BT Ireland wins the 2024 “Using CRQ for Growth” Award

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BT Ireland wins the 2024 “Using CRQ for Growth” Award

We have been privileged at Deep-Insight to work with BT Ireland since 2008 when they first started on their journey towards becoming one of Ireland’s most customer-centric companies. 

It has been a long and successful Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) journey for them. Initially, the BT Ireland leadership team worked hard on identifying and addressing its clients’ major service issues. Then they progressed to the more enjoyable part of the journey – collaborating with clients on new innovative technology-based programmes.

In recent years, the BT Ireland leadership team  took a more commercial focus to CRQ. They used detailed customer insight, along with externally validated propensity to buy, to identify clients where they could develop further solutions to their business problems.

BT Ireland discovered that the excellent relationships they had built over years was critical to driving revenue growth with clients that continued to be delighted by their offerings. Not an easy task in an industry where, every year, customers expect better telecommunications solutions for less cost.

Well done, Shay Walsh, Aaron Carroll, Therese Gunning, Gillian McMahon, Paul Byrne, Peter Evans, Alan Shanley, Conor Patterson, Cathal O’Toole, Priscilla Regan and the wider BT Ireland team!

Rose Murphy

The BT Ireland leadership team were helped by an army of service managers, account directors and engineers. They were also guided by a CX team led by Barry O’Shea, Mary McDonagh and Deirdre Tyrrell whose great CX efforts have been recognised globally in recent years.

Shay Walsh, Managing Director, BT Ireland (left) commented on the Deep-Insight award:

“We are absolutely thrilled to be recognised in the category of ‘Using CRQ for Growth’.

Working with the team in Deep-Insight we challenged ourselves collectively to convert our top quartile CRQ scores to income growth. This brought a focus on widening our contacts base within our client base and creating a watch list of customers who needed more focus from our customer-facing teams.

The additional insight and broader awareness informed how better to serve our customers and ultimately how we achieve the dividend of growth from CRQ.”

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About BT Ireland

Your trusted provider to a connected world.

We’re one of the world’s leading communications services companies. The solutions we sell are integral to modern life. Our purpose is as simple as it is ambitious: we connect for good. There are no limits to what people can do when they connect. And as technology changes our world, connections are becoming even more important to everyday life.

Today, that’s truer than ever. The connections we make are helping solve the world’s biggest challenges such as the global pandemic, climate change and cyber security. Through the power of technology, we’re supporting customers to live, work and play together better.

For more information, go to www.btireland.com.

About Deep-Insight

Deep-Insight is a leading European B2B Customer Experience (CX) company founded in 2000 by a small team of ‘magicians’ with one goal: researching a way to read customers’ minds. Today, Deep-Insight supports customers all over the world with the skills, tools and methodologies to establish and operate world-class Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) programmes.

For more information, go to deep-insight.com or email us at sales@deep-insight.com.

 

 

Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods wins “Best CRQ Communications” Award for 2024

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Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods wins “Best CRQ Communications” Award for 2024

Vreugdenhil conducted its first Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment in 2022, impressing us with their smooth adoption of the CRQ process, as if it had been a long-standing practice.

What stood out most was their commitment from the outset. They dived into the process with enthusiasm and maintained a strong momentum throughout all the phases of the CRQ process.

In 2022, strong client relationships were identified as a key strength. Determined to build on this foundation, Vreugdenhil developed an internal training programme for all colleagues who have contact with customers, to enhance their client communication skills. They employed a variety of creative formats like interactive training sessions customised for different departments.

These ‘customer contact training’ sessions emphasized proactive client engagement and addressed the nuances of dealing with different customer types.

We recognise these practices as ‘best-in-class’ in the communications area. It’s no surprise that communication emerged as a standout strength in the 2024 CRQ assessment.

Not only was Vreugdenhil diligent in following up with internal communications and training, during the most recent 2024 CRQ assessment they again displayed their strengths in this area. They have an ability to connect with their clients through their personalised communication plans. Their active marketing of the CRQ survey also helps them gain valuable insights from their customer base.

