How We Transformed Customer Care at Spark with Digital Adoption
With Dan Cooper, Head of Digital at Spark New Zealand
Show Notes
Dan Cooper is the Head of Digital at Spark NZ. He’s been working in the contact centre industry since the late 90s. Over the past few years, Dan’s lead the transformation of Spark’s customer care with digital adoption.
Today, he shares the details of Spark’s digital adoption journey, the mistakes they made along the way, and their exciting next steps. All so you can shortcut your organisation’s digital adoption journey.
Over the past few years, the approach Dan discusses has lead to significant improvements in Spark’s customer interaction NPS score and their employee NPS score. As well as a 45% reduction in human assisted interactions.
You'll Learn:
How Spark now starts all of their initiatives, instead of the common practice approach of starting with a commercial assessment (02:43).
Dan’s core philosophy regarding improving customer experience (03:04).
What was wrong with the KPIs the contact centres had in place when Dan arrived (which might be true of your KPIs too), and what he did about it (03:20).
The complete flip that Dan made with regards to customer journeys, which has allowed Spark to be more successful (04:26).
The proactive approach Spark now takes, to reduce the problems customers experience (04:40).
The management restructure that was done in the contact centre, which has been crucial to streamlining contact centre operations (05:32).
The continuous improvement approach Spark takes to reduce customer friction (06:21).
Why their first attempt to transition customers to use self-service options failed, and the successful approach that followed (08:29).
Which digital initiative Spark has launched in the last 12 months, which is going gangbusters (15:15).
The changes which Spark are making to their internal systems, which will dramatically reduce the time taken to bring new hires up to speed (16:28).
The ‘unified front line’ approach that Spark is about to embark on, which will enable frontline team members to flow to wherever the customer needs them to be (18:03).
The subtle changes they made to the contact centre KPIs, which has resonated extremely well with staff (23:09).
A summary of Dan’s advice for contact centre leaders who are deciding to go down the digital adoption route (28:48).
Connect with Dan on LinkedIn.
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, I'm the founder of BravaTrak. Our Sales Leadership Accelerator enables Sales Managers to lead a higher performing team at 90 days, by mastering the five habits of exceptional sales leaders.
Today, I am very fortunate to be joined by Dan Cooper, who is the Digital Lead for the Consumer Channels at Spark New Zealand. So, Dan, welcome along. Good to have you here.
Dan Cooper (00:31)
Hey, Blair. Thanks for having me.
Blair Stevenson (00:32)
Fantastic. I've been looking forward to this discussion. So just for our listeners, tell us a bit about your background and your experience.
Dan Cooper (00:42)
Like a lot of people, I don't think going down the contact centre track was the original intent. Back in 1999, I actually joined a contact centre because I was looking for something that would pay me some money so I could fund my flying lessons. So I found a gig that allowed me to work from 2:30 in the evening to 11 o'clock at night, so I could study and fly in the morning.
And somehow I accidentally fell into a career which spanned contact centres and supporting customers with technology and directory assistance, service desks, financial services, and sales, et cetera. And here we are, a good 21 odd years later, I'm still enjoying it and loving every moment.
Blair Stevenson (01:27)
Awesome. You've transformed customer care at Spark with digital adoption. And so I'm keen to find out all about that. So I guess as a starting point, talk us through the journey that you've been on in terms of digital adoption.
Dan Cooper (01:44)
Sure. First and foremost, it's been a hard but fun journey and it truly takes the whole village. We're 5,000 people in the organisation, and it's taken every facet of the organisation understanding the need and responding to it. So the key was the appreciation that the contact centre isn't the cause of the customer experience friction. It's just where the friction shows up.
So for example, it's not a contact centre issue that customers have trouble with their broadband, for instance. Yeah, when they contact us, we can do the best to make the experience of fixing the fault as awesome as we can. But how do we work on preventing that fault occurring in the first place? How do we research statistically, which type of solution is best suited for this customer's need and apply that proactively, so that they're less likely to experience an issue.
(02:43)
We now start all of our initiatives with an assessment on culture and customer. Rather than just a commercial assessment as is historically best practice or common practice. So our transformation programs span multiple facets.
There's no real one silver bullet that I can point to and go, "Do this and all your problems go away." At its core, it's the need to ensure that we remove friction from our customer's journey, therefore removing the need to contact us for simple inquiries.
(03:20)
Then our people needed to be applied to conversations where you needed a big sexy human brain to focus on complex or relationship building conversations, rather than transactional stuff. And then we built out a tactical plan based on those principles, and that tactical plan included things like KPI clarity.
