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If you get out of the way…..your colleagues and customers will build you a better organisation

Writer's picture: Morris PentelMorris Pentel



Morris Pentel talks about the power of habit-based engagement in transformation and why most CX and EX transformation programmes struggle to maintain momentum. He has spent his career working for and advising the world’s largest organisations and governments about contact centre and customer experience transformations. He has influenced the design of contact centres and customer experience globally.


Introduction

I once built a contact centre culture transformation programme with just a joke. This article is about the tricks and strategies that make this work and how you can use them to reduce the cost of a single issue – customer friction. It’s about transformation using a “habit” of talking about uncertainty in phone calls and digital communication with customers.  

 

My programme aimed at getting people to find a daily joke to share, which started people talking to each other in a new virtual contact centre in the UK during COVID-19. Once people started engaging with fellow team members, they started discussing improvements. They prioritised things that would work. It allowed me to inject a wide range of improvement ideas into their daily habits. It built its own momentum and replicated itself across a large virtual organisation in weeks.


There is always bound to be some disconnect between the centralised customer experience and contact centre strategies of large organisations, and the realities faced by customers and colleagues. Large organisations are managed through core channels, technologies, goals, strategies, and operations —it’s part of the DNA. This needs to be recognised and requires effort to counter.

 

A habit-based strategy is about increasing focus on small-scale changes, driven by customer-facing colleagues through their relationship with customers and each other. Small-scale changes can have a significant impact, creating momentum, a vital component of transformation. Momentum towards deeper engagement like all outcomes requires careful design and effort. The more people actively engage, the more likely you are to understand and achieve consequential change. When stakeholders are involved, their input grounds improvements in relevant issues and every success increases engagement. Levels of engagement impact more than just levels of effort, because insight often impacts exponentially rather than in a linear pattern. It builds belief and trust in the team.

 

This approach delivers the greatest return on investment. Deeper engagement is the most cost-effective way to transform an organisation. It leverages economies of scale and increased human capital, created by deeper engagement with customers and colleagues through more valuable insight.


Habit-Based Engagement in Transformation



The Structure of Culture
The Structure of Culture

Habits are part of the framework of culture and a driver of momentum.

 

Habits are one of the building blocks of experience and culture. They provide the framework, subtext, and momentum for our daily experience. Of course, my project wasn’t really about the joke, it was about the habit of sharing a joke.  It was about momentum. Crowdsourcing content to everyone added to the generated interest and engagement. A water cooler moment for the COVID-19 generation. *

 

Drucker v Tyson: Culture eats strategy, and everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face - both statements are about habits

So, Peter Drucker and Mike Tyson may seem a bit of a stretch as examples, but life is about habits. 

 

Drucker’s Paradox

Peter Drucker was correct. Culture does eat strategy for breakfast. Habits provide a large part of the framework of culture. In simple terms, most cultural changes are changes in habits. Habits of speech or action create the change. It is only cultural explosions driven by world events such as the COVID-19 pandemic that create large numbers of new habits rather than small changes. In general culture change is about incremental changes to habits rather than massive changes.    

 

Tysons Habits

Tyson developed the habits needed to be a champion, including, according to him, being hit in the face—as well as being an amazing puncher. Habits are a core element of culture because they set the guidelines for action—the good, the bad, and the very scary habits. But not all habits are useful, and some outlive their role. Anyone who saw the recent fight between a 58-year-old Tyson and a much younger man will understand my meaning.

 

Start your engine

Momentum needs the introduction of one single, adapted habit, into existing routines. This will (if done correctly) create more engagement by giving people — both customers and colleagues—something new to discuss and the tools to keep the conversation going. Every organisation has established communication channels and routines for engagement with colleagues of course, but these tools can always be improved and their use encouraged more. The goal is always more engagement — sometimes, having a conversation is more important than the subject itself. Building a better habit of regular communication allows us to understand what truly matters to colleagues and what they think about the topics we raise. 

 

Embedding Change

Embedding an improved engagement habit into the daily routines helps maintain focus on what’s important to others. Done well, habits become self-sustaining. It’s about making small, frequent improvements that gradually build cultural change, aligned with practical outcomes. When habits are formed, they spread across the organisation because habits are the part of the framework of culture.

Small changes are as important to colleagues as they are to customers. Tweaking a routine or changing the format of a meeting, small shifts affect the day-to-day experience. Even having weekly chats about experiences or social issues on internal channels or asking each customer a specific question for a week, can strengthen bonds, habits and culture.

If you fix a small issue in my daily work, I’ll notice it for a while. But if we fix that issue together, it has more e-value (emotional value). If it is a frequent issue that e-value goes up exponentially. It’s also about creating more space to notice the useless process, or that question customers never understand the first time, the things that cost money and the small snags that ruin the experience. 

Finally, it is about the channel to express what binds you together as people, and how it feels when you engage. This mustn't be just focused on the issues. Having a bit of fun is part of being human. However, a word of warning. It is not your sense of humour that is important, it is everyone else’s sense of humour. You will know you have momentum when it is driven by co-creation by its stakeholders. 


Why do this?

