July 2020 CSIA Quarterly
Navigating the New Normal CSIA members share how they’ve navigated the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.
Creating Thriving Contact Centres
2020 ASEAs Finalists
Danielle Clark from SuperFriend explains the impact a new program is having in supporting wellbeing in contact centres.
We announce the finalists for this year's Australian Service Excellence Awards.
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CSIA FOCUS
“Congratulations to our 2020 ASEAs finalists”
Welcome to the winter edition of Focus magazine. The world is certainly a very different place since our last publication. In this issue we hear from some of CSIA’s members who share how they have navigated the challenges of COVID-19 and how they have maintained customer focus amid the pandemic We spoke to CSIA Certified Practitioner Todd Gorsuch who shares his insights into the future of digital transformation projects over the next twelve months. Sam Blaxland gives us the inside story behind the development of the new version of the International Customer Service Standard. Congratulations to our 2020 ASEAs finalists. We share the full list in this issue. This month marks my one-year anniversary leading CSIA. I’ve very much enjoyed the challenge of working with our members and clients to support your work for your customers
In the past year, the CSIA team has done an amazing job delivering three key projects: the collaboration and launch of the new version of the International Customer Service Standard; the development and launch of our updated website; and the creation and launch of our online training platform. This coming year CSIA will be releasing a new members portal and undertaking our new industry insights survey, the Voice of CX … so please ”watch this space”. Thank you for the many messages of support I’ve received from our community this past year, I trust you will enjoy this issue of Focus and do please be safe.
Jeremy Larkins Executive Director
JULY 2020
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Contents
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News in Brief
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No small feat Sam Blaxland reveals the challenges behind the revision to the International Customer Service Standard.
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2020 Australian Service Excellence Awards Finalists
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Navigating the New Normal CSIA members share their journeys through the challenges of the COVID19 pandemic.
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Rebounding with the post pandemic workforce Paul Smith discusses how temporary workers will be the key to growth as the economy recovers.
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Emotion Based Design Bruce McGregor outlines the principles to incorporate customer emotion into customer design thinking.
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Creating thriving contact centres Danielle Clark introduces Wellbeing on Call – and explains the positive impact from this recent pilot program.
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Is SMALL the new beautiful for digital transformation Todd Gorsuch provides his insights into the trends that will drive digital transformation projects over the next year.
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News in Brief We’re taking the ASEAs ONLINE!
This year, with the challenges of COVID-19, CSIA has decided to take the annual ASEAs gala celebration and presentation online. We’re currently in planning for a live studio broadcast of the awards on October 22nd. And we’re welcoming back Michael Pope to host the event, and he will be joined in the studio by selected (and social distanced) VIPs and special guests.
When: October 22, 2020 from 6pm - registration details coming soon Book now
JULY 2020
Join us for a public training program this August CCHE Public Training Program Online via Zoom Join us for our Certified Complaints Handling Excellence (CCHE) program online on Thursday, 13 August. The CCHE program focuses on understanding why complaints are so valuable, how they should be handled, and what skills are needed to turn angry customers into happy customers.
Find out more
CCSL Public Training Program Online via Zoom Join us for our Certified Customer Service Leader (CCSL) program online on Thursday, 20 August. The program is all about equipping customer service leaders with practical tools and techniques to motivate their teams to deliver great customer experiences. This is great opportunity to become a certified customer service leader so secure your place now. Find out more
2020 ASEAs finalist judging begins
Thank You to our 2020 Guest Judges
This month, our 2020 Australian Service Excellence Awards panel commenced the judging process for over sixty finalists. And this year, for the first time, all presentations and interviews will be conducted online, and each category will have a dedicated team of assigned judges.
The ASEAs rely on the CSIA community supporting the finalist judging program. This year we have a record 40 people participating as guest judges selected from many applications.
Lead Judge, Danielle Larkins will again oversee the finalist judging program which will conclude in September.
CSIA is very grateful to our members who come forward committing time and expertise to the judging process.
