Improving the conversation

words: Michael Fern

Golden Charter’s contact centre has been through a year of change. The people on the front lines tell SAIFInsight how focusing on quality conversations is giving families what they want.

There is no one route towards taking out a funeral plan – it is an intensely personal decision for anyone to make, and people take that step for lots of different reasons.

Meeting that need is why the Golden Charter contact centre team exists: people who choose to speak to a plan provider directly expect the same standard of care and attention they would get from an independent funeral director. Contact centre advisors dealing with funeral plans must be trained to deal with a very specific and personal type of conversation. But there is no single conversation that ticks those boxes: those who decide to go directly through a provider are no less diverse than any other group who choose to take out a plan.

In May last year, Golden Charter enlisted the help of business change experts to look at how it deals with families’ enquiries. A big goal of the project was to improve Golden Charter’s systems, but ultimately over the year that followed it did something more fundamental: changed a rigidly scripted enquiry process into a conversation centred on families’ needs.

“The whole process started literally days after we moved into our new consumer channel model,” said Stewart Bodys, Contact Centre Manager. “When we started doing more through phone calls as opposed to field staff speaking to people face to face, we knew we had to look at how we could be more effective in meeting people’s needs.

“Once we completed the ‘discovery’ exercise and identified what changes should be made, we commenced the activity on 30 May last year with three two-day manager workshops for the contact centre leadership team. We followed that up with six half-day workshops for the advisors on the phones and the manager population, so in total we invested in excess of 950 hours in offsite training for the people who work with families on the phones.

“At this point we weren’t looking at the ultimate conversation they would have with customers; it was more about the mindset they viewed every situation through, and how that had an impact on whether customers came away with a positive view. They learned about positive and negative language, avoiding vague ‘weasel words’, and generally all about focusing not just on what you say to someone, but how you are saying it.”

Collaboration

Working under Stewart are two Team Managers, Martin McGhee and Amanda Coleman. Between them, they manage 18 telesales advisors. And that whole population was able to have an input into the training they were receiving.

“The advisors have been involved in the whole process from start to finish, and it has felt different from any other type of training that I have been on before,” Amanda explained.

“It might have been just the managers who would go on a course, and that course would be a one-off without a follow-up to see if things are being put into practice. When the advisors can’t learn the reasons for changes directly, that makes putting those changes into practice harder. But with this project, everyone has been involved from the start.”

Martin believes that level of involvement from everyone in the contact centre is having its own benefits.

He said: “We’re looking now at creating what is potentially a fantastic talent pool, so that we can actually start to recruit from within far more, whereas before we probably would have had to go elsewhere for a lot of things.

“It is helping the whole company. We have a much more established relationship with our Marketing colleagues, our Compliance colleagues, and there is good morale across those relationships. We are putting talented people to work in a more effective way, and customer feedback is showing us how well we are doing.”

Flipping the script

Those 950 hours of training took until July to complete, but that was only the beginning. In August and September, the call structure itself was changed.

Stewart Bodys said: “We imparted more information to people, and at the same time we were able to receive more information from them, letting us identify how our funeral plan product range best met the customer’s needs. Then it was about presenting that back to each customer in a way that allowed them the opportunity to question, reflect, ponder and hopefully decide to go ahead with a funeral plan.”

Once again, this was a collaborative effort, as Amanda explained.

“The change to the scripts has been massive,” she said. “I started here nearly seven years ago, and the difference between then and now is like night and day. Before, we would provide a completed script for them to start using, but now the advisors have been involved throughout, talking about what they think will work and what shouldn’t be included.”

No pressure

The results of that next phase were almost instant.

Stewart explained: “We started to fully embed that activity from October last year, and saw some immediate benefits in terms of sales – we finished the third quarter at 126% of our original budget number. But beyond numbers, we really started to see the tone of our work change fundamentally in the first three months of 2018.

“Interestingly, because we were able to more fully inform customers, they felt more comfortable to go ahead with their decision earlier in the process. Families were going ahead earlier in their own time with a clearer understanding because of the conversations they were having.”

The mix of plans purchased also reflected that improvement – a larger proportion of families chose the comprehensive Select and Premier plan types, while more payments were taken by single payments, and tellingly the number of cancellations dropped. The right kinds of plans were being sold in the right way.

“There was a sense of calm across the contact centre between January and March. We did more sales than previously, but did it in a manner that never felt panicked or chaotic for us or families. We didn’t expect it to be such a major consequence, but it shows that by having better conversations, we can work sustainably while making customers comfortable to go through the process on their own terms.”

Families also directly let the contact centre know the process was working. Martin McGhee had several examples to hand.

“Feedback just this week said ‘I just want to pass my thanks on to your colleagues, they were really friendly, helpful and informative, and took time to answer all my questions and explain everything. It’s nice to speak to someone who treats you as a person and not just as a potential customer’.

“We are getting more and more of this type of feedback on a daily basis. That’s in direct correlation with all the hard work that’s going on in the contact centre.”

Golden Charter also surveys thousands of plan holders every year, and satisfaction with customer service staff shot up in October 2017 when the new conversations began. Staff were rated more helpful, speedy and knowledgeable – more than four-fifths of customers gave these three measures a rating of 8/10 or higher, levels not seen in the two preceding years.

That work has been maintained, as more people have rated the contact centre 10/10 across these measures in 2018 than ever.

Funeral director Helen Wathall, of G Wathall & Sons, visited Golden Charter Head Office and through sitting near to Martin and Amanda’s teams, she learned about the customer focus first-hand. She said: “In all the departments I visited there was a real buzz, and the new layouts and grouping of teams made perfect sense to me. I spent quite a bit of time working downstairs amid the Marketing, Funeral Director Support and Consumer teams, and it was heartening to hear the conversations with consumers, showing real empathy and interest in families’ needs.”

Helen had asked Martin about the writing on the team’s ‘buzz board’.

“I explained that our advisors use it to quantify their work for the day,” he said, “and how the guys have to go through a series of points before they would mark one up – did you get the emotional need, the mechanical need, ascertain affordability. As she was leaving she said she was really intrigued and fascinated by what we were doing and the level of conversation we were having with people.”

Vulnerable customers

Working to have a real conversation with customers has another important knock-on effect: it makes it clearer when a potentially vulnerable person may be speaking to staff.

When external auditors looked at the contact centre, Stewart said, they found that a more structured, customer-focused conversation “better equipped advisors to identify capacity or vulnerability issues”.

“Simply by adopting different questioning techniques and rephrasing certain key points, we were able to be more aware of when there may be vulnerability, and able to act accordingly.”

Amanda and Martin agreed.

“The improvement workshops have been all about communication and how you interact with the customer and build a rapport. I think the guys are good at identifying it because they can notice it straight away,” Amanda said.

“Every single week the advisors get call feedback,” said Martin. “We listen into calls, so we can coach and educate the guys further in spotting what is deemed a vulnerable customer, that’s just part of this rigorous way of doing things.”

All systems go

Work is still being done to refine the conversations families have when pre-planning. The last strand of the project involves the technology used by the contact centre.

Martin described the ultimate goal as ‘single screen functionality ’. “Advisors still have to do multiple duplications of work every day across three, four or five systems to capture information from the conversations they have. Bringing that all onto one screen, so they only have to input that information once, seems to be the final piece of the puzzle.”

That work is already beginning, and once again the advisors have been involved from the start, mapping out the current system with all of its duplication, and putting down in black and white what one single system would look like.

The contact centre team sees it as the last big step towards an improved experience for families, said Amanda. “For me the exciting point is, look how far we have come just through training people – how much further can we go once we have the right systems in place?”

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