According to Optus, a shake-up of its customer care model yielded significant success for the company. The model removed “old school” metrics through its’ Community of Experts’, including “clock watching”.

The VP for customer contact centres of Optus, Emma McRobert, said that “We’ve seen our NPS grow by 30% since we’ve implemented Community of Experts.”

The transfers where the telco’s subscribers are passed on from one staff to another have been reduced to 50%, with some of the ‘communities’ revealing a figure as low as 4% of the time.

The VP further added: “We’ve improved our resolution by about 20 points. So when you contact us, you’re more likely now than ever to get your issue resolved. We get it right about 90% of the time, which again is best practice.”

The VP also highlighted their customer complaints figure, which has been the lowest the telco has ever been. This is reflected in the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman’s annual report for 2020, revealing that the complaint numbers of Optus decreased by 27.9% last year. 

“We know that our metrics are showing that we’re moving in the right direction,” McRobert also said.

The Community of Expert model implemented by the telco was inspired by T-Mobile, talking about its Team of Experts approach. “I was blown away by it,” McRobert said.

McRobert said that “Telcos and big contact centres are notorious for bumping customers around, and I couldn’t help but think that there was a better way.”

“How can we make sure that we’re giving our customers what they want? Which is, help when they first contact us. So it all started from that.”

The concept behind the model is to have a team of experts manage the same group of customers. In this case, the company divides the country into 16 local markets, with a couple of ‘communities’ managing them. When a customer first contacts the telco, the person who takes the concern must see through its resolution.

“There are no bouncing customers around, there’s no passing the buck,” McRobert added. In case the person who first took the inquiry can’t solve the problem, “they’re empowered to get the person sitting next to them over to actually help them.”

“What we’re seeing now is a much higher resolution when customers contact us because all of a sudden we’ve killed all of that red tape. We’ve empowered our experts to actually be able to solve it. We’ve given them all the training they need to be able to do that as well.”

“This is about providing the best experience for the customer. If that’s about adding new service, then that’s what we do,” she also said. “Around 82% of our overall workforce is now trained on what we call growth and we will have everyone trained on that by the end of our financial year.”