Elevating Customer Satisfaction with Visibility & Coaching

As companies seek to thrive in today’s current competitive landscape, customer satisfaction remains a key factor in their success. Identifying and eliminating customer pain points and de-escalating issues quickly to prevent revenue loss is an essential part of this equation. 

That's why we wanted to take a closer look at how Gousto, a leading British meal kit retailer with over 150,000 customers a week, leverages reporting and coaching systems to quickly spot performance trends, uncover threats to customer satisfaction, and boost the performance of their blended team of in-house and BPO agents. 

To get exclusive insights into Gousto's strategy, we spoke with Michael Whittaker, Customer Care Training & Quality Manager. In this blog post, we'll share what we gleaned from Michael so you can learn how to implement these strategies to provide your in-house and BPO partners with the tools they need to elevate customer satisfaction.

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Let’s get started.

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Making the Internal Shift from Cost-Center to Value-Add

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For any business looking to create long-lasting relationships with its customers, having an in-house customer care team can be an invaluable asset when it comes to understanding and engaging with your customers and ultimately driving loyalty and growth. 

To stand out from the competition, however, brands must move beyond viewing their internal customer care as a cost center and embrace it as an opportunity to add value and strengthen their brand. As Whittaker put it: “It's all about delivering unique experiences to customers so that when they think about a brand, they think about choice, convenience, and—most importantly—care. We want to make every interaction of our customer care team a value-add moment in terms of our overall brand image in the market. When a customer calls because they have a problem with a box, we want them to have a warm, informative, and easy conversation with an agent. They should leave that conversation with the agent thinking: “Wow, I really trust that brand to do what's right for me as a customer.”

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Boost Agent Performance With a KPI Dashboard and Gamification

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For Whittaker's team, the MaestroQA KPI dashboard has become an invaluable tool, providing them with a single, centralized source for data. They can use it to review poor CSAT trends and monitor efficiency metrics such as average handle time (AHT) and first call resolution (FCR), as well as to generate ideas for gamification. As Whittaker stated: “The UI of the dashboard is designed like a leaderboard. That is a great inspiration for team leaders to build more gamification into what they do. It's a great visual cue to be like; I have the data now; let's create something from that. Let's create games, let's create competitions, and let's create prizes—all these things. And gamification, when done in a really cool way, is an amazing and positive thing for agents.”

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Leveraging BPO Partners While Maintaining An Internal Customer Support Team

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Creating positive customer experiences is essential to any successful business, but as customer demands increase, it can be difficult to maintain exceptional support experiences at scale without sacrificing quality. To help combat this challenge, many companies outsource their customer support to multiple BPO partners (offshore and onshore).

Gousto implemented this strategy and outsourced up to 70% of their customer support while maintaining a blended solution (internal support team and outsourced teams). “We've learned a lot in the last three to four years about integrating our two BPO partners into the wider Gousto ecosystem,” shared Whittaker. 

One key learning for Whittaker and his team comes from their BPO partners using their own internal QA grading systems. As Whittaker pointed out, “they did everything in Excel spreadsheets – scoring rubrics, and everything else. To this day, I still shudder at the thought, frankly. And over time, we very slowly brought them along that journey of building their own rubric in Maestro and explaining how these different things could work; they adopted it. And now they love it, and they would never go back to using their old methods because it's so much easier, it's so much more centralized. Yeah, again, it goes back to the point of letting BPOs be a BPO, but bring them along your vision.”

With the performance metrics from the MaestroQA BPO dashboard, “you can literally learn with your team leads from your in-house support team, and from your BPOs,” MaestroQA allows “us to get on the same journey with them,” said Whittaker. Each team can “craft their own coaching and performance management identity,” so Whittaker recommends bringing “your BPOs along with you from day one” of using MaestroQA.

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Speaking about coaching…

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The Difference Between Reductive Coaching and Coaching With MaestroQA

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Through data analysis, Whittaker and his team discovered that their high-value customers were churning but that the underlying cause was deeper than they first thought. By taking a closer look at customer-agent conversations, they realized that customers were dissatisfied and frustrated due to the poor quality of conversations. They had a general overview of the issue but realized they needed to look at how agents handled customer conversations.

This discovery led to a bigger challenge - Whittaker and his team were now faced with implementing a coaching system, so they turned to MaestroQA for a solution. MaestroQA's powerful coaching platform enabled them to foster meaningful conversations where all parties had a say, and agents could share their areas of need. The platform also provided a needed layer of accountability for coaches and agents and allowed easy integration with their learning management system. Together, these features enabled Whittaker and his team to move from a reductive coaching environment to one that was truly collaborative.

Now let’s break this all down by allowing Whittaker to share, in his own voice, a real-world example of how his team uses the MaestroQA dashboard for their coaching sessions.

“Before the coaching session, a team leader would use the performance dashboard, and they would maybe have a couple of metrics they want to focus on, potentially link to OKRs for the overall team. And they'd use the performance dashboard to dive deep into some tickets. They do some spot checks in that case. And they started to add to the coaching section a few tickets that really caught their attention, ones that they wanted to chat about in the conversation. 

“On the other hand, agents are also in the Maestro platform looking at their grades, looking at their CSAT tickets, and again, thinking about some things they want to chat about and start adding their notes on areas that they want to discuss within that conversation.

 “And then, the coaching session happens. We start it off with the agent talking us through the cases that they want to talk about—asking them questions like, what excited you about those tickets? What worried you, and what do you want to want to maybe work on? How can we support you with that? And really talk through those examples in detail, record coaching points, record to-dos, that sort of thing. And then we finish off with a big old smile on our faces because it's been a very productive session in that case.”

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Get a sneak peek of MaestroQA’s coaching platform. Watch the video below.

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If you would like to learn more about MaestroQA, request a demo today.