Interview with the 2023 Customer Service Manager of the Year

CSIA recently interviewed Matt Anderson from Hollard who won the 2023 Australian Service Excellence Award for Customer Service Manager of the Year

Congratulations on winning the 2023 Customer Service Manager of the Year Award! How does it feel to be recognised for your efforts?

Thank you, it is quite humbling. Winning is still quite surreal and has not yet fully sunk in. The primary feelings are of pride, appreciation and motivation.

How long have you been involved in customer service, and what motivates you to pursue excellence in this field?

I have been in customer facing/service roles for over 20 years. My specific field is General Insurance and the majority of my career has been in property claims. Customers generally only engage with my team and I when they have suffered a loss and rely on us to support – often following large natural disasters. The want to help people and get their home/possessions/family life back to normal as soon as possible is one of the key motivations. The other aspect that motivates me is to exceed customer expectations. That could be by way of finalising their claim more quickly than they expected, repair their home ahead of schedule or make the experience far easier and less stressful than they expected. I enjoy the challenge that exceeding expectations brings and find doing so really rewarding.

Can you share the specific reasons or initiatives that you believe contribute to your success in customer service?

I think one of the key things that I try to do is make sure that in any decision I make within my business, there is always customer lens that is considered as a part of the decision making process. My team and I could be working through a risk item, supply chain decision, resourcing change or a process change –regardless of the background to the initiative we always consider the overarching customer impact. This becomes habitual and that type of behaviour becomes cultural.

What challenges have you encountered in delivering excellent customer service, and how did you overcome them?

Scalability during times of significant volume is one of the biggest challenges. One of the ways we overcome these challenges is by learning, taking a critical view of how we performed and use those learnings to help shape our plan for next time. It is important we understand where our opportunities are, where our customers are telling us we need to improve but equally important is that we understand what we have done well and ensure that helps shape the plan and the response next time.

If you could give one piece of advice to customer service professionals, what would it be?

Keep challenging yourself to improve and try things. Even if something does not work as planned, you have learnt something and that gives you a data point that you can use to help on your way to optimising customer experience.

The 2024 Australian Service Excellence Awards are open for nominations until 31 May 2024.