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No Small Feat
Sam Blaxland , CSIA Certified Practitioner, shares his experiences as one of the leaders of the 2019 review of the International Customer Service Standard Working on the revision of the International Customer Service Standard (ICSS) has been a daunting task. Designed more than 20 years ago, the Standard has been the premier and internationally recognised scorecard for evaluating customer service delivery and has been used by organisations around the world across a diverse set of industries since its inception. Making changes to a standard that is so heavily embedded into organisations globally has been a delicate and oftentimes humbling exercise. The review committee took a multi-stage approach to this redesign – a review of the current academic literature in customer
excellence theory and practice, a client audit of both new and established users across a range of public and private sector industries in both Australia and the US, and extensive consultation with other organisations within the International Council of Customer Service Organisations (ICCSO). End to end, this process has taken a total of six months of review and revision to arrive at the new standard. Specific thank needs to be given to Jeremy Larkins, Executive Director of the Customer Service Institute of Australia and Christine Churchill, CEO of the Customer Service Institute of America for their unwavering support, encouragement and tenacity in driving the redesign of the Standard.
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”the end result is a standard that is a far more userfriendly design in its language and its structure”
One of the major challenges in this revision has been in finding the right balance between the amount of content it covers and the push for a more pragmatic design. Many of the clients and users interviewed talked of the complexity of language and ideas in elements of the Standard and the challenges that they face in understanding and demonstrating their performance on these. Throughout the process of evaluating each element of the standard, we worked to a constant mantra – can this standard and its
elements be as easily understood and applied to a local butcher’s shop as it can to a multinational company. And while our aim in the redesign was to maintain continuity with previous iterations – an emphasis on evolution, not revolution - our focus first and foremost needed to be in ensuring a relevancy and ease of use in the finished version. Several of the elements were removed, recognising the overlap with other elements. Some were split, while others were stripped down. Similarly, there’s been a restructuring of the content into a
more logical and consistent pattern. In the previous version, elements that spoke to customer insights and satisfaction measurement were dotted throughout the Standard. Elements related to HR were in several places. This revision has emphasised a topic grouping to ensure that when preparing for a certification or a healthcheck, a client can supply evidence that fits consistently and logically to each element. Another common criticism of the previous Standard was the need for a structure that can be applied to all organisations. One of the common challenges that we head in our interviews with users were issues around the Finance and Governance Perspective, and specifically, with 4.1 (The
organisation measures how customer experience creates growth, revenue and profitability)
We were conscious that much of the value and power of the ICSS is in the idea that it can be applied to any organisation no matter what size and structure it has, and so several elements have been revised (like 4.1) to ensure that the Standard is relevant and applicable. As a working group, we’re exceptionally pleased about where we got to with this revision - the end result is a Standard that is a far more user-friendly design in its language and its structure and more actionable, while still remaining true to its origins as a four-pillar balanced scorecard design and with a clear continuity with the previous version. And we’re excited about its roll-out in 2020, as it continues to represent the gold standard in what excellent customer service should look like in Australia, and globally.
and the challenges that NGOs and government agencies experience in applying evidence to this – they operate with a fixed mandate, and generally, considerations like profitability and market share are not applicable to them.
Sam Blaxland Managing Director Antenna
ICSS: 2020-2025 Webinar Steven Brett Facilitator
Steven Brett is CSIA’s lead ICSS assessor, a Customer Experience Executive, Business Management Consultant and Entrepreneur, founder of Manage Smart, and blogger on leadership and productivity
The International Customer Service Standard is a practical framework that helps organisation understand whether they are keeping internal and external customers at the heart of all they do. This webinar is designed to introduce you to ICSS: 2020-2025 and walk you through the key changes with this iteration of the Standard and the steps to undertake certification to this new version. • • • • •
When: Wednesday September 9 Where: Online Time: 9am Duration: 60 Minutes Registration: Free
Find out more
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Organisations Customer Service Project of the Year
2020 Australian Service Excellence Awards Finalists We are excited to announce the finalists for this year's Australian Service Excellence Awards.
