Company: HomeServe USA
Company Description: HomeServe USA is a market leader in emergency repair service plans designed to provide homeowners with plumbing, electrical and HVAC repair services when they need it the most. Operating in North America since 2003 and with impressive year on year growth, now works with more than 50 partners to provide best-in-class repair service plans to more than 1.8 million customers.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Telesales Team of the Year

Nomination Title: A team that leads with the customer first

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July 2013 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Despite having a 98% customer satisfaction rating and a 98% mystery shopper score, the Customer Service team at HomeServe are constantly striving to deliver world class service in every interaction. As part of this process of continuous evolution, the team challenged themselves to break away from the conventional metrics of contact center management such as AHT, sales conversion, schedule adherence, etc. and instead focus purely on the opinions of our customers, (while upholding our exceptionally high compliance standards) – and as a result the WOW Team was born.

The objective of the team was simple – Put the customer at the heart of everything we do and deliver unparalleled service that truly differentiates HomeServe from our competitors – a “WOW” experience.

To measure the success of the WOW team, all conventional metrics were removed from the front line (with the exception of adherence to manual compliance scripting) and replaced with one simple measure – Customer feedback. To obtain this we recruited a dedicated survey agent to call customers after all types of interaction to ask the following question:

“On a scale of 1-5, with 1 being completely dissatisfied and 5 being completely satisfied or “Wow’d”, how would you rate your experience with the representative that you spoke with at HomeServe?”

To remain in the WOW team, the dedicated specialists were required to average a minimum 4.5 / 5 rating every month while achieving all compliance objectives.

Before the program could begin, we created customized training heavily focused on the following two principles:

• Putting the customer at the heart of everything we do
• Empowering the WOW team to be the only person a customer needs to speak with to get a resolution

As we hoped, the results and feedback from our customers since the inception of the program in July have been remarkable:

After surveying almost 1,000 customers – the team have achieved a 4.96 rating - where 1 is poor and 5 is WOW!

In addition to the fantastic feedback from our customers, the commercial metrics in the background have also shown significant improvement versus the floor average, proving the benefit of this completely customer focused approach delivers both exceptional service and also financial reward for the business, with:

• Sales performance of the group up 9.7%!
• Cross sell/upgrade performance up 7.5%!
• Conversion to continuous payment is up 7.1%!

The accomplishments of this team have not only WOW’d our customers, but they have WOW’d our business here at HomeServe and as a result we currently in the process of rolling this approach out across the center to replicate these fantastic results.

We are incredibly proud of the passion, dedication and commitment of the WOW team to deliver a world class experience in every interaction and believe this kind of differentiation is worthy of the prestigious recognition provided by the Stevie Awards – hopefully you agree that this type of team are what makes our industry great!

(Please find attached as supporting evidence a small sample of the many customer commendations received by the team since inception, along with a short sample of survey responses from our customers when asked the 1-5 WOW question based on their interaction).

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