all begin to switch our heating on to take the chill out of the air. But instead of wall-mounted radiators, more are turning on underfloor heating , a system that emits an even warmth through the floor.It’s something that’s becoming more widespread, and not only with more people pursuing self-build dreams of the type made popular by the TV show Grand Designs. It’s more affordable than some might think, costing around the same as luxury radiators, is more efficient and does away with those irritating cold spots! Based in Honiton, Devon, Nu-Heat is the UK’s largest supplier of designed underfloor heating systems.

The company started out in 1992 employing just a handful of people and is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year with a team of more than 100. With over 70,000 systems installed, the company has also branched out into integrated renewables such as heat pumps and solar thermal systems.Nu-Heat designs bespoke systems for each project, working from house plans, and as well as single new build or renovation jobs, also works on bigger trade and commercial developments. The company works with a network of registered installers around the country.

Customer service journey

Customer service has always been important to the company and in 2014 it formalised this by becoming a member of the Institute of Customer Service. Christian Oram, Sales and Marketing Manager at Nu-Heat, explains: “We’ve always looked at the customer service journey throughout the process from first contact through to completion of a job. We pride ourselves on being an ethical sales company that takes a very consultative approach.

The industry has become more competitive over the years and we realised that bringing customer service to the forefront of what we do will improve customer satisfaction and give us a real competitive advantage. It is another way we can stand out from the crowd. The difference between eight out of ten and nine out of ten for customer satisfaction is huge.

On joining the Institute, Nu-Heat ran an initial benchmarking survey both externally and internally. The external results were pleasing, with a customer satisfaction score of 84.6%. Internally, however, it was much lower at 62.7%.”We realised that we had much more to do on the internal side,” Christian says. “Whether we were just being too harsh on ourselves, or whether we were not in fact communicating well enough through the company about the emphasis we place on customer service, it gave us the spur to up our efforts. So we began to increase the visibility of our customer service policies and processes, including beginning a formal feedback process internally for service challenges and successes.”

Steering a path

That wasn’t all the company did, though. “We also set up a Customer Service Steering Group, made up of Board members and senior management (including myself). The Steering Group sets strategy, looks at high level customer service challenges and discusses root causes. Then we created a Customer Service Focus Group made up of people from across departments to develop and implement any changes to our processes. In addition, we created internal customer service champions, started a recognition scheme and began sending out monthly customer feedback emails to all of our people.”

Nu-Heat then worked towards The Institute’s ServiceMark accreditation, and successfully gained it in December 2016. It is the only heating company in the UK to hold the accolade. Not only that, but the company achieved a Distinction, one of only a handful of companies in any sector to do so. The company’s external score had risen to 88.8% – a satisfying increase given that it was already starting from a high score, while the internal score shot up to 88.9%.

The ‘9 out of 10’ goal

“We were very pleased with this,” Christian says, “but we want to keep pushing ourselves to do better! We’d love to get to 90%. That’s why we’ve now embraced a ‘9 out of 10’ initiative where every member of staff sets themselves an improvement goal that would help us get to that 9 out of 10 score. It can be something big or small. For example, my first one was ‘Don’t interrupt people’ as I had a habit of doing that! My current one is ‘Establish a structure and process so everyone in my team is clear what their role is’. People have really embraced it well. Since joining The Institute, the customer service ethos has become firmly embedded in the company”.

Through following the advice of their Client Services Director at The Institute, every member of Christian’s 40-strong Sales and Marketing team, for example, has a customer service objective amongst their 4 or 5 key personal performance objectives for the year. The company’s HR manager has also become an accredited trainer to deliver The Institute’s FirstImpressions customer service training programme, and all of Nu-Heat’s people have been through it. “We’ve caught the training bug now!” Christian laughs. “FirstImpressions was our first company-wide learning and development training and now we’re rolling out leadership training too.” The company also actively participates in National Customer Service Week (1st week of October) with a variety of team-building and recognition activities through the week. “We’ve taken part for the last three years now,” Christian says. “It’s something we look forward to and everyone can enjoy.”

