Using insights as a North Star for customer-centric CX upgrades

At CXN Live: Contact Centers The Very Group's CX director, Mark Billingham, explained how the retailer uses insights to make meaningful contact center upgrades

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Chanice Henry
02/22/2022

customer centric The Very Group CX Network Customer Experience Retail Littlewoods

After beginning its life as a catalog retailer, The Very Group has evolved to stand as a 100 per cent digital retailer, which Billingham notes has required significant business and customer experience transformation.

On identifying where to start with CX transformation, Billingham notes: “All CX transformations should start on solid foundations, and for that you have to remove waste, you have to fix the processes that are broken within your contact center and remove unnecessary friction for customers.” Through a data-led approach, over the last three years the retailer has managed to remove 15 million calls annually from its contact centers via process fixes, first contact resolution improvement, AI integration and self-service channels. The group’s AI chatbot answers around 250,000 customer queries a month.

Building a customer-centric North Star vision

To locate and capture insights that are credible enough to guide a business strategy and contact center upgrades, Billingham notes that The Very Group started by dedicating itself to understanding the reasons driving customers to contact the retailer “to ensure we have the best possible chance of understanding how to fix the most important issues first for our customers”.

Data sources that The Very Group tap into include text analytics, voice analytics, agent feedback, scripts from chatbot’s customer conversations, NPS surveys, a UX lab visited by customers in person and its All Ideas Matter tool – a digitalized portal that captures VoC and VoE data. Users are invited to express ideas or observations and tickets are automatically submitted to the CX team who investigate the issues, interacts with the ticket creators and manages the case through to resolution.

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All of these sources combine to give The Very Group visibility on the current top five customer painpoints, which directs the retailer’s focus. These painpoints have a strong influence on Very’s NPS scores and the five points are communicated to the board every two weeks to assist with achieving buy in for particular contact center improvements.

Outcomes

This approach has inspired and enabled the launch of the retailer’s new CRM roadmap which is replacing legacy systems to improve customer interactions. Another improvement was applied to the workforce infrastructure post the onset of Covid-19. With the eventual lift of lockdowns and social distancing restrictions advisors expressed they missed face-to-face interaction with colleagues. Business leaders transformed the business to operate with a hybrid model converting portions of contact center hubs into dedicated spaces for advisors to socialize with each other. Office time is utilized twice a week for colleagues to interact, receive in person training and also communicate needed CX improvements.

Reflecting on the achievements won over the last three years from this insight-led approach and bringing data to the board, Billingham notes that brand NPS has increased by 20 points, The Very Group has been recognized in the Nunwood top 100, customer churn rates have lowered and its customer base has expanded in size.