BT CX specialist on voice of the customer

Ahead of his session at CXN Live: Voice of the Customer, Sam Phillips-Lord, customer experience manager at global telecommunications provider BT, reflects on his career journey, sharing key lessons he has learned along the way.

Sam began his CX career on the frontline, answering phones in a call center and dealing with incorrect customer bills. In this role he enjoyed  doing right by customers and understanding what data was available to boost his performance in the world of business. From there, he moved through various management information data roles into the voice of the customer (VoC) sphere, before finally arriving at BT.

Find the value in customer feedback

One lesson that has shaped Sam’s career, which he learned from his call center days, is that customers matter and so does their feedback. This learning may seem a little obvious acknowledges Sam, but, he has discovered that perspectives and enthusiasm around customer feedback differs significantly between business departments.

“For example, people within sales care differently about how improving things for customers affects them compared to somebody in say product or a contact center,” explains Sam. “For me, it's about finding the right ways to transform what customers are saying into the right format for the right audience.”

Ensure that feedback reaches the right people

One of the greatest CX wins in Sam’s career occurred within his time at energy supplier E.ON. He took steps at the utilities firm to transform a problematic legacy feedback process to ensure that customer feedback was received by the right people, in a timely fashion. Originally, if a customer called E.ON there could be up to a week delay until they received a feedback survey call back, which relied on the customer being available and willing to pick up.

“What we didn't do very well at that time was making sure that the relevant people, our advisers, our frontline agents, were getting the feedback directly and taking action on it,” remarks Sam. “So we transformed the program to a real-time feedback loop and so if customers call E.ON today, within an hour they will get a text or an email asking for feedback.”

Steps were also taken to ensure feedback was channeled to the right departments and being actioned by the relevant people, to ensure E.ON was utilizing the full value of customer feedback provided.

As soon as customers give their feedback, it will be seen by the staff member they spoke to, their managers and anyone in the business who the feedback is relevant to, explains Sam. “Journey owners and journey leads could see feedback relevant to their journey and team managers would see instant feedback from their team.”

This initiative resulted in significant changes to the way advisor coaching. Instead of taking agents off the phone for an hour a week for standardized training, managers now had the opportunity to employ reactive coaching based on real-time feedback, to ensure that any issues identified can be swiftly targeted and eliminated.

“Rather than waiting for a week, when an advisor has spoken to maybe one, two or three hundred people and forgotten what the feedback was or why the customer was upset, angry or different than usual on the phone, we can have a real, immediate impact,”

These upgrades thanks to VoC data delivered real benefits to customers, Sam remarks. “We did improve NPS significantly through that real-time feedback loop, getting feedback to advisors and managers to make sure that they were improving things in real-time.”

Sign up to the upcoming CXN Live: Voice of the Customer online event to uncover Sam’s best kept secrets from 35+ years of VoC management.