So I walked into one of the Spark teams at first, when I was Head of Care Transformation. And as you do in the first week, you ask "Hey, how the team doing, what are the KPIs?" Then you've got an Excel spreadsheet, as you do, 14 columns. Column A was name and the rest was just data dump. No one was successful, really, on that sort of matrix.
So it was about how do we get down to four or five things at the most, which tell you on your way home for yourself - on the bus, train, ferry, however you go home - that you did a good job today? And so it's about that clarity for our people. That was number one.
(04:26)
Then it's about agreeing as an organisation to build digital-first journeys. So anything we build should not entail mantronics and glue and sticky tape in the back end; it has to be digital-first.
How do we then right-plan our customers, going back to that whole, how do we prevent our customers from experiencing an issue? So rather than waiting for them to call us and say, "Oh, actually you're on copper. Did you realise you can have wireless broadband or fiber?" It's about getting in front of that and saying, "Hey, you're currently on copper, we recommend wireless broadband or fiber. Based on your needs, this is the one we'd go for."
(05:02)
Then number four would be our customer conversations needed to promote the use of digital tools. So when a customer contacted us, let's not just treat it as a transaction, let's treat it as a training or learning opportunity.
And key to that was getting rid of the old contact centre norms of AHT being one of your KPIs, for instance. No, let's have a conversation, let's educate our customers on the tools that best suit their needs.
(05:32)
Then we had to eliminate the contact centre silos as a culture, because we had like nine different 'Heads of' who were fantastic human beings, meant well, but one was leading sales chat, the other would lead sales voice, and then somebody else would lead resolve chat. It was all siloed.
So we went down to three, and it was very clear. You contact Spark for three different things and those our skillsets. Either you're joining us to buy something, or you'd like to change something or inquire about something you already have, or you'd like something resolved. As in, something that you have is not working as it should. Fix it.
And so those are the three skillsets we moved to, from about nine different ones. And you could practice that skillset, regardless of which contact method the customer had. It could be chat, it could be voice, it could be instore in the latter years.
(06:31)
Interaction analytics, so using a solution which listens to our calls, transcribes it to about 80% accuracy and then enables those analytics to help us understand where the customer friction is occurring.
On its own, the technology actually doesn't pay off a business case as such, but when used in conjunction with, "Okay, we understand here's where the friction points are. And therefore this is what we need to focus on from a product or experience journey perspective, which will therefore remove friction and the need to contact us." That's where the benefits start coming in. So it's all being data driven.
(07:12)
We had then a huge program of work to move our customers off their reliance on the world's easiest phone number - 123 - onto chat. So how do we move our customers to chat? And then when they were on chat, once we understood the type of inquiries, how do we use a virtual assist to move the customers to digital self-service where a journey existed, or to a human being where one was needed.
And then lastly, it was the automation of back of house mantronics. It's that glue and sticky tape I was referring to earlier. How do we use technology to do what it does best, so human beings can do what they do best, which is to have conversations.
Blair Stevenson (07:58)
Yeah. I love that term, mantronics. So what I'm hearing is there's been a large amount of behavioral change that has to have occurred. Both within your organisation, obviously, as a starting point. But also what you're trying to do is prompt behaviour change in your customers as well. And behaviour change isn't straightforward.
I'm just curious about one or two things that didn't go so well for you, that you learnt key lessons from.
Dan Cooper (08:29)
I'll give you a good example of when you walk in and you're trying to make a different straightaway. And one of those examples was we evaluated our journeys and found that several customers were calling us every month to do basic transactional stuff. Like, "Hey, I'd like to add another gigabyte on my mobile plan." Cool. And our people would dutifully do that.
They'd be like, "Cool. I've added your one gigabyte of data. It'll show up on your next month's bill. Or if you'd like to pop it on your credit card, let's do it now. And here's the credit card option you can follow."
And we went, "Hey, here's an opportunity. Instead of doing that, let's teach our people about how the app works and how MySpark works so that they can promote the use of those self-service journeys.” All good. Makes sense.
Dan Cooper (09:18)
So we went through a big drive, educating our people, taking them off the queues, spending time and educating them on how our self-service journeys worked, what the kind of conversations we wanted them to have looked like, et cetera. And off they went.
And two months later we reviewed the data, and there was a 2% reduction in contact centre applied data credits. Sorry, not data credits, but data allocations. And we just we went, "Oh mate." After all that, you heart just sank. And then you dust yourself off and you go, "Cool, let's go talk to our internal customers, who are our people, and ask them why this adoption is not quite working."
