Christian, you are part of our team of skilled CX-consultants, please tell us a bit about yourself and your area of expertise?
I am an incurable optimist who always believes that everything is possible, there are simply different degrees of difficulty to conquer. Early in my career, while studying, I became a telemarketer and 25 years later I have just as long experience in outbound telephony, technical system responsibility and sales. By now I have encountered most things so as a consultant I would describe myself as a friendly technician, knowledgeable analyst as well as creative business developer.
What is your specialty and focus?
My role is to help our customers who want to increase their sales. It can be via phone but also digitally, on the web. You can summarize it with “Proactivity and outbound”. I am also passionate about assignments that may seem impossible at first sight where we don’t really know what to do going into it, but the customer has a hard-achieved goal or need.
When do customers choose to take you in?
There are basically three phases, before, during and after.
Before: Normally starts with a thought, a challenge or a need. I help by challenging set ideas and try to clarify the scope of the project and investigate what is possible. One example was a feasibility study on how to start up a new customer service organization. Here, technology was not the first thing I looked at, but rather organizational challenges and what other systems we needed to interact with.
Another assignment I was involved in was one where our customer needed to develop their website. Either a web agency or Telia would help them and my focus was again not on technology, instead we did a thorough feasibility study with in-depth interviews with both employees and customers who used the website. We then put the puzzle together and identified gaps between what the company desired and what the users wanted and did. This resulted in an actionable plan for the customer meeting and the natural next step was to look at how to technically implement it.
During: In a project we often have super-skilled project managers driving our progress, so in this phase I often do pin-pointed needed efforts.
After: When you have started using your new solution or functionality, I usually come in again and examine if there is anything that can be improved or adjusted. In those cases it is incredibly important to be able to weigh in several different competencies and aspects to find improvements that works for everyone involved.
One of our customers included me in all the phases listed above. They realised that they did not handle their SME-customers well enough and needed to set up a new team to target this segment. We started the project together with the leadership team to structure a plan. When a new leader was recruited for this team I trained her and set up the ACE-structure needed to support their new business. We kept this project on-going until the team were ready to fly for themselves.
What benefits do you see in the projects you are involved in?
- Increased sales. By using the technology smarter and making changes to routines and processes we have in one case increased total sales by almost 5%.
- Increased efficiency. Through better integrations, customers have achieved faster internal processes and can handle cases faster. We actually cut off 2 months of lead time for an insurance company,
- Employee satisfaction. The users are happier when we make their workday faster and their tools more user-friendly.
- Case transfer. This is a bit challenging to explain so I will use an example. At an insurance company agents expressed frustration that they did simple errands/cases for their customers and consequently did not have time to help customers whose house had burned down. There were simply more cases to handle than there was time. By moving cases to self-service, we could free up time for the agents. And the really smart thing about this is that customer service began to own their part of the website. Now they can make instant updates from the ACE platform. Previously they had to make a request to a manager that sent it on to the web agency, who often completed the task too late.
The customers you have helped, what challenges have they faced?
The perhaps most important challenge that I encounter is that the customer has locked themselves into a solution which does not solve the problem they are facing. Those issues can be a bit sensitive to talk about and therefore my biggest focus is to find the problems that exist and clarify them. It is only then that we can find a suitable solution.
Another challenge I come across is that within the company you do not have the whole picture or lack adequate communication with other departments. So, it is quite common that I step in and help with a holistic perspective where we put together a plan in order to solve the task together. In my experience, letting an external party into a project often opens up internal doors that were previously closed.
What are you working on now?
Right now, I am involved in two projects. The first is a super fun project where we take existing solutions and combine them with new functionality that will lead to a better customer experience and higher sales. All at a lower cost.
In another project the customer wanted an automatic callback dialer. Like in my other project, it is about making an inventory of what is available and how we can build on an existing solution to create new value.
Great! Anything you wish to add?
Yes, two things actually. First, if you are thinking about using a callback dialer to increase your efficiency, then reach out to me. Secondly, if you think that you could engage with your customers in a better way, then also reach out to me and let’s have a chat!