Customer Impact •
Optus – Care Standards
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Sydney Water – Customer Experience (CxP) Program
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Visionstream Australian – Mount Terrible Upgrade Project
Continuous Improvement •
CBA – Operational Excellence
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City of Casey – Development of the Customer Experience Strategy
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V/Line Corporation – Evolving Organisational Culture to Deliver a Better Customer Experience
Service Transformation •
INX Software – INX Customer Service Project
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Suncorp – PII Excite
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Transdev Melbourne – Project Phoenix
Service Innovation
Individuals
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HP PPS Australia – Virtual Reality (VR) HP A3 Printer Training
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Intuit Australia – The Expert Ecosystem
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Optus – Fixed Residential Transformation & Innovation
Customer Service Executive of the Year
Customer Service Manager of the Year
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Adam Centerrino – Centerrino Technologies Martin Culnane – Suncorp Lisa Dowrie – Property Exchange Australia Kylie Dunphy-Brown – CBA Wietske Smith – Department of Transport and Main Roads
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Victoria Callaghan – Wilson Security Ryan De Rosayro – Property Exchange Australia Shaun Harper – Centerrino Technologies Bianca Tuckwell – CBA Brent Walker – TSA Group
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Customer Service Team of the Year
Customer Service Organisation of the Year
Service Excellence in a Contact Centre
Large Team
Large Business
Large Contact Centre
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Aussie Broadband
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HCF: The Hospital Contributions Fund of Australia Law in Order
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CBA – General Insurance Contact Centre MATE Communicate Pty Ltd – MATE Customer Service Team Townsville City Council – IT Service Operations Team Wilson Security – National Dexus Security Team
Medium Team •
Finder – Customer Care Team
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HCF – Ancillary Claims, Claims Operations Team
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News Xtend (a division of News Corp Australia) – Campaign Management Team Sleeping Duck – Customer Service Team
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Aussie Broadband HCF: The Hospitals Contribution Fund of Australia Woolworths Food Group
Medium Business
Medium Contact Centre
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Centerrino Technologies
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News Xtend (a division of News Corp Australia)
Australian Catholic Superannuation
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Centerrino Technologies’
Property Exchange Australia
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HP PPS Australia
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Government / Not-for-Profit • • •
Australian Red Cross Lifeblood Lotterywest Department of Transport and Main Roads
Customer Service Leader of the Year
Customer Service Professional of the Year
Customer Service Advocate of the Year
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Tanya Acheson – Department of Transport and Main Roads Chetana Bais - CBA Janet Born - Department of Transport and Main Roads Rennie Fletcher Department of Transport and Main Roads Rebekah Nugent Department of Transport and Main Roads
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Jacob Doueihi - CBA Lisa Mobbs – Department of Transport and Main Roads Mark Jimenez – HP PPS Australia Bonny Wong – Intuit Australia Gus Younes – Australian Catholic Superannuation
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Ramzi El Khoury – HP PPS Australia Bailey Johnson – CBA Lorrae Leo – Australian Catholic Superannuation Andrew Orr – Intuit Australia Stephanie Phillips - Department of Transport and Main Roads
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Navigating the New Normal The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact across the globe. As the crisis unfolded, organisations, their workforces and their customers faced unprecedented challenges and uncertainty. Some of CSIA’s members have kindly shared how they have navigated through these testing times.
Ray Windle Senior Operations Manager Transdev Sydney Ferries We have nearly 600 employees working in the Sydney ferry fleet who are classed essential workers and they deal with the public all day. Their anxiety levels are high due to being out in the public domain and they are at a higher risk of contracting the virus. To support our staff all PPE was supplied, masks , gloves and hand sanitisers.
We have public stand sanitisers on all our primary wharves to help our customers stay safe. Vessels and work stations including crib rooms are pro-sanitised every night and primary wharves are sanitised every 30 minutes by staff whilst on duty. Vessels have markings on the deck for no go areas, to ensure the public does not go into the work area, to ensure our staff are safe by keeping social distancing.
Communication to staff and unions has been paramount in our fight against COVID and we have been meeting with WHS representatives from the workforce weekly to provide updates. The WHS have been extraordinary in their efforts to make our workplace safe for both our staff and the community. Our staff have been fantastic in the way they have continued to provide a service whilst making every effort to stay safe and make wharves plus vessels safe for the community.