The power of management is at its best when it is used to support an engaged team. When the team decides to take on a problem the probability of success goes up dramatically rather than when a directive comes down. Small changes adapt and mature as they develop into the space they fill. Large-scale changes require effort expenditure to fit to situations. There is of course a lot more to the maths of this but more likely to work and more likely to be delivered.




The mechanics of Uncertainty
The mechanics of Uncertainty

The Target - Contact Centre Insights Around Uncertainty

To get people talking more, you need something to talk about. The contact centre is the ideal place to start. Customer interactions across all channels are the richest source of insights available at the lowest cost.

 

Conversations provide insights about experiences vital for understanding operations and culture. The best starting point in the contact centre is call listening. By focusing on one extra type of event, behaviour, or emotion at a time, and reviewing calls during daily work, we can start to notice new patterns and share insights.

The target might be uncertainty. Uncertainty is costly. Doubts, misunderstandings, and confusion can add up to 50% to the length and cost of calls. These are common and are often fixable when teams collaborate. Enabling front-line staff to flag and discuss uncertainty is an excellent starting point. Finding stops and slowdowns in conversations and looking at the root causes is part of the work. Extending this to have a little broader lens creates measurable improvements.

 

Artificial Intelligence

AI is already playing a key role in transformation and its role in the contact centre is expanding fast. It impacts every aspect of interaction management and has new implications for interaction analysis of context and behaviours.

To understand its role, it helps to know a bit about how advanced conversation analysis has developed over time. Over 15 years of accessible AI, amplified the academic study of conversation patterns and our understanding. This is a golden age of conversation analysis. This understanding is used by advanced AI when analysing every interaction. It’s producing empirical insights about behaviour and context. Advanced AI is now processing habits, behaviours, emotions, outcomes and context in real time, creating new levels of insight at a faster pace.

 

So, conversation analysis has evolved from an expert-driven science to cloud-based analysis software applications, affecting real-time outcomes deployed in contact centres, AI analyses behavioural, emotional, and contextual patterns in conversations. Processing 100% of interactions identifies good and bad patterns, helping to understand the cost and experience impacts of these patterns, across different channels. It can scan every call to find problems and present them to an expert to look at in more detail. Most organisations don’t yet have a true Conversation Analysis Team with an AI co-pilot. The most common solutions are current-generation Speech Analytics or Sentiment Analysis, but these tools can find basic insights into uncertainty.

Even if you don't have tools, you have people which is better! You just need people to start looking for them.

 

Careful what you wish for

Although everything I have said here is correct, be aware of the dark side of the force young Jedi. Empowering people is relinquishing some control. Change driven from the front line can be really really scary, chaotic and random. You must also make sure that if you start it, you follow through, or people will feel more let down and then you will have made things much worse. Momentum can build castles and tear them down. It’s generally a bad idea to reduce engagement when doing transformation. Don’t set false expectations. 🙂 

 


 

In summary

 

The key takeaways are:

1. Small Habits Drive Big Transformation: Small, daily habits, when embedded into routines, can create significant cultural and operational changes within organisations.

2. Engagement is Key: Deeper engagement with both employees and customers is the most cost-effective way to drive meaningful change. When people are engaged, they provide valuable insights, and successes reinforce further engagement. Engaged colleagues build better rapport with customers, which leads to better insights. Getting more conversations going, means crowd-souring solutions from those in the know.

3. Start with the Contact Centre: Customer interactions in contact centres provide rich, low-cost insights into operational issues, especially around uncertainty, which can lengthen and complicate calls.

4. AI Enhances Insight: AI has revolutionised conversation analysis by identifying patterns in behaviour and emotions during interactions, providing real-time insights that can improve customer and employee experiences. But without effective communication, insights are useless. The quality of your communication habits directly impacts how well you turn insights into action. Use it don’t let it use you.

5. Empowerment Requires Follow-Through: Empowering front-line staff to lead changes can be effective but also unpredictable. It's crucial to maintain momentum and avoid creating false expectations to prevent disengagement.

6. Momentum is the key: Transformation efforts need momentum, which can be built through careful design, small wins, and fostering a culture of open communication and collaboration.

7. Fun and Focus: Engaging staff and customers shouldn’t always be serious incorporating a bit of fun, like sharing jokes, can spark engagement and make the process more human. A blame-free culture and engaged colleagues are crucial for success.

8. Habits: Engaging staff and customers shouldn’t always be serious incorporating a bit of

 

Workshop Ideas

It is time to think a bit more about a few questions.

  1. What is our culture made of?

  2. What habits drive our culture and are they all healthy?

  3. What share of insight and culture is from the front line to the senior team rather than the other way around?

  4. How much do you know about habits and conversation analysis? And how well-trained are your colleagues?

  5. Are we using our habitual communication to engage as people? Can you describe where?

  6. There is a wellness factor in a better community but are we building that?

  7. Can our habits and their role in our work life and culture be improved?

  8. How much more insight can we gain by looking at conversation patterns with the collective experience shared?

 

Finally, I am 100% not saying get everyone to tell a joke! It was COVID-19 and it was appropriate. What do people want to talk about?

 Hope this gave you some ideas. 

* Never force colleagues to take part but do look at Dereck Siva’s observations on momentum

 

 If you want to know more about Habit-based Transformation contact me

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