Shell Energy

The UK’s leading independent energy supplier, Shell Energy prides itself on supplying gas and electricity at low prices to all of its valued customers.

Finding and resolving the barriers that prevent advisors on the Shell Energy campaign achieving a great quality score.

Webhelp’s Discovery process

Committing to continuous improvement

Discovery allows Webhelp and our clients to identify problems and solutions and promote ongoing positive change.

The Shell Energy campaign was experiencing low quality scores. Webhelp utilised the Discovery process in order to determine what the barriers to success were, and then identify solutions to the problem.

Webhelp’s Discovery process is an integral methodology in our commitment to continuous improvement. Discovery allows Webhelp advisors to use their direct customer interaction experiences to provide feedback on existing processes and collaborate with operations managers to identify better ways to work.

As a result of the Discovery process, numerous barriers to success were identified. These were:

• Advisors were unsure of how call scoring worked
• There was a lack of feedback on good/bad calls
• Advisors were unsure what they were allowed to use email for
• Having two billing screens to work from was confusing for advisors
• Updates were not being briefed out effectively enough
• The search bar on the Knowledge system was difficult to use
• Coaching was inconsistent and dependent on who the Team Leader was

In the Discovery sessions, advisors and Discovery experts identified a number of potential solutions:

• The Quality team and advisors would collaborate to help advisors understand how scoring works
• Guidelines would be issued on what email could be used for
• The Knowledge system search bar would be made more user-friendly
• Every advisor would be given a laminated quality checklist
• Communications that advisors needed to be aware of would be briefed out more effectively
• Advisors would make more use of the reflective log
• The quality and frequency of coaching from Team Leaders would be made consistent

Discovery uses a scientific, “test and learn” approach to finding problems and solutions. At Webhelp, we believe that the advisors are the ones best able to tell us about the changes needed on the “front line” of customer service. In the Discovery Lab, we come up with ways of solving problems and then test them out in a live, but controlled, contact centre environment. These changes, if successful, are then rolled out across the business as a whole and feedback and suggestions are passed on to our clients.

The Discovery team recommended several actions to the rest of Webhelp that would allow immediate improvement on the contact centre level. These recommendations were:

• Quality – There should be collaboration between the Quality team and advisors to enable better understanding of how the scoring system works; ideally during team briefing sessions.
• Quality Recognition – The benefit of using the reflective log needs to be established, and advisors should receive feedback after nominating notable calls.
• Knowledge Sharing – Guidelines should be created on the correct uses of email, so briefs can be communicated more effectively and inter-team knowledge sharing will improve.

Webhelp made recommendations to Shell Energy that would enable quality improvement across the business. We advised that they improve the Knowledge system search bar to make it more user-friendly when advisors are searching for specifics. In addition, Webhelp has advised Shell Energy to host a physical Discovery debriefing session with its stakeholders, in order to ascertain the best solutions to take forward to implementation.