Case Studies
Almost 15 years ago, De Backman-Hoyle’s introduction to the world of corporate facilitation was to focus on Customer Service. Her first service program was titled ‘Crackpots, Complaints and Customers from Hell’ the emphasis was on dealing with the worst customer experiences likely to occur.
A key theme that emerged from participants from this successful program was the inability to respond to customer complaints due to misinformation and at times no information that guided them towards a successful service recovery.
They were simply helpless to take personal responsibility and some paralysed by ongoing customer abuse and anger.
This gave the impression to new and existing customers of staff members that were not in a position to act responsively to complaints and at times with the attitude of being unwilling to care.
We soon discovered that if people are not empowered to take action to resolve service issues they may as well be given a personal bulletproof vests, as it will be inevitable that more bullets will be fired towards them.
Eventually this learned helplessness becomes habitual and conditioned behaviour becomes the norm translating this into the corporate culture and service experiences eventuating in massive loss of client loyalty with dramatic impact to the business bottom line.
De Backman-Hoyle leads a team of talented, dynamic consultants specialising in designing and developing customised service solutions resulting in sensational service experiences.
Her team’s unique ability is to work with the decision makers of events and organisations. Inspired Workforce Performers™ analyse in detail the potential service pain points and create counter strategies to minimise these.
Examples:
AIM & CPM: Pushing the boundaries for maximum gain
As the second year of a new AIM postgraduate training initiative at CPM Asia Pacific is poised to begin, Group Insights Director, Graham Brown, is keen to talk about the benefits of the training program…… more
The Australian Open
The Australian Open is the premium sporting event on the Australian sporting calendar and now attracts more than half a million visitors to the event.
Many visitors leave the Australian Open with great service experience stories and plenty of great memories of the Australian Open.
The management team of the Australian Open places a great emphasis on an event culture that focuses on successful service experiences. This team knows managing expectations of consistent service experience is essential for major stakeholder groups that rely on the Australian Open staff.
The Inspired Workforce Performers® team know that they are instrumental in this outcome, as they have worked closely with the management team of the Australian Open for the last six years. The invitation to return annually is a testimony of the success Inspired Workforce Performers™ has with the staff.
The main role is to create Service Ambassadors for the Australian Open training many frontline heroes in the art of being sensational mood managers.
The Inspired Workforce Performers® program for the Australian Open is called:
“How Well Do You Serve?”
Broken into three distinct phases called:
Game – Pre work and preparation
Set – The training experience
Match – Learning in action; coaching provided in real time throughout the Open
Samples of some groups attending the program include:
- Media room staff
- Information room staff
- Roaming information staff
- Will call and accreditation staff
- Corporate service attendants
- Drivers
Colonial First State Investments
Service Strategies that work!
Inspired Workforce Performers® consultants worked with a group of senior Investor and Advisor Services representatives to further develop their service responses and service strategies.
The banking and finance industry cannot afford to be perceived to have ad hoc responses to common service complaints and issues because consistency, certainty and fairness are paramount in the banking customers mind.
Often service within the banking and investment sector has the defined principles in place and in some cases strong foundation with supporting service policies and procedures.
The magic that needs to occur to hold this together is consistent people management in being able to manage and measure service consistency and directly link this back to people’s role and responsibilities within the overall corporate service vision.
This service experience needs to be role modelled by managers who set the standards for their teams.
Colonial First State Investment believed in their people and invested in their managers by allowing them to create great strategies together.
Our consultant worked with the managers to co design a program to best suit their needs.
This was not a walk in the park program and quite a few participants described being stretched.
The reaction from the Training and Development Manager working on this program was:
“We had another facilitator/ consultant working with us but De it’s like coming out of an old Holden and into a Porsche!”
Large Melbourne Private Hospital
‘Draw an animal that best describes the service culture of your hospital’
“Patients are patients they are NOT customers of the hospital, they are here because they have to be not because they want to be! Don’t insult us by calling them customers and needing service they are JUST patients that need treatment.”
This response was from a very successful Doctor to the Director of Nursing in response to her insistence that he attend a ‘patient’s as the customer’ focus workshop.
The year was 1999 and a very innovative and progressive Director of Nursing had a vision to make her staff responsible to patients as consumers of health services therefore customers of the hospital.
A communication went out to all staff 500+ that it was mandatory that they attend a three-hour session and they would be attending in a multi-discipline group approach to the training, meaning patient assistants might be in sessions with senior doctors etc. Mixing hospital groups to this degree was another brave and innovative idea.
How do you make a session meaningful – match the experience to the impact these people can have on their patient’s lives.
Often as providers and designers of programs we are confronted with training prisoners, resentful that they are made to turn up to a session without their approval and resentful that the topic might in some way suggest that they needed to become more service oriented.
What was our response? – We knew we had a majority of well intentioned people who’s hearts were very much in the right place we also knew there was an existing culture of blame and shame of it’s there fault not ours!
Through a series of actual incident reports, we constructed a story about a person that comes down from the bush for an operation, of course everything that could go wrong does.
This approach utilised a value chain and moments of truth approach to the session. Most disregarded the incidents as fraudulent and inconceivable, when it was exposed that all actually took place there was immediate attention.
The next step was to use excerpts from the famous William Hurt movie ‘The Doctor’ where the Doctor becomes the patient and is exposed to all the types of experiences and behaviours that many patients experience.
- Long delays
- Misinformation
- Unfriendly medical speak vs. Lay person’s language
- Being treated as meat on a slab
- Spoken over as not even visible
- Lack of basic respect and privacy
- Being treated as stupid
- Treating family members as additional burden and not as extended patient support
Using creativity
We also choose a creative group activity that mixed groups together and asked the following questions:
- Draw an animal that best depicts this hospital to it’s patients
- Draw an animal that best describes the staff of this hospital
- Draw an animal that describes the way other hospitals might perceive this hospital.
The results were amazing, the diversity of opinions, perceptions and feedback from the debrief enabled the hospital to piggyback the service program with a successful change management program. Rumour has it that the CEO still has a couple of drawings hidden behind the door of his office.
