Award winning Customer Service Centre

Guinness Northern Counties overcame commercial organisations to win the Best Small Call Centre in Europe 2007 award. The range of services provided in the Centre includes enquiries about availability of homes, rent queries, payments, arranging repairs, aids and adaptations to homes and managing anti-social behaviour.

Guinness Northern Counties became the first housing association in the country to be named an Investors in People Champion in November 2007. Being a Champion means that Guinness Northern Counties works with Investors in People (IIP) to share its expertise and best practice with other employers. This includes mentoring and site visits.

Together with competitive salaries and a range of benefits, Guinness Northern Counties works hard to be an employer of choice, enabling employees to make the very best use of their talents. Its efforts were recognised through the award of Employer of Choice 2006 by the National Housing Federation.

The Customer Service Centre

In 2004 Guinness Northern Counties took a long hard look at itself through its customers' eyes. The reality of statistics showing inconsistent and poor telephone service delivery (an average of only 62% of calls answered against offered as at December 2005), and disappointing customer and employees' feedback confirmed action needed to be taken.

Following consultation with customers and employees, extensive research and the development of a clear blueprint for the future way the organisation would work, a Customer Service Centre was created in March 2006. This new part of the business brought huge benefits but also challenged the way in which Guinness Northern Counties had previously conducted its business. The organisation asked itself the following questions:

• How do we manage flexible working hours within a contact centre environment?

• How can we operate an extended service over the Christmas period without making employees in the Centre feel hard done by?

• How do we educate customers and employees away from the negativities of the perception of contact centres having chicken factory mentalities?

• How do we manage employee morale and prove our commitment to their wellbeing, within a disciplined environment?

These were just some of the challenges facing the organisation as the impact of having a Service Centre began to show.

The answers for Guinness Northern Counties lay in the deliberate culture already created across the organisation of ‘honesty, respect for the individual and recognition of achievements’.

From the outset, employees and customers were consulted about the concept of the Centre and its development. Ideas from the consultation influenced the way procedures were developed.

The Centre’s structure was created to support Guinness Northern Counties' people-centric strategy and ensures there is real clarity of roles, expectations and accountabilities:

• Teams have no more than 10-12 Advisors

• Every team has a Team Coach providing first line support on systems, processes and performance

• Teams are headed up by a Team Leader who is responsible for getting the best out of every individual through effective performance management and people development

• Performance feedback is given through regular one-to-one meetings

• Quality monitoring is conducted against agreed criteria

• Regular team meetings and briefs take place

• Team Leaders carry out 360 degree feedback exercises amongst their teams

Workplace facilities

Guinness Northern Counties has created a working environment that supports its values and meets the needs of its people. Facilities include:

• an on-site, subsidised catering facility

• break out areas with plasma TVs, quiet zones and focus rooms

• a large kitchen on each floor of the building with free drinks, fridges and microwaves to allow employees to prepare their own meals

• an open-plan, flexible office design to encourage communication and where offices are necessary, glass walls provide some privacy whilst still giving an open feel

• Herman Miller desks and ergonomic chairs

• a white noise solution for added comfort (by blocking out distracting noises)

The design of open plan areas focused on achieving the best levels of occupancy whilst still creating an overall feeling of space. Decor and storage solutions were selected with this in mind. Branding was critical, as it was important to reflect the Vision throughout the building, and Vision statements are etched into the glass walls to the offices and meeting rooms.

Recruitment

The recruitment strategy is simple - to recruit people who are fully committed to the Guinness Northern Counties' vision and values. This approach ensures that the organisation gets the best from everyone who works there. The organisation has built strong links with the community through programmes such as Upturn and worked closely with Oldham College to create a pre-recruitment training package.

The recruitment process deliberately manages candidates' expectations from the start and includes a full assessment centre, comprising of:

• competency based interviews
• talk / type assessment
• time spent with an advisor working in the Centre.

Employee benefits

All Guinness Northern Counties employees have the opportunity to shape and decide upon a range of employment benefits. The organisation has an active Staff Council who represents employees’ interests and, through this, schemes such as support for employees who want to stop smoking and free counselling services have been introduced. Other benefits in the pipeline include breast screening and the provision of computers for employees to buy through a financially beneficial scheme.

Guinness Northern Counties' culture is driven by a commitment to supporting work life balance and, despite the confines of contact centre disciplines, employees worked closely with the management team to resolve these challenges. As a result, a range of flexible working options is offered, such as:

• static shifts
• shift swaps
• banked hours
• split shifts
• over and under-time, matching personal preferences wherever possible
• term time working
• zero hours contracts to tap into the student market
• enhanced maternity and paternity provision
• parental and carers leave
• career breaks
• childcare vouchers

Training and personal development

Ongoing development is an integral part of the Centre’s culture and, despite its small size, resource planning includes a high commitment to training and coaching on a daily basis. This includes:

• Central Induction Programme – over 90% of new Guinness Northern Counties' employees rate the programme as useful.