Happy returns

Christian is also clear that there has been a real return on investment for Nu-Heat from working with The Institute. The company has grown market share steadily through the last three years. Externally, repeat business on the trade side has grown by around 15%. Internally, as engagement scores have risen so sick leave has dropped significantly down by around a half. “There’s no doubt that membership has been really good for us. We make the most of it, with our ServiceMark Distinction accreditation on all our quotes, our website, our brochures and our trade show stands. Customers notice it and comment on it. It’s a point of differentiation, a real USP. Internally too, it has proved its worth. People like working for a company that is genuinely trying to be the best it can be. They want to be a part of that and are motivated when they can see you are listening to them and valuing their point of view.”

Part of AIM-listed Restore plc, Restore Datashred employs around 400 people and operates 13 ‘destruction centres’ around the UK where paper records are securely destroyed. The company also disposes of hard drives and computers, although a ‘wipe and recycle’ service is separately offered by another division within the Group. Around 250 staff are drivers, collecting materials from customers, with the rest being depot operatives, customer service staff at a call centre in Purfleet in Essex as well as other admin staff, and a telesales operation in Manchester.

Symbolising what we believe in

It was in 2012 that the shredding business, then owned by a different group, was first asked to take part in an Institute of Customer Service survey. The score was good – and the company decided that it could put itself forward for one of The Institute’s flagship accreditations, ServiceMark. Commercial Director Debbie Pugh explains: “We realised that we had a high enough score to take ServiceMark on and that it would be a great way of testing whether we were as good as we thought we were! We could see that obtaining the accreditation would be a massive differentiator for us, something that could become an important part of our marketing strategy. But perhaps more importantly, we could see that the discipline of doing ServiceMark would help us get a framework in place for what good customer service looks like and embedding it across the whole organisation so that it encompasses all parts of the business. It would become a badge that symbolises everything we believe in.”

Restore Datashred was successful in obtaining ServiceMark in 2012 and achieved reaccreditation in 2015. It is the only shredding provider in the UK to hold the accreditation, which involves three elements: an employee survey, a survey of customers, and an assessment by an independent assessor from The Institute of Customer Service.

A challenging process

As Customer Experience Manager at Restore Datashred, Helen Prentice has been integrally involved with the accreditation. So how did they find the ServiceMark process? “It can be quite challenging,” she says, “especially as we have depots across the country so the workforce is geographically spread. The main challenge was getting everyone to see that ‘customer service’ is not just something that happens in the customer service centre – it happens everywhere. So it was about getting the drivers to make the connection, to see that what they do on a daily basis is customer service. We went out around the country doing presentations and workshops in every depot. That worked really well – it helped people see the importance of what they do, which is quite empowering. It was a lot of work, but you learn as you go along, you adapt and change your approach as you need to.”

Learnings and benefits

A number of useful learnings have also come out of the process. Helen explains: “Our customer survey results were actually higher than our employee survey, with customers scoring us 81.6 (out of 100) and employees 75.9, but one area for further work that the customer survey highlighted was to improve the way we recorded complaints when there were any. We were dealing with complaints effectively, but not recording them well enough. So we changed that and now have a system where complaints are detailed together with a record of what was done about it and then, crucially, a follow-up happens with the customer about a month later to re-engage with them and make sure everything is still OK. We don’t just make the assumption that they are happy – we go that little bit further and check back in with them.”

The process generated some internal learnings too. Debbie says: “It made us realise that not everyone knows what you think they know. For example, in the employee survey it asks whether they think the Board discusses customer service. I was expecting 100% of people would say ‘yes’. But they didn’t. That showed us we had more to do to communicate about both the Board and the way that customer service is a key strategic issue for us.” There have been clear external benefits too. Apart from providing a strong marketing message, the ServiceMark accreditation has helped the company in tenders because it has given them a higher Quality score.

With regard to the ServiceMark accreditation Helen says: “We have highlighted a unique selling point within our bids and tenders; demonstrating proven excellence in customer service from an independent body; and since achieving the accreditation our quality score has improved over 15%.”

Everyone is responsible

But despite all the advantages, Debbie is clear that taking ServiceMark is not for the faint-hearted: “ServiceMark sets a high bar. There’s nowhere to hide with the survey responses! The standards are tough to achieve and if you take your foot off the gas, it will be reflected in the results. With a business like ours, that is quite regularly acquiring other smaller businesses, you have an influx of new staff periodically so another challenge is making sure they all get the service culture. It’s a process of constant education – you’ve got to appreciate that things don’t just stand still.”

