Transitioning to new ways of working with four key focuses

Everything has changed in the last year. Business has switched overnight to a model of home-based working that normally would have taken years to evolve. One thing is for sure, organisations will never be the same again. And that’s a good thing. Change should be embraced: it’s an exciting challenge that can help to release innovation and transformation at an unprecedented pace. 

But with change comes responsibility, the responsibility to implement change effectively. At the heart of that lies the people and processes that will enable change, and therein lies the key. The transition to home-based working will only be successful if you can ensure that colleagues feel supported and part of the bigger picture, and that processes have been streamlined. So how do you get teams on board? How can you ensure that you move at pace?

As my team and I have been through this journey, I’ve found that there are four key areas to focus on to navigate this challenge successfully: 

1.        Simplify your end-to-end processes and reduce the number of handoffs between colleagues

2.        Measure people on the outcomes they deliver rather than how many hours they spend ‘in the office’

3.         Create a virtual operational management framework, including a ‘mission control’ dashboard to monitor and track customer interaction and satisfaction

4.         Be agile enough to adapt and prepare for life after the pandemic.

Let me give you some more detail about what these mean in practical terms with real-life examples from our own experiences, within Capita and with clients.

As part of my role as Managing Director with Capita Regulated Services, I‘ve worked with some of the biggest clients, managing the front- and back-office operations for more than 15 years. For the last five years, I’ve worked with a large UK insurer.

We helped this client to manage more than 1.6 million life and pensions customers globally, more than 3,000 customer processes, and 1,000 colleagues across four sites in the UK and India. These colleagues had customer-facing and back-office roles. 

Processes were fragmented across teams and sites, leading to a lack of transparency and control. The average end-to-end customer experience took 35 days from initial request (contact centre) to fulfilment (back office); some outlying enquiries could even take up to 100 days. As you can imagine, customers weren’t happy, which led to a negative Net Promoter Score (NPS) of less than 70%. 

Even before the pandemic, we began to examine these processes to streamline them. First of all, we acted swiftly to capture all the touchpoints of work items: how the work was processed, all the process steps, and who took these steps. With this new insight, the insurer was well placed to undertake a three-stage service modernisation programme, based on streamlining the standard operating framework (Simplify), comprehensively re-engineering its processes (Strengthen) and achieving continuous improvement by overlaying digital and enabling technologies (Succeed).

Simplifying processes

One challenge was that the inherited processes were paper based. The philosophy of using real-time data insights into customer behaviour required changes, including removing paper and using online verification tools and other technology enablers. We addressed this, redesigning the client’s processes to eliminate paper and reduce the number of customer touch points, reducing almost 3,000 fragmented processes to just 250 end-to-end customer-orientated processes and aligning business KPIs to drive incremental improvements, so that 80% of customer demands were fulfilled at the first point of contact and the remaining 20% within three business days. And we’re glad that we did. Suddenly it was no longer a gradual transformation but an immediate need, as the day-to-day operations became home-based.

The moral here is that, if you haven’t started simplifying, do it before it has to be done. When moving work between locations and colleagues, whether they’re working in the office or remotely, the simpler the process and the fewer the handoffs, the better. This can take time to achieve, but the pay-off is well worth it. In one customer service group, Capita moved its NPS from – 11 to +79 in just eight months. This work was done before the Covid-19 pandemic, but it contributed greatly to our ability to quickly adapt and respond to the crisis.

Measuring outcomes versus hours ‘in the office’

When dealing with a newly remote, home-based workforce, many organisations focus on making sure that employees are working to their assigned schedules. Stop doing this! Worry less about what time Jane clocked on and off, and more about the customer and client outcomes that she delivered. 

Did she hit her production goals for the day? Note that production goals should factor in handling time for each work type – so complexity, variations and time to complete are calculated into them.

By replacing manual, inefficient paper-based processes with paperless digital-verification ones, we’ve reduced complaints by 50%, increased employees’ satisfaction and purpose, reducing their attrition by 70%, and enabled a more equitable assessment of goal achievement. Team members can now work on different tasks, giving them more autonomy, trust and flexibility and, ultimately, significantly improving their wellbeing.

A subsequent survey of our people showed that 99% were fully satisfied with the actions that we took to protect them during the pandemic.

Create a ‘Mission Control’

Like NASA’s Mission Control, front- and back-office operations need a central hub that provides full visibility of all the data related to work, people and processes, regardless of their location.

At Capita, we implemented dashboards for all our work and resources. This enables leaders to see at a glance how they are performing against their production and customer-outcome goals, and to proactively adjust resources and assignments to cope with peaks or troughs in work – or an outage at a particular location or unreliable internet connectivity in a particular region.

You can read more about our process for this in our recent case study “Simplify, Strengthen, Succeed: Capita’s approach creates better outcomes for customers, clients and colleagues”

Be agile to adapt and prepare for the future after the pandemic

When the Covid-19 pandemic began in March 2020, business ─ as we knew it ─ changed irrevocably. Suddenly, workers were being instructed to work from home instead of congregating in offices, public transport virtually ground to a halt and daily life was effectively frozen. For many companies, this had a devastating impact on their ability to serve their clients.

Within 48 hours of lockdown restrictions being announced in both the UK and India in late March, we ensured that 80% of our colleagues in both countries could work effectively from home, while a further 10% continued to work from our one UK office that remained operational. We now have 97% of our 750 contact-centre colleagues working from home across four global locations and 100% of customer demands fulfilled, including a new self-serve customer channel of choice by using LivePerson to fulfil customer demands while on the move. Since then we’ve ramped up our conversational messaging programme, to enable digital fulfilment of key customer demands, and launched a faster payments service to accelerate payments to customers to within three hours instead of three to five days.

You can find out more about our plans for business life after the pandemic here “Strengthen, Succeed: future proofing customer-service excellence in the ‘new normal’“

Summary

Become agile, automate or simplify your processes where possible, empower your colleagues and create an environment in which you can act quickly to resolve issues. These four things are the key to ensuring that you can adapt to new ways of working. 

We’ve been through it here at Capita and with our clients, and we’re now well placed to work towards the future. As increasing numbers of customer-service employees are likely to be working from home for the foreseeable future, the role of transformative digital technologies ─ from robotic process automation to artificial intelligence and beyond ─ will become ever more critical. Now is not the time to procrastinate but to immerse yourself in these transformative practices.

And if you need a helping hand, feel free to get in touch with either myself or Capita. We can help. Our customers can now use our best-in-class service-modernisation and digital capabilities, assured that their customer-facing and back-office operations are in good hands ─ even in the most uncertain of times.