Footprint Learning and Development

Case Study – Leadership Development

Background

A challenge had been set by the newly appointed Managing Director of the Contact Centre directorate in a large financial organisation to significantly increase revenue over a 3-year period. Footprint Learning and Development were engaged to assist with the development solutions required to meet this challenge. In addition to working on the service and sales approach required to meet and exceed the expectations of this exciting challenge, we agreed with the Business Sponsor that an important part of the approach would be how the leaders supported their people in the workplace following completion of the final solutions. (e.g. workshops, coaching sessions etc.)

Purpose and Objectives

The Critical Success Factors identified for the overall programme through discussions with the Business Sponsors were:

Improvement in leads generation (110 – 130% of target by end 2005);
Enable Advisers to weave sales into present call duration;
Enable parity as a minimum effect on customer satisfaction;
Consistency in the approach to sales across all sites using the same process, information and tools;
Increase in Adviser confidence to carry out sales activity as part of their role;
Positive return on investment from additional products and service sold due to an effective, customer centric sales approach.

The specific objectives for this piece of work were:

To design and deliver:

A 1-day Sales and Service Programme for front-line Advisers;
A Sales Leadership and Coaching Programme for Team Leaders and Sales and Service Managers;
A Sales Process and Coaching Framework.
To up-skill internal trainers to deliver the newly designed material;
To support the initial rollout of the training.

Stage One

An intensive period of research was undertaken over a period of 2 weeks at all seven Contact Centre sites. This was important to gain buy-in from the people who would receive the new training interventions but also to engage all sites (including areas of the business which were merged some years ago and who had not felt fully involved in previous initiatives).

This research period was named ‘Engage’ as we wanted everyone to feel that this approach to learning and development was different from the start. The Engage approach included the following:

Engage Sessions with groups of front-line advisers to determine their thoughts and requirements, not only regarding the service and sales approach but also in relation to the level of leadership support they received in connection with service and sales. We presented the questions in various formats – voting slips, use of flipcharts to gather opinions and general group discussion;
Engage Sessions with Team Leaders to assess their requirements and gain their opinion on past developmental solutions;
Interviews with the senior managers and Heads of Customer Service at each of the sites to gather their thoughts and ensure we had their buy-in moving forward.

As part of this stage, we also assisted with the delivery of an ‘Involvement Day’ where all senior managers from the Contact Centres attended a motivating, informative event to share the high level findings and signpost the way forward. We included activities to clarify the importance of their role in making the programme a success - by embedding and reinforcing learning in the workplace. A competition was also held to name the new programme, again contributing to the engagement and involvement of managers by branding it as a recognisable event moving forward so they would associate any solutions launched with their experience.

Stage Two

The second stage of the project was to design the service and sales programme, including the associated Leadership events. The design was fully tailored to the needs of this client combining what we had learned in the research phase in addition to our experience of leadership development. The research had highlighted that leaders had enjoyed previous leadership training, but there was not a great deal of evidence to show that they were putting the learning into practice. We also learned that the audience preferred their face to face learning solutions in ‘bite-sized chunks’, which drove us to design two initial events (which we termed as ‘foundation events’ to indicate that more was to come). These two events were centred around ‘analysing gaps in performance’ and ‘addressing gaps in performance’ and delivered as two 3-hour face to face modules. These events emphasised some of the previous learning but prompted leaders to focus on taking specific and personalised actions with each of their team members.

The two leadership foundation modules contained the following material:

Foundation Event 1:

3 Stage analysing performance process;
Energy Investment Model;
Challenging Beliefs and Perceptions;
Deciding specific actions for each team member;
Discussing specific approaches to ascertain whether performance gaps are skills, knowledge or attitude based.

Foundation Event 2:

Review of progress from Foundation 1 event;
Situational Leadership Model;
Identifying a range of options to personalize the development agreed with each of their team members and to encourage leaders to think beyond the box.

Stage Three

Footprint then delivered a ‘Train The Trainer’ event to a group of Management Development Trainers and Training Team Leaders within each of the client’s Contact Centre sites. The reason for including these two groups was to ensure the Management Development Trainers could deliver the key messages of the events and to gain the buy-in of the Training Team Leaders. We then delivered the pilot events to the senior managers in the Contact Centres to ensure they had the understanding and knowledge to support their team leaders when attending. The senior managers commented that in addition to raising their awareness about the programme, they also learned some new or were refreshed on some good ideas which they were able to put into practice with their teams back in the workplace.

Outcomes

The project is still currently ongoing and will be evaluated fully in due course. However, each stage of the work has been validated and evaluated as follows:

Use of Subject Matter Experts to contribute to and validate the content of both the front-line service and sales events and the leadership foundation events.
Evaluation of the Involvement Day to ascertain whether senior managers had bought into the approach and content of the programme.
Evaluation of the Train The Trainer event to determine success of the event in addition to gaining positive feedback on the content of the material.
Evaluation of initial Leadership Foundation Events which demonstrate high scores for the method of delivery in addition to extremely favourable comments for the content.

Level 2 evaluation has commenced to indicate that Team Leaders and front-line team members are putting into practice the methodology learned at these events. The Head of Customer Service stating ‘the work you have completed is excellent and I can already see the difference it is making at this early stage.”

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