It seems that Restore Datashred is certainly on the right track, with the company’s scores improving quite significantly between 2012 and 2015. Back then, employees scored 66.6 out of 100 – and three years later that had risen to 75.9. Customer satisfaction also rose – from 75.9 to 81.6 in the same timeframe. They are now set to go for the next reaccreditation in 2018.It’s not only about ServiceMark, though. The company has also run FirstImpressions customer service training sessions for staff as well as a number of managers taking the ServiceManagement course. More broadly, they are in the midst of rolling out more training for drivers and depot staff through a mix of video materials, e-learning and assessment quizzes. They have also incorporated customer service criteria and measurements into their recruitment process – to ensure that new staff are suited to the service culture. All in all, the company has fully embraced the service agenda. As Debbie says: “There is no one who isn’t responsible for customer service.”

Arguably, no sector in the UK has seen greater change in recent years than higher education. The increase of tuition fees, which rose to £9,000 in September 2012, and the removal of the cap on student numbers, have profoundly shaken up the sector. As ‘paying customers’, students’ expectations are higher and the competition to attract students is fiercer than ever. One university is putting customer service at the heart of its response to this changing landscape, London South Bank University (LSBU).

The university, with its main campus in Southwark and another in Havering, is distinctive in a number of ways. More than half of its students come from the local area in London; over half are of BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) origin; and more than 50% also come from the lower socio-economic quartile. The demographic of its students means that the university puts a huge emphasis on developing employability skills. And it sees customer service, across all aspects of the student experience, as a key facilitator to achieving this.

Ian Mehrtens, Chief Operating Officer at LSBU, said: “Everything we do is focused around the student experience. We are committed to providing the most positive and supportive environment possible so that our students can flourish and put themselves on the path to successful working careers. Customer service is central to this, we use customer service as a way to stay ahead of the curve. Many universities are slow to react to change, but we try to adapt quickly and deliver what students need and increasingly expect.”

An embedded approach

This sense of the importance of customer service has been embedded across the university, from academic staff to student support services (well-being, disability/dyslexia support), accommodation services, student admin, library and learning resources, and HR. The university has established a Customer Service Steering Group that sets the strategy and vision for customer service across the organisation. The steering group includes two Deans who actively promote and push the service agenda to academic staff, to ensure that it is seen as an issue for everyone, not just support or admin functions. For example, tutors in all of LSBU’s seven Schools use their module evaluation questionnaires to improve the student experience – by asking students for their feedback after each and every module, and then acting on the feedback received.

What makes this really stand out is the fact that courses are designed  with this feedback specifically in mind, so students’ needs are central to all developments. Classic customer service in action. However, whilst students form the biggest customer base for LSBU, it is not only about them. Around a third of the 20,000 students at the university are undertaking employer-sponsored degrees (a much higher proportion than at most other universities). So these companies are another important customer base, along with other businesses local to the university. The local community is important too. For example, LSBU’s Academy of Sport, which offers a whole range of sporting facilities and events, markets itself as much to the local area as it does to students.

The customer service journey

The university has been on its customer service journey for a number of years now. But becoming members of The Institute of Customer Service two years ago marked an important step. Since joining, the university has delivered customer service training via The Institute to a wide number of staff (through the FirstImpressions and ServiceFocus training programmes) and also received ServiceMark accreditation for four of its divisions.

“Working with The Institute has enabled us to formalise and professionalise our customer service approach,” Ian Mehrtens said. “In a sector that fundamentally values qualifications and professionalism, it is important for us to bring that to customer service as well , to show the real value of customer service as a career, or as a facet of a career.” The training programmes have given staff greater confidence around delivering service to students as well as improving employee engagement. The university is notable for being the first organisation to achieve ServiceMark accreditation for four areas at the same time. The Academy of Sport, the Accommodation team, the Library and Learning Resource Centre, and the Student Life Centre (that delivers support and well-being services) all achieved the prestigious accreditation.

Returns on investment

There have been tangible returns for LSBU from its Institute of Customer Service membership. The university has been seeing higher number of students re-enrolling, lower numbers dropping out of courses, employability rates rising, and demand for its support services increasing. Meanwhile, staff retention rates have also increased. In some areas, satisfaction rates among students and staff rose by as much as 25% between the university’s 2014 and 2015 surveys. LSBU’s score in the National Student Survey (which is of third year students) also rose last year. There are many factors involved in these outputs of course, but The Institute training and accreditation has certainly helped.