And so finally, some of the candid ones said to us, "Well, you know how you said to us, we should teach our customers to use our digital tools. Well, what you actually said is, 'You know that three minute call you got where you just applied data and moved on to the next one? Well, don't do that anymore. Spend 10 to 15 minutes educating a customer on how to do it themselves. And also because the customer is doing it themselves, you won't get a commission.’”
Because they used to get points towards their commission on every piece of revenue that they generated. We just went, that was a huge face palm fail moment. Not listening to your own people and not understanding the consequences of your actions completely.
So it was a great learning experience, but what it then surfaced for us is actually digital adoption needs to be behaviour change - not just for the customer, but also for us internally - and we need to align the KPIs to it.
Then what we ended up doing is actually flipping the KPIs around. Instead of just being revenue based, it was a rudimentary digital adoption metric that we started applying. Which quite simply went, if Blair spoke to Daniel about something to do with adopting our digital tools, and then if Blair, the customer, went away and in the following 60 days used MySpark or the Spark App, we would attribute that to the agent Daniel's conversation. And therefore, as a percentage, that goes in Daniel's KPIs favour.
And that's how the momentum started to shift and build. Because we didn't just tell you about our digital tools as the customer, "Hey, Blair, thanks for calling us in the IVR", like we always have, but we actually reinforced that on the human experience. And we walked you through how to do it yourself, rather than just did it for you.
Blair Stevenson (11:56)
Right. So it's really thinking through the consequences and aligning them, so you get the kind of behaviour that you're looking for. So one of the things this whole process is predicated on - some extent anyway - is some technology transformation. So what new technology did you put in place?
Dan Cooper (12:21)
You can have the best of technology, but you've got to start with culture and customer. At the heart of the matter, for us, was the mantra that we will only promote digital journeys which we have absolute faith in, and that are easier, faster and better for customers to undertake themselves, rather than contacting us in assisted care.
So that was the sort of underlying premise of digital adoption. Because we also know from data that once you force a customer down a journey that actually didn't work, they're much more reluctant the next time to adopt it. And it just reinforces Spark equals 123. And that was not in our favour.
So what did we do? We transitioned volume from voice to chat. So we were quite honest with customers and said, "Hey, look. It's faster to talk to us over chat, and we've also dropped you a link in your e-text solution - which is just an SMS link - so you can choose to wait in voice, or you can talk to us in chat."
We then, once we understood the drivers behind chat, we were able to virtualise the simple and then hand off the more complex or relationship building conversations to our people. I've spoken about the interaction analytics solution, which actually helped us understand where our points of friction were.
We have a strong virtual-hold solution. So you're not just left waiting in queue. You can essentially say, "I'll hold and retain my position in-queue." And when I'm at the top of that queue, Spark will call me back. We've also got booking a callback online, which is quite popular with our customers. Because it's like, "Oh yeah, I can't talk to you right now, but I'm free Friday afternoon. I'll book a call back for then."
And something that we've launched over the last 12 months, which is messaging. And that's going gangbusters for us. I'm super happy with the way that's going, and our trajectory in future is to promote messaging more and more, because our customers are telling us that it's really working for them.
Blair Stevenson (14:31)
So tell us more about messaging.
Dan Cooper (14:33)
So messaging, as an industry, I think we've been slow to adopt it. Because chat was something we needed to educate our customers on. "Hey, go to our website, chat to us. Don't call us", for instance.
However, messaging is something that our customers have been using for years. We just haven't been where our customers are. So you think about it. I talk to my parents on WhatsApp. We text each other all the time, family, friends, et cetera. And we do it on our time, a message conversation isn't instantaneous. And we get a notification when someone replies, rather than standing there staring at our phone, waiting for them to. So we do that in our personal lives, why don't we interact with our customers and organisations that way?
And so we've launched messaging in the Spark App, which is a secure method of contacting Spark. And when we respond, it pops up saying, "Hey, you've got a notification from Spark." And you're talking to one of our people, the same people you're talking to on the phones are on chat. But you're doing it on your own time. You can do it on the bus, you can do it in your lunch break.
Similarly, we've got messaging through WhatsApp, through Apple Business Chat, Google Messages and through Facebook. So we are going to where our customers are, and resoundingly our customers are appreciating that through their Net Promoter Score feedback.
Blair Stevenson (16:01)
Very cool. Where do you think you go with technology? What's the next step for you?
Dan Cooper (16:09)
The next steps for us is through the digital adoption and transformation programs that we've done, we've earned the right in the organisation to demand a better employee experience. Let's face it. Spark is a legacy organisation, and with that comes legacy tools and systems.
So what we're focused on right now isn't actually so much digital adoption for our customers, because that momentum is already established. It's now just our way of working. What we're focused on is improving employee experience.
