16th Dec 2020
We had judged the GDBA Award for Customer Delight on a number of previous occasions and been inspired by some of the great ideas within the region. Over the last 12-18 months, we refined our approach to delivering excellent service and we would encourage you to do the same.
Our Customer Service Programme is based on five core pillars:
This is more than just being friendly and approachable, organising face to face meetings and the ‘usual' things you might expect from an agency. We aim to promote and highlight (both internally and externally) the things we do which make us different and make them part of our everyday operations.
‘Above and beyond' has become a key phrase in the updated Programme. What more could we do? How do we go the extra mile? How can we deliver great service outside of our standard remit? It is something that we have actively looked to improve upon and to better identify opportunities to help our clients. A recent example of this is our recent "Launching out of Lockdown" campaign, helping companies with their marketing and creative campaigns.
We have implemented several processes aimed at continually inspecting, reviewing and adapting our approach to customer service and making relevant changes on an ongoing basis, rather than the previous approach which was to address this during an annual review.
We felt it important to recognise the ‘convenience' for us of a client or supplier meeting with us in our office and so we have made a concerted effort to make their time away from their office as valuable as possible. Small changes to our approach to hosting guests such as meeting the whole team working on their project have added value for the client.
Mark Scholefield, Head of Operations says: "It is great to be recognised for our commitment to client service. Having learnt so much from other outstanding businesses in the region, we realised the importance of formalising an update to our processes to make real change. Taking home the trophy vindicates the work we have put in and hopefully demonstrates the benefits for our clients."
The fifth pillar of the Programme encourages the team to immerse themselves in our value of customer focus. The Champion of the Month (COTM) process and Customer Champion's role have made customer service excellence much more prominent within the everyday operations of the business. Staff are consistently motivated to be a Champion in their daily dealings with clients and strive to achieve COTM status.
The entire team is behind the Customer Charter and are proud to see their hard work and client focus pay off.
Head of Client Services, Stefan Buss adds: "It's great to get recognised for our customer service as it's at the heart of everything we do. I feel proud to be part of the team and feel motivated to go even further in providing our clients with outstanding service."
A big thank you to Menzies LLP for their structured approach and especially for providing such detailed feedback;
"It was great to meet Matt, Ben and Mark, they have a passionate and focused team and it was evident the effort they had put into their submission and our visit to their premises. Their Customer Service Programme was multi-faceted and comprehensively showed how they are client and quality focused, with clearly aligned short/medium term objectives. This project involved the hire of a Customer Champion, regularly reviewing and challenging the project to ensure continual improvement. The client is the centre of everything they do and they question every part of the client's journey and have found a formula that resulted in 100% client retention in 2019. They displayed outstanding metrics around both the financial and non-financial elements in the business, that everyone in the business is accountable for. The entry and discussions at our meeting covered all aspects of the Brighter Thinking criteria, and some!"
