Fintona Financial (not the company’s real name) had a problem. Interviews with their financial advisors revealed something disturbing: When dealing with Fintona’s Customer Support, many advisors followed a three-call rule saying, “If you really need the right answer from Fintona, you have to call them three times [to ask the same question] and trust the first two operators who give you the same answer.” Yeah, ouch. The more calls they received, the more operators they needed, and the more their margins eroded.
How One Company Got Employees to Speak Up and Ask for Help
The first thing it tried was a “Bat signal.”
September 27, 2018
Summary.
Employees in a fast-growing call center were hesitant to admit to customers when they didn’t know the answer. The call center told them to ask for help when they didn’t know, but too many people were still afraid to look clueless. So they brainstormed ideas to address the problem, and tried implementing one of the crazier solutions: a “Bat signal” that employees could use to alert the whole team when they were struggling. This failed. But the team iterated until they found a variation that worked: something they called “Bat chat” that allowed employees to get useful answers more discretely. Iteration gave them a solution that worked so well that it spread naturally to the other parts of the business.
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HBR Learning
Customer Focus Course
Accelerate your career with Harvard ManageMentor®. HBR Learning’s online leadership training helps you hone your skills with courses like Customer Focus. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. Access more than 40 courses trusted by Fortune 500 companies.
Learn how to keep your customers—and their most important needs—front and center.