November 2016

Celebrating our clients...

VU Celebrates 100 years of great customer service

Victoria University (VU) has had a longstanding working relationship with CSBA since 2009 and was an early adopter of CSBA’s customer service standards across their traditional student service centre and contact centre teams.

After 3 years of making transformational improvement in customer service, VU wanted to make a step change to customer experience by integrating their customer service framework with more service areas including student administration and systems. They also wanted to ensure they were employing the most contemporary service mindset to be reflective of their aspirational brand positioning and approached CSBA to help them on their journey. CSBA introduced them to their newly developed Omni channel methodology: The Consultative CX framework.

The CX framework is designed to tap into the increasing importance emotion is playing in the world of differentiated customer experience. Historically – good customer service was about speed and accuracy but the move to increasing “self service” has meant the focus needed to shift. Research is showing that customers who seek help now want more than a solution – they want their agent to have empathy with them – a relationship with them of sorts.

CSBA worked with a broad cross section of the Student Services team at VU to enhance their Customer Service Framework, renew their service standards with a consultative approach and redevelop their Quality Assurance feedback model to embed the new customer experience philosophy. Called “Project Ignite” CSBA worked with more than 40 leaders and front line staff in Student Services to co create the new “customer service is everyone’s responsibility” ethos.

Project Champions volunteered from 9 different service teams to help gain alignment across teams, build capability and road test that the standards could be uniformly applied to any interaction over any channel or any customer need. The Student Services team also redeveloped their Customer Service Framework with a new view on customers that extended beyond students to including staff, parents, suppliers and community influencers.

At a recent celebratory morning tea hosted by the Project Ignite Owner Naomi Dempsey (Director of Customer Service and Student Communication) CSBA presented two awards to the Champions; Cam Luong and Marlene Molina.

These two worthy recipients were acknowledged for their creative application of the ideas learned during their framework development workshops, their disciplined commitment to meeting attendance and “homework”, their infectious enthusiasm and their willing adoption of new skills. They are now truly customer experience evangelists at VU and will play a vital role in continuing to foster commitment and improvement across the broader team.

At the morning tea all project champions and their line managers were recognised by Naomi and Registrar of Student Services, Teresa Tjia for their efforts, patience and commitment.

LINK HOUSING WINS AUSTRALIAN CUSTOMER SERVICE PROJECT OF THE YEAR

CSBA congratulates cleint Link Housing on their ‘mystery shopper’ program which was successful in winning the ‘Customer Service Project of the Year’ at the recent Customer Services Institute’s Australian Service Excellence Awards.

The awards are important recognition of the innovation of Australia's most outstanding customer service driven organisations and individuals. It is wonderful to see a community housing provider take the top accolade for the first time.

Andrew McAnulty, Link Housing CEO, said, ‘This is an awesome initiative in partnership with NSW FACS which has generated training and jobs for tenants with a focus on improved customer service. This is the first project in Australia that utilises their own tenants to mystery shop the services of their housing provider’

Link Housing describes the drivers of its customer service strategy as leadership, innovation and a customer-centric approach to all its services and operations. Delivered in collaboration with NSW Department of Family and Community Services, the ‘mystery shopper’ program involved tenants assessing and reviewing the effectiveness of processes and customer satisfaction. The program has gained some tenants long-term employment and motivated others towards further education.

Lance Carden, NSW FACS Director Customer Service and Business Improvement, said, ‘the collaboration between FACS, Link Housing and our tenants has been driven by a desire to create real tenant engagement and long-term service improvements.’

Link Housing is one of the oldest not-for-profit community housing providers in NSW and manages approximately 1,400 homes with over 2,500 customers across Northern Sydney. They work with clients along every step of the journey, from placing tenants into their new home all the way through to managing sustainable tenancy outcomes.
The customer - centric approach Link have applied across all services and operations has made this program successful and we are proud to work alongside Link and the NSW Department of Family Services and Community team.

Lance Carden, Director and Rebecca Huntsman, Senior Project Officer, at FACS Housing said the following about their relationship with CSBA.

“Over recent years, FACS Housing has worked closely with CSBA to improve customer experience for FACS Housing tenants. When FACS Housing and CSBA presented a case study on business improvements from our CSBA Service Quality Benchmarking program at the National Housing Conference, we set a challenging goal to involve our customers (tenants) in future service quality assessments. FACS Housing and CSBA then set about designing an innovative program which involved CSBA recruiting, training and employing tenants to provide feedback on their experience during interactions with FACS Housing.

David and the CSBA team were highly committed and flexible in developing and implementing the program, which provided FACS Housing with unique insights into tenant experience and perceptions about FACS Housing. We look forward to conducting similar customer experience improvement programs with CSBA in the future”

CSBA Index
Quarter 1, 2016-17

Argyle Community Housing
Town of Mosman Park
Homes North Community Housing

5.

GWM Water

6.

Blacktown City Council
University of Western Australia

8.

City of Monash

9.

Colonial First State Super

10.

Australian National University

TOP CUSTOMER SERVICE PERFORMERS BY INDUSTRY

1.

Automotive

Volkswagen

2.

Banks - General

Commonwealth Bank

3.

Banks - Loans

ANZ Bank Home Loans

4.

Energy

Energy Australia

5.

Housing Services

Argyle Community Housing

6.

Insurance

AAMI

7.

Local Government

Town of Mosman Park

8.

Superannuation

Colonial First State First Choice Superannuation Trust

9.

TAFE

TAFE Riverina

10.

Telecommunications

Virgin Mobile

11.

Tenancy Authority

VIC Residential Tenancy Bond Authority

12.

University

University of Western Australia

13.

Water

GWM Water

If you are assessing or reviewing your customer service to monitor and improve performance, CSBA's quarterly customer service benchmarking assessment can provide an independent validation of your internal assessment of the customer experience as well as benchmarking you against others. It generates specific, objective feedback you can use to reward and reinforce great performance as well as practical insights you can implement to improve the customer experience. Enrolments for the next quarter are open now so if your team could your team benefit from external feedback, contact CSBA to find out.