“One of our key values at the university is inclusivity,” Ian Mehrtens said. “We want students to be comfortable to be themselves, whatever their background, and not feel that they are being judged. We want them to feel well-supported and well-understood. I think our metrics show that we are succeeding in that.”

Plans for the future

Looking to the future, the university plans to roll out further customer service training to even more staff, gain ServiceMark accreditation for more of its functions, implement the action plans that have arisen to date, improve its internal customer service, and maintain and extend its close working with and service to partner businesses and the local community. A packed agenda for sure. Reflecting on the importance of the university’s Institute membership, Ian Mehrtens said: “The Institute has helped us focus all staff on what customer service is, what it means, and how it affects our students’ lives. It’s really been worth it.”

The company’s operations are extensive. It services some 2.4m domestic households and 160,000 businesses in Scotland. With a turnover of £1.2bn per year and employing around 3,750 staff, it is the fourth largest water company in the UK. With such a large customer and geographical base to cover (30,000 square miles), it is not surprising that Scottish Water has a very busy workload. It deals with, for example, around 40,000 sewer blockages a year. Service standards, therefore, are an absolute priority.

High aspirations, Scottish Water’s commitment to customer service is in part driven by its regulator, the Water Industry Commission for Scotland, who sets the service (and efficiency) standards that it must meet during each regulatory period. The company has in fact set itself even higher standards that it aspires to reach. It benchmarks itself not merely against other utilities but against other leading service providers in different sectors.

Peter Farrer, Chief Operating Officer at Scottish Water, who has responsibility for both operations and service, says: “Customer service is fundamental to what we do. We have proven that you don’t have to be a private company to deliver leading levels of service. We’ve also shown that, with the right focus, it is possible to drive up both customer service and operational efficiency at the same time.” The company has taken customer service seriously for a long time. Nine years ago, it introduced a ‘Customer Experience Measure’ whereby customers who have dealt with Scottish Water receive a survey asking for their views on their experience.

When this started out, it was done every six months to a sample of 1,000 customers. In the last few years, however, the company has significantly expanded this so that any customer interacting with the company receives a survey, sent to them by the same channel as they contacted the organisation through (phone, email, social media etc). Response rates are impressive, with around a quarter of surveys being completed, meaning that the company receives 1,000 to 1,500 pieces of detailed customer feedback every month.

Driving culture change

This expansion of the Customer Experience Measure is one of the things that Peter Farrer has introduced since becoming a Board Director in 2009. But he has also deepened the level of information captured so that a customer’s satisfaction can be taken right down to an individual operator level in the contact centre or the field. League tables are produced at an individual, team leader and manager level.

“This has driven a real culture change. It’s one of the ways we’re doing things that not many other utilities are,” Peter explains. “Nobody wants to be at the bottom of the league table! But we don’t just use the information for coaching purposes around areas for improvement, we also use it for positive and motivational purposes, such as positive reinforcement when a customer praises an individual or team for great service. It gives us such a rich seam of information. We have recently introduced the Customer Experience Measure for businesses too.”

Longstanding member

Another important facet of Scottish Water’s commitment to customer service is its membership of The Institute of Customer Service. Again, this is an area that Peter has driven significant changes to since becoming Chief Operating Officer. Scottish Water is in fact one of The Institute’s earliest members, joining in 1999. But for many years the company largely confined itself to working with The Institute on the training of its front end customer service staff.

Peter became a Board Member at around the same time as Jo Causon became CEO of The Institute. As one of The Institute’s largest members, Jo came to visit Peter early in her tenure. “We made a great connection,” Peter recalls. “I was very impressed by Jo’s passion and enthusiasm for improving standards of customer service, and I think she was impressed by our focus on it too.” Jo invited Peter to become a Vice President of The Institute. The Vice Presidents don’t sit on the Board itself but meet regularly in an advisory capacity. “Being a Vice President means that I rub shoulders with other senior executives from some of the best customer service organisations in the country,” Peter says. “We can share learnings and experiences, and I can take things back to try them at Scottish Water.

