Strong Customer Retention by Creating Memorable Experiences
Lebara’s journey from moving service to experience and beyond
Overview
Lebara wants to be recognised for delivering exceptional service and quality to its customers. We have embarked on an ongoing programme to transform the service we provide to customers across seven European countries from our multilingual contact centre in the City of London.
We focused on transforming our culture, employee engagement and technology to ensure we could amaze our customers every time they contact us. This programme has resulted in world-class NPS scores, a huge impact on customer retention and eight major awards in 2012.
Impact
In an industry sector where we traditionally see NPS scores between 10 and 20 our weekly average is 65. Our first contact resolution has risen by 8% and our cost to serve has reduced by 19.5% year-on-year.
We generated a 12% impact in retention when comparing customers who interact with Customer Services versus those who don’t. When comparing retained profit to the cost of our centre, we have seen a 250% R.O.I. On a scale of 1-5, our employee engagement has risen from 3.6 to 4.1 and the tenure of our advisors has increased from three to eighteen months.
Innovation
We launched a unique SMILE programme for advisors to enable them to create memorable experiences for our customers. Our advisors do not have a target for AHT or the number of calls handled per day.
We introduced an internal social media portal to encourage communication. A unique recruitment programme was developed to select applicants based on their values. We make welcome calls to new customers that focus on service and not up-selling.
Our tailored training includes memory-tagging to help retain information. We deliver insight sessions to the rest of the business to ensure the voice of the customer is heard.[/one_half_last]
Insight
These highly successful initiatives should have been introduced even earlier:
• Making NPS a key metric for our eight Managing Directors.
• Adding a second question on our customer satisfaction survey asking customers to assess the service they received from our advisor.
• Expanding our SMILE philosophy across Social Media, Chat and Email channels.
• Taking ownership and management of the online Customer Help portals from our Marketing teams.
• Holding regular SMART meetings with our IT, Network, Carrier and Marketing teams, introducing and monitoring their progress against internal SLA’s and costing their errors to create accountability for customer-affecting issues.
Inspiration
We turned the traditional contact centre model on its head by focusing on staff engagement, creating a culture of employee empowerment and making customer satisfaction our key metric. Taking ownership of all customer channels and ensuring we do things right first time has led to a dramatic reduction in customer contact (propensity).
We can clearly demonstrate the positive impact the transformation programme has had on our brand, customer retention and revenue, ensuring the voice of our customer is heard loud and clear throughout Lebara, driving our organisation forward by making customer experience our first priority.[/one_half_last]
Speaker
Matthew Kemp
Director of Customer Services
Lebara
Matt Kemp, Lebara’s Customer Services Director, is responsible for delivering exceptional experiences to over 3.5m customers in eight countries. By focusing on improving the loyalty and advocacy of both employees and customers he has led Lebara to win 13 prestigious customer service awards, culminating in “Best Large Contact Centre” at the European Call Centre awards in 2012. With over fifteen years experience in contact centre management from 50 to 1000+ seats, he has implemented a full transformation programme of both the culture and operation within Lebara Customer Services, successfully managing the integration of state-of-the-art Contact Centre technology and reporting suites.