Aggressive dynamics – Customer Service in a Multinational
Situation
The Customer Service team had a performance and retention issue that jeopardised the quality that is associated to the client’s brand, with potential critical consequences (life or death for patients). The Customer Service team was often overwhelmed by demands & interruptions, multitasking a lot, had few breaks to calm down and internal conflict was high. The team felt that the critical role they played was rarely recognized and acknowledged.
Objective
Create engagement and emotional resilience for performance through team coaching.
Diagnostic: The team was in a vicious circle of non-constructive behaviour and lacked the awareness to reverse it. Their stress level was detrimental to services & detailed oriented tasks, people skilled interactions and maintaining healthy in-group relationships. Internal team engagement issues compounded performance issues. The team was only as strong as its weakest member, and we found it necessary to reinforce every team member to create a stronger team.
Action
We designed a three-phase project to create a top performer team with excellence in execution. Phase 1 built individual awareness and increased intra-team cooperation. We organised and facilitated 3 workshops (over 4 months to support their schedule), coached the Team Manager and did investigation work with internal clients. We created intention based on a model we developed to drive alignment. We focused our work on supporting their mental shift by increasing team members’ self- awareness. Phase 2 provided the team and its clients with a clear framework (team charter), defining how the company vision cascaded into individual and team behaviour and reviewing KPIs to measure success. Phase 3 was follow up actions, including a Customer Service operations strategy and implementation of innovative ideas coming out of Phase 2.
Result
The team moved from victim to actor mindset and gained support from the leadership team and sponsors. The organisation values were wired into their tasks. By sharing experiences, they built empathy and increased performance and innovation. The team created systems to ensure future challenges would not derail their efforts. Turnover was stabilised and costumers, both internal and external, noticed the drastic shift in behaviour and quality.