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Adam Centorrino Founder & CEO Centorrino Technologies As the pandemic was beginning to unfold, we came together as an Executive Team to not only ensure that our organisation was well prepared for what was to come but also to focus on how we could best support our people, our customers and our community. In terms of our customers, we wanted to really focus on delivering meaningful support to those customers whose ways of working were greatly impacted. Our infrastructure has always allowed our office staff to work from home when required, so the ability for our team to get the work done has not changed. What has been a challenge, is maintaining a sense of team when people are working from various locations. To meet this challenge, we have implemented: • •
Daily stand up meetings via Microsoft Teams for all our specialist teams. Company wide Townhall meetings have been conducted as Teams Live events, so that the entire company can come together once a week to celebrate the wins, ask questions of management and learn about new initiatives.
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A Wellness @ Home program, which allows team members to log in together for yoga classes, cooking classes and gaming sessions to maintain a sense of community. We have expanded our EAP program to provide guidance and counselling for any staff members that need it, especially those that live alone and may be feeling isolated during these difficult times.
For our Field Services staff who cannot work from home, in addition to the above items, we have also ensured that masks, sanitiser and sanitised company vehicles are provided to minimise the risk to the staff and the client. The feedback from customers has been overwhelmingly positive. Our customers have been very appreciative that we have gone above and beyond for them by really putting some thinking behind what we could do to help make their own organisations operations more effective. Some examples of initiatives we have implemented for our customers include:
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A Parental Service Desk has been launched to support our Educational customers as students transition to learning from home. This has been provided free of charge throughout the lockdown and to date has received 200 calls. We have increased our headcount within our Service Desk team ahead of the curve, so that our clients transitioning to a stay at home workforce still get the same support and response times they need to operate effectively. For some of our Enterprise sized clients, moving to a stay-at-home workforce is a monumental task. For these clients, we pulled together project teams to help source and the required infrastructure including laptops, and created dedicated service desk teams for them, which ensured they had the service levels they needed during a difficult transition for their staff.
The dedication and hard work of our Service Desk teams has been outstanding. Our daily call rates have increased by 321% yet our call wait times have only increased by 15%. Our positive reaction measures from clients remains above 98%, even with the increased volume, and this could not be achieved without our team’s commitment and dedication.
“we really wanted to focus on delivering meaningful support to those customers whose ways of working were greatly impacted”
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James Lim General Manager Community Care Australian Nursing Home Foundation (ANHF) ANHF has a unique connection with our consumer’s cultural community, and ties with China, Hong Kong and other South-East Asian countries. Our management had been monitoring the news and impact of a potential global outbreak and the development of COVID-19. When the closure of Wuhan city came through with other travel restrictions, ANHF decided to form the Disease Outbreak Response to address the potential global threat of COVID-19, prior to it being declared a pandemic in Australia. The DOR Team developed an overarching COVID-19 Response Plan, with each team member responsible for ensuring the strategies, review of actions, risks, and developing COVID Management Response Plans, business continuity testing across our residential care facilities and community programs. ANHF took on a diverse range of strategies to address challenges such as appropriate ways to support and engage our community, language barriers, development of bilingual resources, revised our infection control management,
comprehensive COVID training and competencies assessments, updated our time-critical business processes, business impact analysis, business continuity management, being flexible in our model of care and services, assessing the risks and vulnerability of our cohorts and develop new and innovative ways of engaging all our residents and older Australians in our community programs amid the pandemic. Our workforce responded positively to the training, competency assessment and procedures implemented in response to COVID19 preparedness. We established a dedicated site on our website to promote information, guided learning resources, current communications and important COVID-19 bilingual resources to our consumers and wider audience.. We established regular communication with staff to check on their and their close contacts’ wellbeing. Social media applications such as Zoom, WeChat and WhatsApp have been used to capture the concerns and needs for support. The chat groups help management to provide prompt response to help clarify any concerns or myths which bother the workforce. Our efforts in cross-collaboration across departments have created a more resilient workplace culture and help improved staff wellbeing and
confidence to continue working and supporting our residents and consumers and their carers. Simple acts of kindness became evident across the organisation and not just the continued kindness to residents/consumers. For example, colleagues helping colleagues across functions of the front line and corporate services to collaborate on co-developing and sharing collective knowledge and expertise to prepare and defend against the COVID-19 virus. Through the pandemic, the Team knew that they were making a difference as thank you donations and PPE resources flowed from the wider ANHF family and supporters to help with the course in keeping our older Australians and workforce safe and protected. As of 27 July 2020, ANHF remains infection-free from COVID-19. That’s a staggering 184 days infection free since the first confirmed case was reported in Victoria on 25th January 2020. ANHF remains vigilant with the potential resurgence of COVID-19 in the community. We hope that with the implemented health protocols, infection control management, our organisation will remain COVIDSafe for the foreseeable future.