• Customer Service Centre Induction – carried out over two weeks, interspersed with buddy time in the Centre.

• Academy Groups - when formally trained, employees are provided with additional close support via Guinness Northern Counties' academy groups, managed by the team coaches.

• Voyage of Discovery Course - a creative and innovative twelve month programme completed by all employees', focussing on soft skills and processing knowledge.

• Monthly Training Hour - to cover any procedural refresher or upgrade training.

• Mary Gober - The Gober Method^TM puts excellence in customer service as a priority, and it underpins and provides the framework for the organisation’s culture programme. Everybody in the organisation is trained, including the Chief Executive.

• Equality and Diversity – Guinness Northern Counties' theatre-based training receives excellent feedback from participants: the use of actors allows them to relate more easily to issues experienced in the workplace.

• Aspire Programme - employees can undertake further study, such as NVQs, professional diplomas, MBAs, driving lessons and even belly dancing funded by the organisation. In 2006/07 the organisation supported 20 employees and spent £26,687 on this programme.

• Buddy Visits - Centre and local office employees undergo ‘a day in the life of’ in each other’s areas of the business to increase understanding of the challenges of different roles.

In addition to the traditional contact centre development tools such as quality monitoring, 121’s and annual appraisals, the organisation have introduced innovative methods of self assessment such as “The Two Week Challenge”, “Self Scoring Call Listening” and a “Library of Service Excellence”.

Opportunities are also available for employees to progress outside of their current role through:

• mentoring
• funding and study time for qualifications
• work shadowing
• mock interviews by Guinness Northern Counties' Organisational Development department.

In 2007, from a Centre workforce of less than 30 Customer Service Advisors, there were two internal promotions and four employees progressed to other areas of the business.

Reward and recognition

The Customer Service Centre has its own “wall of fame” which is used to publicise the Centre’s achievements and recognise individuals for their outstanding contributions. Guinness Northern Counties' awards include:

• GEM awards - peer-to-peer nominations for employees who have ‘Gone the Extra Mile’. This award came from a suggestion made in the Centre’s Staff Focus Group, who wanted to recognise individuals across the Centre who had offered excellence in service standards.

• Team of the month - awarded for highest team performance in productivity statistics, quality of service, attendance and tidy work area.

• Employee thank you - an organisation-wide cash award for employees who have worked ‘above and beyond requirements’, or consistently ‘gone the extra mile’. Guinness Northern Counties awarded over £69,000 in 2005/06.

• Prize cupboard - token gifts, to reward excellence on the spot.

• Blank cheque book - an hours holiday is given out for additional work / customer compliment.

Communication with employees

Guinness Northern Counties engage and communicate effectively with its employees in many different ways:

• an intranet site called “GNCNet” where relevant information can be found
• a weekly lunch-time round up is produced summarising the key highlights of the week
• a monthly “Business Brief” to ensure that consistent information is shared
• a monthly newsletter “Have you Heard” for those without computer
• a employee suggestion scheme.

A recent independent employee survey conducted by KWest demonstrated top quartile scores in relation to employee morale with job satisfaction in the Customer Service Centre at 73%.

Working with other areas of Guinness Northern Counties

Team work between employees in the Centre and local offices is critical for the delivery of end-to-end effective and consistent customer service. Joint Team Leader forums have been established by the Team Leaders from both areas of the business.

Local office employees visit the Centre, and staff from the Centre ‘buddy-up’ with colleagues from the Centre via job shadowing to help progress understanding and joint working across the organisation. Alison Dethick, Housing Officer, East Midlands Office said, “I really enjoyed my visit to the Centre, we all found the experience a very valuable one, it has opened our eyes and makes us appreciate you even more”.

Boosting performance

Guinness Northern Counties work hard to create a climate where people are passionate about the work they do and ensure that everyone receives effective coaching and feedback to enable them to continuously improve.

As a direct result, the percentage of calls answered increased over 2007/07 from 86.7% to 90.3%. Over the same period the average call handling time fell from 5:06 minutes to 3:40 minutes, while the number of calls each month built up from less than 6,000 to over 30,000, with a peak of 56,000 in January.

Whilst the Centre’s targets reflect the need to answer as many calls as quickly as possible, great emphasis is placed on the quality of those calls. Guinness Northern Counties say customer experience ‘happens’ in the Contact Centre. It conducts customer satisfaction surveys on a daily basis and uses this feedback to further improve its understanding of customers’ needs about its service. Customer satisfaction levels increased from 82% in August 2006 to 94% by April 2007.

Customer Service Advisor Neil Birch said “In my previous experience of this environment, there has never been such a focus on customer service. The help and guidance I receive is second to none and the flexibility in terms of accommodating me in shift swaps and other holidays is great. It is hard work, being an up and coming service centre, but the investment in training goes a long way and reflects in positive ways in the feedback we receive from customers. Working in the friendly environment makes it easy to work here and communication between teams and senior management is very good.”