CMA has been working closely with a major telecommunications provider to improve its customer service and increase its brand loyalty and customer advocacy in Australia
Difficult Conversations Case Study
Managing difficult conversations for a major telco provider
The challenge
As media reports have highlighted, the telecommunications industry is under pressure to improve its customer service. Customer service is widely assessed using a ‘Net Promoter Score’ (NPS), which measures the extent to which a customer will speak positively or negatively about a particular provider. CMA was engaged to work with the General Billings and Enquiries Division of a major telecommunications provider to increase its NPS and build its capability to deal with challenging customer conversations, with a particular focus on customer enquiries that had been escalated through the calls handling system.
CMA’s Solution
We consulted with our client to design and deliver a highly tailored conflict resolution program designed around the specific challenges and outcomes that the client wanted to achieve. We ran a series of one-day workshops in Adelaide and Melbourne in which we focused on equipping the teams with the mindset and skills to effectively navigate their ‘difficult conversations’ with customers in a timely and skillful way.
The program was able to quantify and build on existing skills and experience. The program was well structured and tailored to meet the specific needs of our audience. The content was mature in its approach as was delivered in a manner which ensured it delivered value.
It was very valuable and I learnt a lot. The training didn’t feel ‘run of the mill’ because the facilitator linked it to our competency behaviours and NPS and made it relevant to our business. It’s as if the facilitator had strong knowledge of our organisation already.
[The program] was very good. It was very insightful, it broke down the foundations of our calls and taught me to breakdown a difficult conversation and then restructure it to receive a different outcome.
The insights into what drives the customer, how to obtain that information and using that to come up with an agreed solution was very valuable to me.
The most valuable parts for me were working out a solution and taking into consideration what the customer wants versus what the organisation wants. This will help me get to a quicker resolution for the customer.
It showed me how to look at things from the customer’s perspective. I gained useful tools and help me better understand the interests of the customer.