JULY 2020
James Newton Customer Resolutions Manager Transurban Our roads are more important than ever during the pandemic, to transport essential workers and goods, like food and medical supplies, around our cities and across the country. People who need support are a key focus for us. That’s why we expanded our Link Assist program to provide up to three months of toll credits to people who need it most, like people on the frontline and people who are struggling financially as a result of COVID-19. Since the start of the pandemic, we've provided over $4.7m in toll credits to around 21,000 people, so while our Customer Service team is busier than ever, it's great to know we're making a difference.
“so while our Customer Service Team is busier than ever, its great to know we’re making a difference”
Sara Stidwell Contact Centre Manager and Sandra Orben Learning & Development Coordinator Challenger The key themes for Challenger during this time has been; the health and wellbeing of our staff, making sure we are able to continue with business as normal and lastly, flexibility whilst retaining best practices. In the Contact Centre we have also focused on making sure that the customer experience we provide has maintained our high standard of service and investing time in ways we can improve processes to reduce the impact of COVID on our customers. Initially the biggest impact was technology. Having staff move home with limited resources and technological solutions that were less than optimal. It impacted the way we work, the way we communicate and connect. We also had new starters commencing in our Contact Centre just before the peak of the pandemic / lockdown, and the majority of their onboarding had to be completed remotely. Most would agree that starting a new role can be daunting enough, but this unprecedented situation required the challenge of not only having to come up with a remote onboarding plan, but also delivering training remotely. During this time, we also had initiatives in place to respond to the pandemic, including legislative changes, and digital initiatives to help our customers. A lot of these initiatives required “on the spot thinking and decision making” from a learning and development perspective, as training and content for the business unit needed to be developed quickly and delivered remotely.
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Staff have really stepped up during the pandemic and have followed the guidelines outlined by Challenger. We have a great vision for the organisation: I ACT; how staff act with integrity, aim high through the delivery of outstanding results, collaborate to achieve shared goals and think customer. These values have really been core to how staff have conducted themselves during these challenging times, staff have really stepped up and worked together to show that they have the ability to still succeed against adversity. Over the past few months; we have received countless pieces of positive feedback from our customers about the service they have received which just validates that staff are still providing the best service they can in a challenging environment.
“we have focused on making sure that the customer experience we provide has maintained our very high standard of service and investing in ways we can improve processes to reduce the impact of COVID on our customers ”
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Mark Fazio General Manager mate. During this COVID period, like other businesses, we have had to mobilise our whole organisation including our call-centre to work remotely. The operation of doing this did not come without significant challenges and headaches. There were so many things we needed to consider like: •
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No down-time for our customers, our services are ‘essential to them’ and we can’t give them more to worry about so we need to be operational as per normal when they need us. The quality of the infrastructure and set-up of our staff in their homes, this was a significant investment we needed to make out of no where. Remote access to tools/systems that are usually only available in the office needed to be opened up. With that came another level of security we needed to invest in to secure our data for our customers.
At the time where most of our competitors had their doors closed for multiple reasons including having their call centres in other countries, we never had any down-time as our ‘disaster recovery plans’ were solid and we had the operational expertise in our business to move everything off-site, quick and easy for our staff which resulted in the best possible outcome for customers which was the number one goal. Being able to do all of this with no effect whatsoever on the business and in less than 24 hours is our biggest triumph during the pandemic along with simply being able to keep our staff at home, connected with their families in a time that they all needed to be together as no one understood exactly what was taking place. We were able to keep our staff in jobs, being paid and able to be with their families which in turn enabled us to deliver superior service to our customers in a time that all they needed was solutions in a time of uncertainty.