So how might we pull our systems and tools together into a single pane of glass? How might we provide elegant knowledge-base solutions? So that our people can use intuitive systems - which they use in their day-to-day lives - and we don't have to train them on our custom systems.
We can hire someone off the street who can intuitively use a website, and teach them about our products and how we expect a Spark conversation to flow, rather than, "Hey, here's the 20 different tools and systems you need to learn how to navigate." So we're focusing on that.
We're also focusing on enhancing our messaging solution. So we will close down chat in the near future, over the next few months or half a year. And we will move to messaging as our preferred channel.
And we will always have voice. That's not going anywhere. But we aim to be about 50% of our contact centre interactions by voice, and 50% in messaging in the sort of next 12 to 18 months.
Blair Stevenson (17:46)
Okay. That's a big change. So one of the things you and I've talked about is the idea of a unified front line. Just for the sake of our listeners, I'd love for you to just to explain what you're doing in that space.
Dan Cooper (18:03)
So it was something that we were hypothesizing prior to COVID, and then COVID kind of accelerated our momentum towards it. But where we started is, our retail people and our retail solution is fantastic. It is the gold standard for representing Spark in a positive light. And it works as an operational unit extremely well.
Our contact centres were getting to that point as well, but we still had two key silos, being retail and contact centre. And we were sort of fiddling with how might we flow to where the customer is, because there are trends and patterns, right?
If you look at an annual level, this time of the year in the lead up to Christmas, retail is very busy. So all of our resources were focused on retail and they needed to hire more people as casuals to sustain the demand.
(19:04)
And then you come into that sort of February period, and it becomes broadband season in New Zealand where customers are moving house, new students - when you're not in COVID - are coming from overseas, looking for connections, et cetera. And that becomes extremely contact centre focused because customers still consume broadband via the contact centre, rather than by retail.
And then you head into winter and you start seeing contact centre volume again rise up, because you've got some faults occurring at the time if customer connections are slightly weaker on decades old technology.
But when you overlay it, the demand is actually complimentary to each other. Even on an intraweek level, Mondays are our busiest days in contact centres, and tend to be the quietest days in retail. It's not just us, it's every retail. But then as the week progresses, contact centres go down in volume, retail rises in volume.
(20:07)
So how might we take our people - they're serving the customer, the same customer, they're just doing it in two different channels as two different silos - how might we blend them and go, "We will flow to where the customer demand is."
So now Blair can have a roster that says, "Blair, you're working from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM. But from eight to 11:00 AM, you're actually in the back of the store in Newmarket with a headset on, because you're answering customer demand there. We know from our footfall tracking solutions that at 11:00 AM, customer demand goes up in retail. So you're going to pop your headset down and you're going to serve customers in the front-of-house. And then once again, we know at 2:00 PM, it gets a bit quiet. So you're going to go back into the back-of-house, put on your headset and talk to customers again.”
(20:59)
And so that's about being where our customer needs us to be. And that's fine from a rostering perspective, but what it gives you is that added benefit of actually, the Newmarket store might be quiet today, because it's a really sunny day in Auckland. So how might we use some of those people who are on the front-of-house to actually jump on queue in the back-of-house? Or even better still, jump on messaging and serve customers in the virtual world.
So that's where the unified frontline really comes into its own. You're no longer a retailer at Spark or a contact centre agent at Spark. Everyone new coming into Spark is a unified frontline team member who will flow to where the customer demand is. Because at the end of the day, it's the same process, it's a similar conversation. You're conducting it over a different medium.
Blair Stevenson (21:52)
Brilliant. I think that's - I'm just trying to think of the word - it's a paradigm shift. Because people, historically, have been stuck in channels, "I'm a retailer" or, "I specialize in contact centres." But as you rightly point out, everyone's specializing in serving the customer. And so taking that approach is incredibly smart.
Dan Cooper (22:23)
It's pretty confronting, right? Especially as leaders, we didn't wake up in the morning thinking, "I've been a contact centre leader all my life. I'm suddenly going to have to learn retail." But that's what happened to us all. And we did it to ourselves, which is the awesome thing. Because if you're standing still, someone's going to overtake you, how do you keep constantly evolving? And that's what I enjoy about working here.
Blair Stevenson (22:46)
Awesome. So I'd just like to go back. Just thinking about this unified frontline in mind. And so some of the old metrics that you would have various channels kind of go out the window. How have you changed your performance measures to kind of reflect the approach that you're taking now?
Dan Cooper (23:09)
So our metrics have changed dramatically. And this was even before we did the unified frontline. Just even in contact centres alone, the metrics changed. And the metrics changed in who they were applied to, not so much what they were.
