Improving customer service by effectively engaging teams
Executive summary:
Our client in the construction industry needed to ensure there was a joined-up approach with their partners to provide their customers with better support, reduce complaints and increase customer satisfaction.
Flint Change undertook a programme to increase engagement across multiple inhouse and partner teams to understand the current issues and put in place new ways of working that addressed the root causes. The programme successfully reduced the volume of complaints, improved the time to resolve them, and enabled a targeted approach to identify and remedy poor performing partners.
The background story:
NHBC are the UK’s leading warranty and insurance provider for new homes. They set standards for registered builders and work to help them improve the construction quality of the homes they build.
There is a national agenda to raise standards in the construction industry and to protect homeowners.
What did they need?
The brief from NHBC was to ensure a joined-up approach with builders, developers and NHBC Claims, to do more to support homeowners better, reduce complaints and increase customer satisfaction.
The approach
In order to gain real traction on this initiative, we needed to engage builder and developer partners as well as the NHBC Claims teams.
We ran workshops, interviews and webinars with builders to really listen and understand their frustrations, blockers and obstacles; getting a deep understanding of why it wasn’t working as well as it could.
We did the same engagement process with the NHBC Claims teams and analysed all the claims data to ensure that our approach was targeted.
What was the solution?
The number of great ideas received from all of the groups was overwhelming! As a result, we created a clear plan to achieve results. The actions included:
- Creating a claims guidance manual for builder developers, giving them better access to information to enable them to support homeowners. This avoided homeowners becoming frustrated and calling into NHBC.
- Publishing technical guidance booklets for the top 5 issues that were affecting homeowners and builder developers, to ensure they had more support on these trickiest areas.
- Creating an employee toolkit to support relationship management with builders.
- Piloting a dedicated Customer Experience Consultant approach with a major builder in 3 areas, and subsequently rolling this out to all large builders.
The results
Once the improvement programme was delivered, the results were significant and the client was delighted with the improved performance. The key performance areas that improved included:
- Reduction in complaints in regard to NHBC’s performance
- Reduction in the time taken to resolve issues
- Reduction in complaints on builder repairs
- Poorly performing builders are easily identified allowing a more targeted approach to improve.
What did our client think?
The Claims Director at NHBC said:
“Working with Flint Change was a terrific experience. From the outset they demonstrated a great understanding of the problems we faced and what we wanted to achieve.
The strong focus on outcome was so key in helping us deliver some amazing results. We saw greatly improved customer satisfaction and employee engagement as well as cultural changes which led to improved ways of working.
They worked with us during a challenging time and their assistance in shaping our improvement strategy was a key element in our success. All in all, great to work with.”
