Put Culture and Talent at the Heart of Your CX Partnering Strategy

Competing priorities, culture, and talent are the biggest inhibitors to achieving customer-centricity among the Global 2000 (see Exhibit 1). Your partner strategy must include selecting a provider that is focused on talent and culture if customer experience is an initiative at your company. The leading customer engagement service providers are no longer just taking calls and answering emails; they are also helping to design the CX strategy at top global brands, using analytics to gain insight into their clients’ customer expectations and operations, and helping customers to implement intelligent automation that complements how customer service agents do their jobs. This change in client expectations means providers need to be on top of their game when it comes to attracting, developing, and retaining the best talent in the market and cultivating a customer-focused culture to be able to deliver on these services.

Exhibit 1: Competing priorities, culture, and talent gaps are holding companies back from customer-centricity

_{Source: HFS Research, 2019, n= 248 Global 2000 Enterprise Leaders}

Service providers should be investing in the best and brightest: The Teleperformance University example

Teleperformance, the world’s largest contact center service provider and the leader in HFS’ 2019 customer engagement operations Top 10, twice annually invites its rising stars to a unique international training program called Teleperformance University (TPU). Each “semester,” an executive committee selects 20 to 30 staff members in various leadership roles across functions including operations, marketing, and research to participate. Over eight months, the MBA-style program sends TPU students around the globe to several Teleperformance delivery locations to attend classes on a variety of topics ranging from AI to P&L management, with online courses supplementing the curriculum between global meetups.

Teleperformance invited HFS to join a recent TPU graduation ceremony and heard from each of the students individually about the knowledge and ideas they are bringing back to their respective locations from all world regions and many countries including Egypt, China, Jamaica, Philippines, Canada and Mexico. It was clear from their stories that the program is as much about training and upskilling as it is a way of spreading the company culture and values to its 300,000 employees across 80 countries. HFS was also invited to sit on a panel to provide perspectives from our research on key topics like AI and automation. The discussion highlighted how well attuned these leaders are to the issues impacting their market, and it demonstrated an earnest desire to embrace technology and figure out the best ways to put it to work for clients.

Multilingual hubs are a stand out example of talent strategy

Teleperformance’s multilingual hub in Athens, Greece, provided a fitting backdrop for the graduation events. The ENA campus in Athens is a striking six-building facility overlooking the Acropolis and downtown Athens. This delivery center has an employee-focused design, and it fosters a social, positive culture with attractive cafes, outdoor dining spaces, and amenities like an open-air gym, chess tables, and a cinema; there are plenty of social spaces for people to gather.

Here, staff provides customer support in 32 languages to some of the world’s best-known brands via phone, live chat, email, and social media. The interactions we witnessed were sophisticated programs leveraging analytics and digital technology to support customers across Europe.

Teleperformance was the first service provider to effectively execute on the multilingual hub model 10 years ago. Today, it has 8,500 employees in Athens and continued to take business away from competitors that struggle to attract and retain talent in disparate locations across geographies. The model is not easy to execute; Teleperformance recruits multilingual talent from all over Europe and provides attractive relocation assistance to Athens as well as other hubs such as Barcelona and Istanbul.

Investments in talent and culture are impacting partner relationships—what to consider

• Look for service providers who know how to strike the right balance; cutting costs is not a strategy for customer experience. While cost will always be a consideration, companies investing in talent at the level described above are customer experience partners, not legacy call centers. You can expect lower attrition rates, more focus on business outcomes, and the capability and appetite to focus on activities that impact top-line growth. The way Teleperformance can provide more cost-effective services in its multilingual hubs than in the higher-cost native locations of many European languages it services is a testament to the ability to strike the right balance between cost and stellar talent.

• Think beyond traditional KPIs to create meaningful Part of nurturing culture is structuring the work people are doing so that they feel they are contributing to a positive outcome. Customer service agents need to be enabled and incentivized to put your customers at the heart of the interaction. If you evaluate employees solely on average handle time, they aren’t going to focus on creating great experiences for your customers. The intelligent engagement companies hope to enable with these investments, are best supported if you craft metrics and goals that focus on customer effort, satisfaction, and delight to empower the employees.

• Shed legacy relationships and build co-innovation relationships with your partners. Most enterprises we speak to are thirsty for innovation and ideas from their partners. To leverage the ideas from your CX partners, you need to break away from the legacy mess-for-less models and collaborate with your partners. Ask your service provider about its approach to talent and culture; listen to and consider its ideas.

The Bottom Line: Nurturing talent and culture must extend to partnerships with shared customer-centric values

We need to stop talking about the “future of work” – it is here now.  Between crowdsourcing and the gig economy, robotic colleagues and intelligent cognitive assistants, the way we work – and support customers – has changed dramatically.  It’s time now to make put the focus and investments not just on process and technology, but on people, in particular to support our customer experience initiatives.