How British Gas Are Using Metrics in Their Contact Centre

In this video we look at how British Gas are using metrics in their contact centre. They have streamlined their metrics to focus on the NetPromoter score to improve customer advocacy.

British Gas go on to look at KPIs in future and in particular customer effort scores.

This VideoCast was filmed in 2011 at the ProtoCall One Genesys Workforce Management User Group.

Video Transcript

Jonty:

Hi, I’m Jonty Pearce and welcome to the Call Centre Helper 3-minute videocast.

We were recently at the ProtoCall One Genesys Workforce Management User Group, and there John Connolly from British Gas was talking about how they’ve simplified their call centre metrics.

This issue of the videocast is brought to you by ProtoCall One making contact centres work for you.

John Connolly, Head of Innovation, British Gas:

We spent the first three or four months of our journey just listening to our teams, and we stared at leads through our general manager. We sat down and you know in every opportunity to speak to our people so what’s the one thing you would do differently if you were me.

And the team overwhelmingly said: well you target me on 20 different things, you target me on things that don’t matter to me, they don’t matter to the customer, it’s all about you. So can you please, please, please stop beating us up and target us on the things that matter.

So we took a step back, and we thought wow okay, and I think what really landed it for us is that within one of these sessions one of the team actually said to us: does your manager beat you up on a daily basis around what you need to deliver.

And I think if you’re honest, if you’re part of a leadership team no. You know what your objectives are, you know what your goals are, you’re self-sufficient – you work on them throughout the year.

So we got rid of all targets. The only target that our teams have at the front line is Net Promoter Score.

Jonty:

And we caught up with John afterwards about how they’re moving forward with their call centre metrics.

John:

We reduced, or actually removed all of the typical contact centre metrics we measure our people on; so handle time, commitment, sales performance, things like that. And we actually replaced that with one thing which is Net Promoter Score.

So we think the most important thing is whether you know customers advocate the service that our teams provide so we stripped everything back. The one exception is that we do expect them to put a third or a quarter of their conversations through to the customer feedback tool, which generates their Net Promoter Score.

So that is literally all our teams are measured on now.

Jonty:

I mean NET Promoter, there seems to be different ways of measuring it, like a scale from naught to ten. You seem to use a sort of plus and minus rather than a naught to ten measurement. How does that work?

John:

So the NET Promoter Score that we use within our teams is the proportion of advocates if you like for the service that we provide. So those customers that give us nine or ten out of ten for those conversations, against the proportion of detractors, so any customer that gives us a zero up to six score.

We work out the difference between the two. So if you’re a zero you have as many fans at British Gas as you do detractors, and actually we’re in the positive now which is what we’re leading the way with in the utility industry.

Certainly within our contact centre in Cardiff which is a great place to be.

Jonty:

You have been playing around with another metric as well, having chosen one, what metric is that?

John:

Well Net Promoter Score measures customer advocacy, so it’s how a customer feels about the service you deliver at a moment in time. And that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that that customer may want to continue to be loyal with British Gas and repurchase more products with British Gas.

So we think a better measure of loyalty, and this is off the back of research from the Customer Contact Council. Where fifty-four thousand customers were asked what would make them more loyal and actually they said make my experiences effortless.

So the customer effort score is something that originates from the Customer Contact Council. And actually you know you measure on a scale of one to five if a customer gives you a five for an effort score, you’ve pretty much lost that customer already. But if your customer gives you a 1 it means that you’ve given them an effortless customer experience

Jonty:

That’s all we’ve got time for. I’m Jonty Pearce and thank you for watching the Call Centre Helper 3-minute video cast.