Case Study
Where There’s A Will, There’s A Way: New South Wales Trustee and Guardian Connects Customer Service Principles to Employee Behaviors Through Communications
Situation
New South Wales Trustee and Guardian is an Australian state government agency that provides will-making and deceased estate administration services. In 2018, slumping customer satisfaction metrics highlighted a need for employees to reposition the organization as customer-centered. The Communications & Engagement team developed and implemented a communication strategy that included an interactive experience to support the launch of the company’s new principles and bring them to life. The results of the program demonstrate how experiential learning through team activities is a key contributor to changing staff behavior and improving customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction indices (CS) across key service streams were either low or declining, complaints were rising and staff morale was declining, following an organizational restructuring in 2016. The Communications & Engagement team worked to develop Customer Excellence Principles as a tool to turn these trends around and embed a culture of customer service excellence. They identified six principles—reflecting the key attributes of service their customers wanted.
Campaign
To bring the principles to life in a way that would impact customer experience, the team focused on translating principles into behaviors. The Communications & Engagement team members also segmented internal audiences into three primary, and one secondary target– creating learning and development solutions for each. Team leaders comprised the first target audience. While employees viewed team leaders as their most trusted source of information, team meetings were irregular and there was an opportunity to strengthen this powerful communications channel. Feedback indicated team leaders didn’t always know how to talk to staff about poor or inconsistent customer service. Further, there was a strong belief by team leaders and supervisors that their roles did not include leading training.
The second target, frontline staff in branches, had daily face-to-face interactions with will-making customers. This gave those workers a high awareness of each customer’s personal situation and experience. However, qualitative customer satisfaction research indicated that service did not always reflect the Customer Excellence Principles. Comments shared included, “Left to wait over one hour with no explanation” and “No need for legal jargon.”
Specialist teams, the third primary audience, included professionals from Legal, Finance, Tax and Audit functions. Feedback indicated that specialist teams had the perception that they did not have “customers” because they didn’t interact with people outside of their functions. Consequently, they valued their technical skills and felt they were of greater importance than those of customer service employees.
A secondary audience of senior management and executive leadership was targeted as a strategy to endorse the business need to improve awareness and understanding of the principles. These audiences had a high level of engagement with communication channels including the intranet, management forums and email.
The team’s goal was to achieve a significant improvement in customer service outcomes by changing behavior and creating a shared language and framework for customer service within the company. Its measurable objectives included achieving a 40% increase in awareness of the principles, measured by pre- and post-campaign surveys; a 40% increase in understanding of the principles, measured by pre- and post-campaign surveys; a 5% increase in customer service survey scores for all customer streams over 12 months; and a benchmark of 80% of teams complete all five team activities the team created, tracked through completion rates.
The communication team designed a series of five team activities that used an experiential learning approach. Each activity focused on a principle, including the following:
Activity 1: Personalized -External and internal customer personas were created to build awareness that all teams had customers with different needs.
Activity 2: Empathy-A video of company senior leaders describing the organization in three words was used as a basis for group discussion about empathy.
Activity 3: Insightful-A company service was documented to test if it was being delivered consistently.
Activity 4: Convenient and Timely-A service was tested to see if it could be delivered in a more convenient and timely way.
Activity 5: Value-Working together, teams created their own customer value statement.
Results
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