I also need to mention Fabienne Falvay who led the 2024 CRQ project with Vreugdenhil. Here is Fabienne’s view:

“It’s always a joy to work with the Vreugdenhil team, they are all actively involved and love brainstorming new and creative ways to give the survey more attention.

Not only was Vreugdenhil diligent in following up with internal communications and training, during the most recent 2024 CRQ assessment they again displayed their strengths in this area. They have an ability to connect with their clients through their personalised communication plans. Their active marketing of the CRQ survey also helps them gain valuable insights from their customer base.

The video on past results was fantastic and this year we’ve seen even more creativity from them in the form of banners raising awareness for the upcoming programme. I cannot wait to see what is next for them, I am sure it will be great!”

Working with the team in Vreugdenhil, namely Leonie, Erik and Jeroen was a pleasure! They embraced the CRQ process and made it a strong strategic initiative in Vreugdenhil and it showed in their amazing results. I truly think their internal communication activities like sharing the video with past results and raising awareness with the banners for this year’s assessment are best practices! Can’t wait to work with them again!

Alexandra Calugarici

Leonie Soetendaal is a Commercial Project Manager who has been working at Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods for nearly 10 years.

Together with Commercial Director Gerben van Schaik, and colleagues Jeroen de Kunder and Erik Bulthuis, Leonie has been the driving force behind Vreugdenhil’s CX journey since 2022.

Leonie commented on this year’s award:

“At Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods, we believe in the power of connection and lasting relationships. This award is a wonderful recognition of our commitment to open and meaningful communication with our customers. Together with our partners, we make a difference!”

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About Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods

Vreugdenhil is a Dutch family business that has been active in the dairy market since 1954. Every day, we work hard to make all the goodness of milk available to everyone in the world. We specialise in milk powder, with four production locations in the Netherlands. Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods processes more than one billion kilograms of milk per year into thousands of tons of milk powder, which we export to 130 countries worldwide.

Find out more about Vreugdenhil at www.vreugdenhildairyfoods.com.

About Deep-Insight

Deep-Insight is a leading European B2B Customer Experience (CX) company founded in 2000 by a small team of ‘magicians’ with one goal: researching a way to read customers’ minds. Today, Deep-Insight supports customers all over the world with the skills, tools and methodologies to establish and operate world-class Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) programmes.

For more information, go to deep-insight.com or email us at sales@deep-insight.com.

 

 

open eir wins the “Embracing CRQ” Award for 2024

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open eir wins the “Embracing CRQ” Award for 2024

Everybody in Ireland knows open eir.  You’ve seen their distinctive green and white “Connecting Ireland with superfast fibre broadband” vans on the streets, installing fibre lines into business premises and into homes across the country.

You’ve probably also seen vans from Circet (pronounced “sur-say”) who are open eir’s key partner on the ground. We have to mention them in this award as they are an integral part of the open eir teams who operate at the coalface and meet customers on a daily basis.

2024 was our second year working with open eir. What impressed me the most about their approach to implementing a Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) programme was the extent to which they embraced the whole CRQ approach – taking the feedback at face value, closing the loop with the customers, putting in detailed (in fact, very detailed!) responses to all of the feedback, and kicking off a transformation programme that they are committed to for the long haul. They know it’s not a 12-month initiative. It’s a journey.

Some of the specific actions that open eir took in 2024 included:

  • Improvements to the appointments process, and planned upgrades to their Unified Gateway (UG) system;
  • Implementation of new quality processes in partnership with Circet;
  • New CX roles created; 
  • Reviewing processes and systems to understand where automation could be implemented to free up time to devote to client-facing activities.

Our Deep-Insight CX Consultant managing the open eir relationship is Kate Casey. She knows the team intimately and had this to say: 

“Following last year’s results, the entire open eir team – from the leadership team down to Customer Service Managers (CSMs) and networks engineers – jumped in and took decisive action. No messing around with these guys! They have managed to figure out how to embed customer centricity into every aspect of their daily operations. Their commitment to embracing change and prioritising customer-focused principles has been exceptional.