Matching the best

The company also makes much greater use of some of The Institute’s products and services such as the UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI), which surveys 10,000 individual customers of organisations across 13 sectors. The Institute has also provided an additional benchmark based on the responses of Scottish customers in the UKCSI. “Previously we didn’t utilise the UKCSI, but now it’s one of our fundamental business measures,” Peter says. “We use it as a means to benchmark ourselves not just against other utilities but against leading providers of other essential goods and services. Utilities are one of the poorest performing sectors in the UKCSI so we don’t want to just be the ‘best of a bad bunch’, we want to match the best, full stop. We have to be realistic though, because we’re always going to struggle against the likes of Amazon or John Lewis with whom customers have such regular interaction. That’s why we are targeting leading levels of service provided by other providers of essential products and services like Food Retail. Water is still a ‘silent service’ for many, but we’ve been doing pretty well, near the average across all 13 sectors. That’s good, though we still have further to go.”

The company has also achieved ServiceMark, a national accreditation awarded by The Institute, that recognises an organisation’s achievement in customer service – and was in fact the first large multi-site organisation to obtain it. Last year it gained re-accreditation. Peter reflects: “Whereas the UKCSI is in effect a lag indicator of how you have been doing, both ServiceMark and the employee survey ServCheck, are cultural indicators of how you’re performing. So they are really important to us too. ServiceMark, with its absolute scores that you have to meet, sets a high standard. We have also spent a lot of time with The Institute redesigning our various in-house training programmes for staff.” Another area the company has been involved in is The Institute’s forum on providing service to vulnerable customers. This has led to it linking up and working closely with electricity distributor Scottish Power Energy Networks. “That’s one of the many spin-offs at all levels from our involvement and participation with The Institute,” Peter says.

Holding up the mirror

Results have been going well. When Scottish Water first featured in the UKCSI nine years ago, satisfaction using their own real time Customer Experience Survey tool was at 60%. Now, they are consistently hitting 90% or more. The ‘Your Voice’ employee survey meanwhile, which is run independently, has an 80% return rate with engagement scores improving from 50% to around 70% in the last five years. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that working with The Institute has had a fundamental impact on our progress,” Peter says. “The regulator plays an enormous role, setting the standards we have to meet, the hygiene factors if you like. But with The Institute we have awoken to the art of the possible, setting our own agenda on how far we want to push service standards over and above the regulatory targets. The Institute has held the mirror up for us and made us look across all of the other 12 business sectors too. They have given us some lightbulb moments.”

The company’s Food & Water division, with 5 sites throughout the UK, is one of the UK’s biggest testers, carrying out some 8 million tests annually. Open for business 365 days of the year, and often needing to test into the early hours in order to meet customer deadlines, the work is fast-paced and can have unpredictable peaks.

The division’s work plays a hugely important role as part of a safety regime which protects and informs the public, testing that food is safe and contamination-free, checking and verifying nutritional claims and labelling (including for example that a product is ‘nut-free’), and substantiating the authenticity of food products too, think of the horsemeat scandal from a few years past.

Around 80% of the division’s work is food testing, with the other 20% involving testing the quality of water (important for water processing plants or for renal units, for example, in hospitals). “A demanding environment.” Mike McCorkell, Managing Director of the UK Food & Waters division at ALcontrol, explains: “We have 50 vehicles that collect food samples from manufacturers daily and for food safety tests we have to process them straight away. Most of our testing is pre-scheduled but even so we don’t usually know until the day it’s actually due to arrive what the volumes will be. So it can be quite pressured getting through the work and we rely considerably on the engagement, flexibility and goodwill of our staff to get the job done well. Not only can the work be pressured for staff, but the results can also lead to high stress situations for their customers. Listeria for example, in a manufacturer’s sample, then we have to break what is obviously a piece of very bad news to them,” Mike comments, “You’ve got to do that in a sensitive and human way , one of the areas where the need for excellent customer service really comes in.”

A customer service journey

It was four years ago when the company was consolidating some of its sites that it really occurred to Mike that a radical change to a more customer service focused approach was needed. “We were in danger of being too transactional in our dealings with customers, treating the work like a Lean production line. Our organisation was perhaps somewhat introverted as well, working hard under the bonnet but not communicating enough with customers in an engaging way. Mike recruited an experienced service and engagement expert, Julia Bloomer, from the steel industry (another tough industry, fighting hard for marginal gains) to supplement his team and together they set ALcontrol off on what has been a fruitful and rewarding journey.

