The evolution of our Customer Hub

The last two years in the Customer Hub contact centre have been remarkably busy and a huge amount of change and progress has been made to deliver exceptional service to our client’s residents. To achieve our aims of high customer satisfaction and efficient delivery, a lot of hard work and strategic improvement was required. During this time, we have progressed from a contact centre that had no live interaction capability to one about to launch a fourth and fifth option for residents. Now residents can contact us easily with the launch of WhatsApp and SMS, joining email, phones, and live chat.

During this time, we have seen customer satisfaction soar and a huge improvement in our relationships with residents, clients, and internal stakeholders. We have put a massive focus on key areas to drive this improvement – dedicated teams managing quality and training, and also communications and complaints. We have introduced client-specific hubs which enable agents to build relationships with site teams. We are continuing a large upskilling exercise to allow teams to be able to deliver a one-stop shop for residents, reducing hand-off time and enabling agents to provide the best service possible.

Delivering exceptional service

The team have delivered exceptional service to our residents and there have been so many key people responsible for this improvement. We had a total of twenty-seven people nominated for various awards in recent industry awards, with four making it to the finals of the Welsh Contact Centre Awards this year, including one Silver Award winner.

This is a team that is dedicated, bright, enthusiastic and a delight to work with. They support each other constantly, both personally and professionally making it a joy to be in their team.

Our team’s recent successes

The four finalists at the recent Welsh Contact Centre Awards were Alan Alder and Tom Crumpton – nominated as Best Newcomer in a Contact Centre, and Biancha Cunningham and Daniel Priest, nominated in the Best Support Manager category. Alan and Tom have been exceptional since they began working with us late in 2023 – both achieving excellent scores in key metrics such as quality, first-time resolution, achieving SLAs and customer feedback. For two new members of the team to have made such achievements is amazing and the positive resident feedback for both hasn’t stopped.

Biancha and Daniel came in as Team Leaders when we first took over the contact centre and worked hard to manage performance, drive quality standards, and recruit exceptional team members. Since then both moved into exciting new roles – Biancha as Communications and Complaints Manager and Daniel as Quality and Training Manager. Biancha is responsible for all our resident communications, customer CSAT scores, Google Review responses, and our resident complaints. She has delivered exceptional results in all metrics, ensuring that our turnaround time to resolve resident issues has been reduced by 40%.

Dan Priest has transformed our quality-checking processes, delivering a staggering turnaround in quality scores across the team and helping to identify additional training needs within the team. He has worked to create and update quality checking across Customer Services, Home Moves, Debt and Billing – helping to drive standards and improve customer satisfaction.

Celebrating the recent awards season

I am extremely proud that Alan Alder recently won the Silver Award for Newcomer of the Year at the Welsh Contact Centre Awards. Alan has been amazing since he started at Amber and this award is well-deserved for all the hard work and dedication he has shown. He receives so much positive feedback from our residents, who find that he always goes above and beyond to resolve issues in a friendly and caring manner.

Looking back to last year

Last September we were sitting on a 2023 high of 33% for customer satisfaction, last month we finished at 72% – steadily increasing month-on-month throughout 2024 too.

I could not be more proud of this team and the service they deliver. They are an outstanding group of people and the best team I have personally ever worked with.