What was fantastic was seeing such impressive improvements in their CRQ scores this year. That’s proof of just how deeply these values have become embedded into open eir. This award is a recognition of their hard work and commitment to making a meaningful difference for their customers.”

I fully agree with Kate. On a personal note, it has been both a pleasure and an honour working with the open eir team over the past couple of years. I’m absolutely delighted to see them win the “Embracing CRQ” award this year. It was thoroughly deserved.

John O’Connor

Una Stafford, Managing Director Networks, and Maeve O’Malley, Managing Director, Wholesale, have been leading the charge on open eir’s CX transformation journey over the past two years. 

Both Una and Maeve are industry veterans who understand the challenges of a cultural transformation in large complex telecommunications environments. However, their real skill has been to convince hundreds of people in both open eir and Circet to embrace Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) as a way of life.

In accepting the award, Maeve O’Malley has this to say:

“Working with Deep-Insight has given us the quantitative data we need to understand the areas we need to work on, to improve our operators’ experience with open eir. The findings from last year created the foundation for our 2024 plan and this year’s assessment is now helping us understand what’s working and where we still have gaps.

“The data has also helped galvanise our teams with a shared understanding of the transformation required.  The insight from the team has added huge value, not only in helping us understand the challenge ahead but also supporting us in developing and prioritising our plans.”

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About open eir

At open eir, we’re building Ireland’s fastest-growing full fibre network. Our network reaches far and wide, transforming the way individuals, businesses, and communities experience the digital world. With over 1.3 million homes and businesses across 26 counties now able to access faster speeds through any one of our 29 trusted retail service providers, we are the architects of a brighter, more connected future for Ireland.

Find out more about open eir at www.openeir.ie.

About Deep-Insight

Deep-Insight is a leading European B2B Customer Experience (CX) company founded in 2000 by a small team of ‘magicians’ with one goal: researching a way to read customers’ minds. Today, Deep-Insight supports customers all over the world with the skills, tools and methodologies to establish and operate world-class Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) programmes.

For more information, go to deep-insight.com or email us at sales@deep-insight.com.

 

 

Six Degrees wins “Best CRQ Response 2024” Award

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Six Degrees wins “Best CRQ Response 2024” Award

Six Degrees has been a client of ours since 2020 and it has been a privilege to work with the team for the past four years on their journey to greater customer centricity.

Fiona Lynch has been the Deep-Insight CX consultant working most closely with Chris Blofield, Conley Newall and the Six Degrees team to improve their Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) scores this year.

Fiona has been hugely impressed by the strategic response from the leadership team, starting with their commitment to ‘Customer First’, a core value to place the client at the heart of organisation. 

Fiona adds:

“The response from Six Degrees right across the organisation to last year’s CRQ assessment was incredibly well executed and their jump in scores really reflects their efforts. We’re delighted for them.”

The leadership response from Six Degrees throughout 2024 has been impressive:

  • Automating client-facing report production and implementing AI-powered productivity tools, enabling Sales and Service Delivery Managers (SDMs) to focus on more valuable client activities
  • Adding SDMs to an additional 70% of client accounts through increased resourcing
  • Completing 261 proactive problem improvements, focusing on platform resiliency, fine-tuning alert systems, proactive capacity management, and implementing best practices in environment configurations, resulting in a 30% reduction in major outages
  • Strengthening our governance framework with improved quality checks to ensure timely and concise communications with clients
  • Introducing real-time dashboards to track the lifecycle of tickets through our system, leading to a 6% increase in ticket resolution performance over the last quarter
  • Automating the resolution of simple tasks, resulting in 114,000 self-healed events over the past year
  • Enhancing change management processes to increase visibility of change impacts and risk assessments, achieving a 98% success rate in change implementations over the past year
  • Automating contract renewal notifications to improve awareness, transparency, and proactive communication, preventing unintended contract roll-overs
  • Improving the billing experience through direct engagement with our Billing Management team to resolve issues and provide customisations, such as the use of cost centres

These initiatives reflect Six Degrees’ commitment to maintaining the highest standards of service quality, proactivity, and transparency with its clients.