Julia had experience of The Institute of Customer Service from her previous role, and enrolled the Food & Water division as a member too. Since 2013, the company has made wide use of The Institute’s products and services, including putting many of its staff through training programmes, such as FirstImpressions and ServiceManagement, using Business Benchmarking putting leaders and managers through Institute training qualifications for Communication, Solutions, Innovation and Coaching obtaining one of The Institute’s most prestigious accreditations, ServiceMark.

ServiceMark requires an organisation to carry out a survey of its employees to benchmark engagement; a survey of customers to gauge their level of satisfaction; and have an independent assessment carried out by an Institute representative. All three components require challengingly high scores in order to achieve the accreditation.

Julia Bloomer says: “There’s no doubt that being members of The Institute has really paid off for us. It’s benefited us in lots of different ways. Obtaining ServiceMark was the icing on the cake if you like, although for me the most important thing isn’t obtaining the accreditation, it’s the journey to get there and the things you learn along the way. The journey is still ongoing too. We’re the only commercial laboratory in the country to have ServiceMark so it stands out as a truly independent verification of our standards. Some of our competitors promote in-house survey results but without any facts or confirmation, so it’s a great achievement for us.”

Return on investment

And it’s not just a nice piece of paper or a plaque for the company to display, it has led to real return on investment. The food testing industry is a price sensitive marketplace, and margins are low. Getting fairly rewarded for work and making a sustainable profit can be challenging. Obtaining ServiceMark along with other Institute programmes, and achieving the underlying service standard that enabled this, has helped the company to swim against the tide on price. What it’s done for us is given us the knowledge and the confidence to increase our pricing in a fair way, knowing that our customers recognise our service offering too and will stay with us. So it’s had a direct commercial benefit,” Julia says.

Other programmes have led to financial benefits as well. “In the FirstImpressions training course, you have to come up with an actionable plan to improve an aspect of the business. One lady came up with a suggestion to plug a previously unseen revenue leakage around the way we invoice for agreed carriage charges which led to a £10,000 increase on the bottom line every month,” Julia says. “The training people go through has given them a voice and a sense of people power, that’s a return on investment in itself.” Putting the focus on customer service has paid off in multiple ways. Customer retention now stands at 95% compared to 85% four years ago; the average selling price per test has increased year on year for four consecutive years; employee retention has also increased; while the average employee engagement score has risen from 50% in 2012 to 84% now.

Seismic cultural change

“We’ve had a seismic cultural change,” Mike McCorkell observes. “We have a much improved workplace where people enjoy their jobs and are proud to tell their friends and family what they do at work. It is pleasing that when customers visit or audit they pick up on the vibe and comment on it and can see that we’re doing a good job. I’m proud to say that we love to let customers loose on site!” Julia adds. “We can let them stop and talk to anyone, anywhere. I don’t know how you put a price on that. Around 75% of the company’s 420 staff have now been on at least one Institute training programme and the aim is to get that to 100% in time. We benchmark ourselves with great service leaders in other industries, not specifically the food testing business which perhaps is less mature in developing service leadership,” Mike says. “I think we’ve created something quite unique, we’ve built a strong ethos around being a great place to work dedicated to great service, creating quality opportunities and careers for people.”

Other divisions in ALcontrol are now on the same journey, adopting a similar customer service focused approach and working to the same ‘value cycle’ where engaged staff drive great service helping the business gain a fair price and sustainable profitability. A commitment to customer service is now deeply embedded.

Since 1978, Motability Operations has delivered the Motability Scheme, offering freedom to people with disabilities by enabling to them use their mobility allowance to lease an affordable, worry-free vehicle. Today, Motability provides cars, Wheelchair Accessible Vehicles, scooters and powered wheelchairs to some 640,000 people, and has arguably the highest performing customer service team in the UK. But it was not always this way. Motability’s journey has taken considerable commitment, and a willingness to think beyond convention.

