Over the past three years, BT has been working hard to transform the customer experience but to truly improve its systems and change perceptions, it needed to bring the 10,000 people working across 29 contact centres on side.
The ‘Going for Gold’ campaign was created by the telecoms group’s in-house consumer internal communications team to put customer experience at the heart of daily life for its people. The vision was to have one consistent ‘Gold’ standard of service across all its call centres with exceptional staff creating brilliant customer experiences. It was designed to capture the imagination of the 10,000 call centre employees and create a healthy competition among them.
The ‘Gold Standard’, to which all contact centres aspired, rested on six pillars, that ranged from ‘value our customer’s time’ to ‘hire, engage and develop great people’ and ‘successful sites in the right location’. The campaign wanted employees to ‘bring themselves to work’ and to create a vibrant working environment of which they can be proud, deliver outstanding customer experiences and to maintain this Gold Standard for 365 days a year.
Each site was also given the opportunity to create a unique identity for the centre. Initiatives ranged from sprucing up the front gardens areas to painting radiators gold. To ensure they’re striving towards Gold, every six months – starting in September 2016 – each contact centre is assessed by internal assessors, comprising trained BT consumer employees, over two days.
The results are benchmarked by external auditors. In the run up to the first assessment, BT’s ‘Going for Gold’ Intranet page received 20,000 hits, while #goingforgold trended for weeks on its social network. Thousands tuned into a live broadcast of the results, which also streamed visits by directors to silver sites, bringing with them certificates for team members. Recognition events were also held.
The first assessment ranked 22 contact centres as bronze and seven as silver. The campaign’s second phase then concentrated on ‘Celebrate, Reflect, Focus’, allowing teams to celebrate their successes, reflect on the findings and then focus on the pillars with room for improvement. The second assessments in May 2017 saw more contact centres ranked as silver, indicating there is less variance in customer experience across the nation.
Since the launch of ‘Going for Gold’, BT’s Net Promoter Score has increased by 12 points while it has also enjoyed two point increase in its engagement survey score of ‘enabling customer experience’. In a strong field, this was the judges’ unanimous winner.