Huge congratulations to everyone in Six Degrees who work so hard on a daily basis to provide clients with an amazing experience.

Rose Murphy

 

Six Degrees appointed Vince DeLuca as Chief Executive Officer in 2024 as it sought to distinguish itself as the UK’s leading provider of secure, integrated cloud services. Vince commented on this year’s award:

“We’re incredibly proud to be recognised for our commitment to our core value of ‘Customer First.’ At Six Degrees, actively listening to and acting on our customers’ insights is fundamental to driving meaningful change and delivering exceptional outcomes.

This recognition reflects the dedication and hard work of our entire team over the past year. With the continued support of Deep-Insight, we are excited to carry this momentum forward into the year ahead.”

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About Six Degrees

Protecting UK organisations and helping them thrive in the cloud by giving them secure platforms to innovate and grow. At Six Degrees we’re all about enabling our clients to achieve more; providing superior secure solutions, powered by our passionate people.

Find out more about Six Degrees at www.6dg.co.uk.

About Deep-Insight

Deep-Insight is a leading European B2B Customer Experience (CX) company founded in 2000 by a small team of ‘magicians’ with one goal: researching a way to read customers’ minds. Today, Deep-Insight supports customers all over the world with the skills, tools and methodologies to establish and operate world-class Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) programmes.

For more information, go to deep-insight.com or email us at sales@deep-insight.com.

 

 

Avoiding the CX Rat Trap

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Avoiding the CX Rat Trap

Goodhart's Law


A story of rats, cobras and economists

This is a story about rats, cobras and economists (and no, they’re not the same thing!) but it’s primarily a blog about a British economist called Charles Goodhart and his take on target setting, key performance indicators (KPIs) and the law of unintended consequences.

Goodhart is a man whose musings are worth reading if you’re struggling to make your customer experience (CX) programme work. All CX programmes involve the measurement of customer satisfaction (CSat), Net Promoter Score (NPS) or similar KPI. Companies will sometimes incentivise their employees to achieve a particular CX objective: “If we hit our NPS target of +50 this year, all sales staff get an additional bonus of £1,000.” This is not an uncommon practice. It’s also not a good one, as we are going to find out shortly.

Charles Goodhart is best known for Goodhart’s Law, which is neatly summarised in the Sketchplanations cartoon above. Setting targets can result in unintended consequences, particularly where incentives are involved.

Before we delve into Goodhart and his famous law, let’s start with a couple of stories about rats and cobras.

The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt

In 1902, the French ruled Indochina, a region in South East Asia comprised of modern-day Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The capital and administrative centre was Hanoi.

That year, the French administrators introduced a bounty on rats after it was discovered that rats played a significant role in transmitting the plague. The Third Plague Pandemic was a pretty serious issue in Asia at the time. It had spread from China in the late nineteenth century and by the time it was finally eradicated in the 1960s, more than 10 million people had died from the plague.

A bounty seemed to make sense. To claim it, the locals simply had to bring in a bag of rat tails. There was no need for piles of dead rats clogging up the corridors of power in Hanoi – tails would suffice. Within weeks, the bounty was working. Hundreds of rat tails poured in. Then thousands. It seemed too good to be true, and so it turned out to be.

It didn’t take long for French officials to figure out what was happening. The bounty had created an entirely new industry in Hanoi where rodent tails were brought into the capital from the countryside. Worse still, entrepreneurs in Hanoi started to breed rats in order to increase their bounty revenues. The number of rats in Hanoi was increasing, rather than decreasing.

Eventually, the bounty was discontinued. This story of administrative failure and unintended consequences is told in Michael Vann’s book The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt.


The Cobra Effect

It’s not just the French who were outwitted by their colonial subjects. A similar case happened under British rule in India, and documented in Horst Siebert’s book Der Kobra-Effekt.