The whole culture needed to shift

As recently as 2003, Motability Operations was, by its own admission, struggling. Its vehicle fleet was static at around 450,000, and poor financial performance threatened the organisation’s very existence. Customer contacts manager Emma Bird explains: “Back then, we were focused more on cars than customers, and our satisfaction levels, renewal rates and overall profitability reflected that.” Recently-appointed CEO Mike Betts saw that things needed to change, and fast. Emma continues: “Mike believed that in order for Motability Operations to be successful, the whole culture of the organisation needed to shift. But twelve years ago, putting the customer first was not commonplace, and such a radical shift needed an equally robust change programme.”

Lovers, not fakers

The crucial first step was to address culture: recruit team members with the right values, and empower them to focus on the customer first. Emma explains: “Current employees assist with recruitment to ensure we employ ‘lovers not fakers’, that is, team members who want to do the right thing, rather than doing it just because they’ve been told to. We set out a plan to recognise and reward people with empathy, who take responsibility during calls,” Emma continues. “We allowed them to make real decisions based on their discussion with the customer, even if it forced up average handling times. Now, calls are focused on where the customer is at emotionally, understanding what the call is really about before going into solutions.”

General Manager David Walsh agrees: “We’re a principle-led, not a process-led organisation. You can’t write processes for every situation, so we instil principles in people and give them a free hand to apply them.”

Bring out your dead

The emphasis on personal responsibility extends to development and performance management, where Motability employs a ‘Trinity Model’, involving the advisor, a coach, and a team manager. Emma explains: “Self-assessment is fundamental; our team managers’ main role is to enable people to become more self-managing, and the quality, attendance and adherence targets follow naturally.” David adds: “Trying to find development needs from six calls is pointless. If the person who takes the calls can be aware of their performance and come to coaching having identified for themselves the things they struggle with, that works much better We have a process called ‘bring out your dead’. If a call’s gone badly, people don’t hide it, they highlight it, and we don’t use it for performance management; it’s used for development.”

Independent and robust

As the unorthodox approach began to take effect, Motability Operations looked for ways to benchmark its progress , and arrived at the Institute of Customer Service, and its ServiceMark accreditation process. David recalls: “By 2010, we wanted to see how our results compared to the industry, so we entered call centre awards and came top in our sector, second overall and best newcomer. That was great, but awards aren’t always transparent about how the scores are achieved, so we looked for an accrediting body with real credibility across a wide range of industry sectors.” It had to survey both customers and employees, and it had to include an audit process that was independent and robust. The Institute of Customer Service stood out.

Doubts just evaporate

Meanwhile, Motability’s ServiceMark performance has helped in negotiations, and lent credibility at a pivotal time. “There’s been a lot of public scrutiny about benefits lately,” says David. “Our strong ServiceMark performance has really helped to protect our brand. Many of the banks that own us are pursuing ServiceMark themselves, so our score gives us a lot of credibility. It’s very widely recognised as a high quality standard, when we put our ServiceMark score on the table, any questions or doubts just evaporate.”

More understanding

Beyond top-level performance figures, the Institute is helping Motability to assess its performance on hard-to-find, operational KPIs. David says: “We’ve been to a lot of the Institute’s workshops and seminars, which are great for networking and sharing information. It can be hard to find out how the industry is performing on very specific, operational-level KPIs. Through the network, we can get more understanding about how our performance compares. It’s a good partnership. The Institute Account Directors are very good at sourcing information for us. Also, we’re now able to access further surveys, which we’re using to drill down and seek further improvements by comparing groups of customers to the population overall.”

From strength to strength

In 2015, Motability Operations underwent the ServiceMark process for a second time , achieving the UK’s highest ever scores for both customer and employee satisfaction, with an exceptionally high Net Promoter score of 94.2. David smiles: “Right now, we’re the highest performing customer service team in the UK; the Net Promoter score was off the scale. We’ve gone from strength to strength.”

“Going from good to excellent is hard, but going from excellent to outstanding is harder,” reflects Emma. One group, however, has benefited more than any other from the changes at Motability Operations: its customers. “We never forget that we’re fortunate to be delivering the product we are,” concludes David. “Some of our customers were previously housebound. So when you go home at the end of the day, you can sometimes say “We changed somebody’s life today” and that’s pretty good.”

Watch Andrew Harris, Customer Contact Centre Manager, at Laithwaite’s Wine discuss how he secured a return on investment from customer service training and skills development.