“we were able to keep our staff in jobs, being paid and able to be with their families, which in turn enabled us to deliver superior service to our customers”
COMMENT
Rebounding with the Post Pandemic Workforce In July 2020, the Australian Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg announced that Australia’s budget deficit hit almost $86 billion last financial year due to the coronavirus pandemic, the biggest blow to our nation’s bottom line since World War II. With unemployment projected to reach 9% by Christmas, the shortterm economic outlook looks grim, however Australia’s economy is starting to emerge from the nationwide restrictions in April and May, and programs such as JobSeeker, JobKeeper and JobMaker are supporting industry to take the steps to rebuild. When the economy begins to take off and consumer and business sentiment rebounds, one the of key challenges organisations will encounter is the capably and capacity to employ the right staff. As was the case after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, employers will certainly favour temporary and contract staff, enabling their organisations to scale rapidly with limited risk. In May 2020, the Recruitment Consulting and Staffing Association (RCSA) published a report “Leveraging Australia’s Agency Workforce to Drive Economic Recovery” - and among its key findings is that agency staffing firms “play a vital role during times of structural and cyclical economic change, where a significant level of churn in employment is experienced.” The report proposes 4 reasons why using agency workers will be key for business in the early stages of recovery:
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Hiring workers through agency firms reduces the time business takes to employ that worker, and gets them generating an income immediately, rather than seeking income support. Getting people into work means a business can expand its output faster – generating income. Income from sales, means more growth and thus more employment opportunities. Potential is there for even more placements of unemployed workers by agencies – historically about 13 per cent of unemployed people are placed in new jobs by agencies, which could rise to 30 per cent after the downturn. Businesses can start to expand if they have the flexibility to access a pool of agency workers – professional, skilled or semiskilled.
The report concludes that Agencies are the experts to recruit, assess and deliver people for temporary or contract employment – for which there can be strong demand – “prior to the creation of permanent jobs.” The advantage for both employers and for workers is that the best agency staffing firms in the country will have “all of the protections which are inherent in workplace laws such as the Fair Work Act, Modern Awards, work health and safety, workers’ compensation, long service leave and anti-discrimination legislation.” International evidence following the GFC reveals that agency workers were among the largest and fastest beneficiaries of a rebound. For example, in Germany, after a drop of about 23 per cent during the GFC,
Paul Smith, Joint Managing Director at Citrus Group discusses the trends that will drive economic recovery with the post pandemic workforce
there was a 49 per cent rebound in employment for agency workers over 18 months following the GFC. During the first half of 2020, Australian agencies supplied workers to meet demand across three key sectors: •
• •
Call centres – as offshore centres closed and came back to Australia. Also, for example, in industries such as travel where customer service was key to meet heightened demand Supermarkets – as customers went online and demand for warehouse supplies increased Hospital and aged care staffing and support positions
Gradually, as the demand for certain roles shifts - for example, call centres and logistics - agencies can support the redeployment of staff to other areas. According to the RCSA, the agency staffing firms are “well placed to rapidly train and deploy contractors to these new jobs” which will start to emerge in the postCOVID economy. As history has shown, the agency workforce and specialist recruiters are critical to Australia’s economic recovery, and organisations will need to partner with reliable Agencies to support growth in the post-pandemic recovery.
Paul Smith
Joint Managing Director Citrus Group
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Emotion Based Design Bruce McGregor, Managing Partner at Brooke explains why emotion is a critical layer to incorporate into your customer experience design.
As organisations continue to look for new ways to gain a competitive edge and improve their customer experience, human centered design methods such as ‘Customer Based Design’ (CBD) have gained popularity and become more mainstream. CBD helps organisations to explore and obtain insights on their customers’ experience by mapping out ‘customer journey walls’ and understanding the customers perception of their services end-to- end, without the influence of bias and siloed views of those within the organisation. But there is another emotional layer to consider in the customer experience that is critical in bringing a deeper level of engagement as well as an understanding of how your service offering impacts your customers.
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Emotion is powerful, so bringing Emotion Based Design (EBD) into your organisation not only gathers customer insights but uses the scale of the emotion to quantify and measure those insights and include them in design, development and decision making. EBD begins by identifying the emotion that your customers want to feel (Target Emotion), followed by working to define how to measure and report on it in a way that is meaningful for your organisation. We describe the difference between the current emotion and the target emotion as the ‘Emotional Delta’ (EΔ). EBD can be adapted to any delivery framework, but it naturally aligns to an Agile methodology given its iterative design to take on new changes. As such, EBD can be used to extend the common three element Agile story template of: “As a …, I want …, So that ...” to a template with a fourth prefix called ‘’So I feel…” The following example demonstrates how the extension comes into play: As a homeowner, I want a simple way to purchase insurance on-line, so that I can complete the transaction and get an immediate confirmation, so I feel secure knowing that my house is protected.
