CX department at Inspiretec.

“Customer experience (CX) is the sum total of customers’ perceptions and feelings resulting from interactions with a brand’s products and services. Customer experience spans the lifetime of customers’ relationships with a brand.”

What is Inspiretec’s approach to CX?

The Customer Experience department is here to manage the client relationships outside of ongoing project work. We aim to improve the customer’s experience of working with Inspiretec by providing a larger team of people that can assist with customer enquiries and issues, and by removing some of the segregation between roles (so more people are able to assist with a particular issue or enquiry).

The department is formed from the merger of the Implementation Consultant, Support and Account Management departments, with a new internal system support role being created to ensure internal tooling efficiencies, and that system maintenance tasks are moved away from the delivery teams where this is feasible.

How is the department structured?

The department is structured with our Operations Director overseeing the team. We have a Head of Customer Engagement who manages the Customer Engagement Executives and Support Developers, a Head of CX Consultancy Services who manages the CX Consultants and an Account Director who line manages the Account Managers.

The team is organised into customer-focused (rather than role-focused) pods enabling quicker resolution on queries and knowledge accessibility within the team. All disciplines within the CX team that work on a specific customer account sit together.

Why create a CX team?

We like happy, well serviced customers who we can develop long-lasting partnerships with. We recognised that our previous organisational structure and some of our ways of working were frustrating for both customers and staff in the time that it took to get contact from a customer to the right person to be able to assist.

There are two main ‘problem statements’ that we are trying to address:

The first is that both customers and internal staff do not have clear communication channels when it comes to BAU work and queries from customers, and by providing a named team of people, with appropriate escalation channels, we hope to get the enquiry to the person best suited to assist them as quickly as possible. We have also moved from a model whereby staff have specific narrow roles and responsibilities to one where the boundaries of these roles are deliberately blurred: Our customers don’t want to be told that they need to speak to someone else about an enquiry – the CX team are now empowered to own the enquiry and action this on behalf of the customer.

The second is efficiency, we want to keep as much unnecessary BAU work away from the delivery teams as we can. We are aiming to deal with 75% of all enquiries within the CX Team. This includes support tickets that can be quickly resolved, estimates for small changes, training outside of implementations and general set-up enquiries. Where we do need a delivery team to complete work we aim to make this as straightforward as possible by providing accurate triaging and replication of support tickets, better-validated requirements for SORs, and provision of databases containing up to date data where required.

We have created a team of 20 for the CX department to ensure complete service to our customers as they progress their journey with Inspiretec.

Aims and objectives?

The main aim is to focus on the customers needs and expectations and to simplify how Inspiretec manages customer relationships. By creating this department, the business can improve efficiency and enable our customers to have a single team of contacts with Inspiretec with clearly defined communication and escalation channels.

Although focused around BAU activities such as support tickets and small changes to existing systems, the CX team for a client is engaged throughout the life-cycle of the relationship. From the initial sales process, through any project delivery (by attending delivery team stand-ups and retrospectives), into support and ongoing maintenance. We want our team to understand their customers businesses and products and to build long lasting relationships with people.

Since the creation of the department we have seen a 15% decrease in the average amount of time to resolve an enquiry – there is still some way to go, but service levels are already improving. There is also real time information for customers on request status via JIRA, providing a level of self-service and visibility that the tooling that we previously had in place could not provide.