We haven't gone and revolutionized how contact centers get measured. They're there for a good reason. They're tried and true. But it's about levels of leadership and ownership.
So in my opinion, targeting a frontline team member on Interaction NPS or AHT is just lazy in our environment, because they don't have the same influence on those metrics as, say, a channel leadership team member does.
We influence things like, you know, where our people are, what tactical plans we put in place, what tools systems, et cetera, we put in place to make our people more efficient. But the one thing we did change from a sort of customer experience perspective is how we measured parts of our customer satisfaction.
(24:12)
So we still measure Interaction NPS, but we changed out first contact resolution a couple of years ago, and we advocated for ownership instead. So now in our INPS surveys, we actually ask our customers, did we take ownership of your query? And the rationale behind that, in our world, several interaction types can't be resolved on the one interaction. Especially as we've moved out more of the simple contact types.
So what Spark’s promise is, in the front lines you will contact us once. From there on, we will take ownership of your situation through to resolution with the same individual. And so that, to us, says to the customer, "We've got your back through the journey, not just a done-in-one approach."
For instance, if you've got a fault and we've determined that there's nothing wrong with your home network, there's nothing wrong at our end, and we actually need someone to go check the physical cables, we're not going to be able to send someone out that day. Because we're reliant on the local fiber provider. So that appointment could be two days from now.
We don't want to just leave you. We will check in with you in two days. We'll probably just drop your text to go, "Hey, look, I'm looking back at the data now. I can see the connection flowing through. Hopefully you're seeing the same, Blair. If you've got any concerns, just message us back and we'll work on it together."
And ownership has resonated extremely well with our people as a culture drive, than FCR. Because FCR, our people found it hard to buy into, especially in our resolve areas. Whereas now ownership, that's a KPI for our people. As well as us as an organization, but it's something they can tangibly relate to.
Blair Stevenson (26:08)
That makes huge sense.
Dan Cooper (26:11)
At an individual level - sorry to interrupt - in summary, we've gone from 14 KPIs to four or five. Two of them are usually customer feedback based, things like ownership and a service experience score on the individual. One is usually an adherence measure of some sort. And the other could be a sales or a digital adoption measure.
Blair Stevenson (26:36)
Right. So what are all the benefits which are flowed from this massive change that you've undertaken?
Dan Cooper (26:45)
I spend my time looking at metrics in detail because I love data and I'm a bit of a nerd. But when I step back, we've pretty much gone from a business that was known for its poor customer service about five years ago, to a business where customer service is just not a topic of conversation amongst the public.
It flares up every now and again, some feedback on social media, et cetera, but I love the way we respond to it. We front foot it, we stick our hand up where we need to. And that indicates to me the scale of the change that we've achieved.
I don't think I could confidently say I'm happy, but I'm okay with our trajectory. And I'm very excited for what we're going to do in the coming months to improve our customer journey and our employee experience as well.
(27:32)
But if we were to talk about some sort of harder metrics, so to speak, over the three-year period, we've significantly improved our customer Interaction NPS score.
And my favourite is we've had an excellent improvement in employee NPS, because our people are now challenged as they're focused on complex and relationship building, rather than just transactional interactions. And when you do your customer and your culture right, your commercial follows.
Well, we've got a reduction of 45% in human assisted interactions over the last four years. And at the same time, our digital interactions have gone up significantly as our journeys became more intuitive, people could do it at a time that suited them using the convenience of an app, et cetera. And it's gone from strength to strength with our digital adoption drive.
Blair Stevenson (28:33)
That's brilliant. A last thought, really, based on all your experience, what advice would you give to other contact centre leaders who are deciding to go down the same route?
Dan Cooper (28:48)
Sure. Start with culture. If you've got your people on board and informed on where you're trying to head, that's where the journey needs to start. And the culture is not just restricted to contact centres. It's the whole organisation. We were really fortunate to have an advocate for the contact centre within our organisation and our exec team.
So how can you be the advocate of the contact centre within the organisation, where you're quite vocal about the fact that the contact centre is not creating the volume, we're responding to it? So if we fixed it upfront, or made those journeys better, the friction wouldn't need to show up.
So start with culture, listen to your customers, and the commercial benefits are just going to follow.
Blair Stevenson (29:36)
Awesome. Great advice. Dan, thank you so much. For listeners, you'll find the link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Dan on LinkedIn, you'll also find the link to his LinkedIn profile in the description too.
And if you'd like to follow me on LinkedIn, you'll find a link to my profile there as well. Well that's it from us today. Have a productive week.