Knowing the emotional target in this example means that we can measure the current delta, test different wording, imagery and customer experience to then deliver on the desired customer experience outcomes. EBD provides organisations with a deepened qualitative and quantitative understanding of both customer pain points and opportunity points. It gives organisations a tool to close and uplift their customer service delivery.
JOIN AUSTRALIA’S AUTHORITY ON CUSTOMER SERVICE EXCELLENCE www.csia.com.au/membership
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"EBD provides organisations with a deepened qualitative and quantitative understanding of both customer pain points and opportunity points."
And it’s not just about external customers. Executives and decision makers inside organisations can use EBD to assess how staff (internal customers), feel about their internal processes and operations and use this to drive engagement. With higher engaged staff, the service experience offering to their external customers improves. With the guidance and support of the CSIA we have used EBD to support five attributes within the International Customer Service Standards (ICSS: 20202025). CSIA now offers a one-day training course with Brooke on EBD as part of their customer service training program. If you are interested in hearing more about how your organisation can deliver exceptional customer experiences by incorporating EBD into your Customer Based design, we would love to talk with you.
Bruce McGregor Managing Partner Brooke
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Creating thriving contact centres
Danielle Clark from SuperFriend explains how the Wellbeing on Call program promotes better mental health and wellbeing for contact centre staff
There are simple and effective ways to improve contact centre worker mental health and wellbeing, according to the results of a recently completed pilot program, Wellbeing on Call. Due to the unique challenges faced by contact centres, such as repetitive work and intensive performance monitoring, Australia's 250,000 contact centre workers are at a higher risk of poor mental wellbeing compared with workers in other industries. Wellbeing on Call was designed to promote mental health and wellbeing in contact centres, and achieved a range of positive outcomes including improved wellbeing, reduced absenteeism, and greater leadership confidence. The program was funded through a grant awarded to workplace mental health organisation SuperFriend, via WorkSafe's WorkWell Mental Health Improvement Fund. Five contact centres participated in the program: UniSuper, Sunsuper, Link Group, MLC Life Insurance and Concentrix. It was overseen and delivered by SuperFriend, with assistance from The Strengths Lab and Pracademia.
Wellbeing on Call embraced and applied the principles of co-design, meaning those receiving the interventions were involved in helping create them. Co-design is shown to have several benefits, including more efficient decision making, ideas that are relevant to those receiving them, and increased support for the interventions. Program interventions included: • • • •
Mental health and wellbeing workshops Team 'psychological capital' and strengths-based workshops and coaching calls Networking sessions, and Webinars on mentally healthy workplaces and job design
These focussed on five key themes identified through the co-design process: leadership support, resilience, training and resources, performance, and culture and values.
The program in detail Two groups from each contact centre were involved in the program, a participating group and a control group. Each of the groups included team members and team leaders. Employees in HR-based roles also formed part of the participating groups. This approach allowed SuperFriend to measure tangible outcomes for participants against a baseline.
“Australia’s 250,000 contact centre workers are at a higher risk of poor mental wellbeing”
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“Every participating team leader reported greater leadership confidence following the program."
Measuring success
Accessing the resources
Data was collected at each stage of the program through surveys and interviews. Both participants and the control group provided this feedback at the very beginning of the program, immediately after it finished, and four months afterwards.
Through the support of WorkSafe's WorkWell Mental Health Improvement Fund, SuperFriend has collated a range of Wellbeing on Call resources in an online portal, available to view or download.