At the same time that the French were grappling with a rat epidemic in Hanoi, the British were dealing with a cobra explosion in India. Cobras were viewed by the British administrators as deadly pests and a bounty was introduced in Delhi for every dead cobra handed in to the authorities. Many cobras were killed and handed in but, to the bemusement of the British rulers, the cobra population seemed to be on the rise.

It’s the same story of simple economics: the cost of breeding a cobra was significantly lower than the bounty, so entrepreneurs started to breed cobras. When the bounty was stopped, the breeders released the remaining cobras into the wild, further exacerbating the situation.


Goodhart's Law

Charles Goodhart is a British economist. He was born in 1936 and spent nearly 20 years of his career at the Bank of England, working on and writing about public and financial policy. In 1975, he wrote a paper containing the line: “whenever a government seeks to rely on a previously observed statistical regularity for control purposes, that regularity will collapse.”

The comment was specifically about monetary policy but would later be generalised as a law about targets, metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). In 1997, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern expressed Goodhart’s Law as follows when she was investigating grade inflation in university examinations:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The more a 2.1 examination performance becomes an expectation, the poorer it becomes as a discriminator of individual performances. Targets that seem measurable become enticing tools for improvement.

Marilyn Strathern’s interpretation that has become the most widely used today.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

Charles Goodhart

The basic message from Goodhart’s Law is a simple one: beware the law of unintended consequences when you set targets for people to achieve.

This is equally true when companies set targets in the field of customer experience (CX). If senior leadership teams incentivise their sales people and account managers to hit Net Promoter Score (NPS) targets, they will be achieved come hell or high water. In a previous blog, I outlined how CX programmes are often ‘gamed’ to achieve ridiculously high NPS targets which bear no relationship to the company’s actual performance. Common actions taken to game the CX system include:

  • Selecting only those clients who are Ambassadors for you and your product or service, when you are looking for customer feedback
  • Within those clients, selecting only those individuals who you know will score you 9/10 or 10/10 (these are ‘Promoters’ in NPS terminology)
  • Making sure to deselect any client that is likely to give you a poor score, using excuses like: “Now is not the right time to ask their views” or “We’ll only antagonise them if we approach them now”
  • Refusing to send a survey to anybody who doesn’t know you really well, even if it’s a senior decision maker that you’d love to have a conversation with. Why? The chances of them scoring you 9 or 10 are slim
  • Not outsourcing the NPS survey process to a third party that can give the option of confidentiality to survey participants – confidential surveys are likely to elicit lower scores even if they provide a much more realistic and honest view of your product or service

In many cases, employees and leadership teams are unaware that they are gaming the system. They simply believe that they are doing the right thing for the company.


Avoiding the CX Rat Trap - 5 Rules

Rule No. 1: Do not incentivise employees to achieve CX targets. It’s that simple. If you do, you’ll end up with more rats and cobras than you can handle.

Rule No. 2: If your Senior Leadership Team or Board is bonused on achieving NPS results, stop this practice immediately! You would be amazed at the number of companies that engage in such bonus schemes.

Rule No. 3: Resist the temptation to publish your Net Promoter Score in your annual report. All you are doing is setting yourself up for inflated NPS results as nobody in the organisation will want to be associated with a ‘down year’. It’s human nature. By accident or design, employees and leaders will game the system to achieve higher scores next year.

Rule No. 4: Put a robust CX governance structure in place. Make sure ALL clients are surveyed. Sign off the contact lists. Resist the urge to exclude people whose views might be unfavourable – you want to know what they are thinking.

Rule No. 5: Finally, don’t approach CX with the mindset of a colonial administrator! Senior leadership teams have to view customer feedback as a gift. They have to encourage their colleagues to be open about getting feedback, whether good, bad or indifferent. Without honest feedback, change will never happen. Poor practices will continue and eventually clients will leave.

Finally, if you want to find out more about how to set up and run a customer experience (CX) programme effectively, contact us for a chat. We’d love to hear from you.