Through this process, SuperFriend found that: •
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Team members who took part in the program gained important practical skills related to mental health literacy, becoming more adept at recognising and responding to the signs of mental illness. At the end of the program, participating team members were more likely to look after their diet and engage in exercise/physical activity. In interviews, team leaders consistently described increased ability to effectively identify and talk to members of their team who might be struggling with mental health issues. Every participating team leader reported greater leadership confidence following the program. This stemmed from greater mental health literacy, learning more about their team, and from implementing practical strategies in the workplace. The program’s strengths-based coaching was particularly popular. Team members missed, on average, fewer days of work in the six months prior to the final evaluation than they had at baseline. Job satisfaction stayed relatively constant throughout the project, with both the participating and control group each improving slightly in one of three measures. Some of the team leaders said they had noticed behaviour that indicated their teams were more engaged and connected. HR-based staff found workplace mental wellbeing a more familiar topic. The program was reported as a valuable addition to and potential catalyst for existing organisational efforts related to mental health and wellbeing. Some noticed a reduction in mental healthrelated stigma. Team members rated their workplace across the ‘Indicators of a Thriving Workplace’, consisting of 40 separate indicators to generate scores for five domains. Teams who took part in the program made real gains, consistently outscoring those who did not.
Resources include videos on co-design, leadership, job design and strengths-based coaching, fact sheets, and guides to help teams identify strengths and manage performance.
Danielle Clark
GM of Impact, Communications & Insights SuperFriend
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Is SMALL the new beautiful for digital transformation?
CSIA Certified Practitioner Todd Gorsuch reports on insights gained through the recent Customer Science webinar series
Last month McKinsey claimed that 70% of companies expect to accelerate their digital transformation. Certainly, we know some organisations are fortunate enough to be in this situation, but this is not the case for everyone. Many organisations put digital spend on hold in the early days of the pandemic when the situation was a little more uncertain, and now they need to re-prioritise. For example, Qantas is laying off 6,000 staff but has placed ‘digitalisation’ at the centre of its recovery strategy. This is not surprising given the reduction in cost to serve, high return on investment and making the customer experience easier and more accessible. The reality is without digital services, some businesses are losing revenue and customers.
Customer Science recently hosted a CX Executive Webinar Series – The Impact of COVID-19 on Digital Transformation. A panel of executives drawn from a crosssection of industries provided their learnings and insights as we move into the new world and several key themes emerged.
1. Expectations will be higher During the pandemic, digital teams have been able to deliver solutions in rapid timeframes in response to the crisis. A great example is the quickly deployed projects by Service NSW, to connect people impacted by COVID and bushfires with support and grants.
JULY 2020
These light applications provide a good enough outcome and meet the immediate user transaction needs. The downside is that this has set a new benchmark in expectations for digital products from stakeholders, and in some cases, depending on the complexity of the transaction and integration points, these new expectations can’t be met. 2. Everything’s about Agile
The success of Agile teams during the pandemic to move quickly and have an impact has now been widely celebrated. This efficiency is also a new expectation of future projects. The agile approach has been applied where applications are built with the ability to fail to expediate deployment - with the downside that applications do fail and user/consumer/public confidence in these tools can be diminished and as a result adoption is reduced. 3. We can’t leave our people behind
COVID has required digital services to avoid loss of revenue and deliver a technology platform that enables our people to work remotely. While these digital solutions are in place, we can’t forget our people need to adopt and perform. The trick is to stay connected to the team. Remember your introverts are thriving, but your extroverts are suffering. A great example of a simple solution is Tyro where the team set up a permanent Zoom room for team members to log into to work or stay connected. 4. Rapid Automation is the new normal
We see increasing use of rapid deployment service automation software. A great example is Robotic Process Automation. It automates much of the administrative tasks. The software is quick to deploy and with its intuitive drag and drop interphase can rapidly bring together automation out of the box.
5. Small is beautiful The NSW Minister for Customer Service, the Hon Victor Dominello recently stated that new digital projects are going have to be smaller, with a strong focus on return on investment. To drive successful digital transformation in FY21, it is more important than ever to find clearly defined use cases where digitisation can have a big impact. Use of automation tools and an agile approach will enable organisations to recover and grow through a digital strategy, but the challenge will be to continue to connect teams to both eachother and the organisation’s mission. Small, rapid deployments supported by strong business cases will emerge as the predominant digital strategy in the short term as businesses consolidate and refocus for growth beyond the pandemic.
Todd Gorsuch CEO and Founder Customer Science
”The reality is, without digital services some businesses are losing revenue and customers."
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