The Role of Culture in Delivering World-Class
Customer Service
Call Center Week, Las Vegas
June 2013
Introduction – hosted by IQPC:
In this joint presentation, global technology company Google presented alongside global contact center provider, TELUS International, to discuss the role of culture in rallying agents and transforming customer service. In this session, Peter “Scotch” Scocimara from Google Enterprise and Jeffrey Puritt from TELUS International explain how to drive and sustain a customer-service culture including how to inspire “extra-mile” agent performance, how to create a culture with meaning, how to hire and retain the next wave of Millennial talent, the value of using social and collaborative tools in the workplace, and the importance of finding and selecting the right partners to bring your culture to life.
Is your culture reflected in all that you do?
Scotch – At Google, we take culture very seriously. In fact, our culture makes it into everything we do – including how we think about bringing new products to market. You can hear it right from our product managers and engineers. To set the tone, take a look at this short video: http://youtu.be/Zr4JwPb99qU
I’m sure you know by now, this is not a real product! In fact, this video was one of our many April Fools videos in 2012. Surprisingly, we take April Fool’s day seriously at Google! I chose this video for a few of reasons. First, clearly we don’t wear suits at Google, and if you’ve ever been to a Google office or met a Googler – you’d know they dress pretty much like me. Most of our people don’t even own ties, let alone, know how to tie one!
Second, this video illustrates that, while many companies think about incremental features and incremental functionally – we have a very different perspective at Google. Incremental thinking (like making all of the buttons blue) – and in turn, making a big deal out of small improvements – is not part of our culture. I’ll talk more about that later.
And finally, the most obvious point of sharing this video is that it shows our sense humor in the workplace – even if it means poking fun at our own culture, people and products.
About TELUS International:
Jeff – Good afternoon everyone! Before I invite Scotch to tell you more about Google, let me tell you about TELUS International. For starters – among the many things we do to ensure that we can fulfill our promise of delivering an exceptional customer experience, is the creation of a work environment that attracts and stimulates our team members.
For example, we’ve got this amazing rec center in our Central America operation. It includes fitness facilities, a soccer field, cafeterias, and even a library. Our call centers have games rooms on each floor with X-Box, PlayStations, Wii’s, pinball machines, air hockey tables and more. We have cinemas – that are not only used for presentations and training, but also used for our “Family Cinema Saturdays.” And we have themed breakout, training and feedback rooms designed around ideas from our agents – from Zen spaces and playgrounds, to rooms that look like you’re on an airplane, at the circus, on a farm, or in the casino.
Alongside our amazing spaces, we have a great business. TELUS International is a wholly-owned subsidiary of, and is the global outsourcing arm, for TELUS, one of Canada’s oldest and largest telecom providers. Our almost 16,000 team members deliver BPO solutions from the best locations throughout North America, Central America, Asia and Europe – handling well over 150M customer interactions annually via voice, chat, email and social media support. One of our contact centers – at 100,000 sq. feet, and 1,000 seats – is located just off the strip here in Vegas – and you’re all welcome to drop by for a tour this week!
We believe that being backed by TELUS is a great differentiator in the contact center outsourcing space. It ensures that we have carrier-grade infrastructure in all of our operations around the world, as well as unparalleled financial backing that enables us to invest in the best team and empower them with the best technology, infrastructure, tools, and learning and development programs.
About Google:
Scotch – Many of you are probably sitting there wondering what’s a guy from Google doing at Call Center Week?
I’m here from the Google Enterprise team where support is a core pillar of our overall product offering and we take support very seriously. We introduced Google Apps seven years ago with the understanding that businesses want and need dedicated support resources. From the start, we have pushed ourselves to make support easier to reach and the technical support experience more effective for our customers and their users. Today, we continue to invest in a robust support service including 7x24 support in 4 languages, local support in 8 other languages, soon to expand to 13. We offer direct support via phone and web for customers as small as 1 user to customers with over 100,000 users.
So mystery solved! Now you know how I came to be at Call Center Week! So let me start with an overview of culture at Google.
This is probably what you know about Google...it’s a wonderful place to work; it provides really interesting environments. But it’s not just about the cool looking places. Rather, it’s the spaces where people go to collaborate: the micro kitchens, cafes, open floor systems. Places where people go to clear their minds – but also where people go to deeply engage with each other. We believe in workspaces that facilitate casual collisions.
But even with our cool offices, at the end of the day – we are a technology company that develops products for people around the world. As one of our founders and CEO, Larry Page, always says: “We believe that computers should do the hard work – so you can get on with the things that matter in life … living, learning and loving.”
And, as mentioned, we take culture very seriously. So when it comes to choosing our partners, culture also plays a big role in what we look for in a customer service provider. I’m here today with Jeff and TELUS International because we have a partnership based on aligned cultures. We have a shared value
system which makes doing business and providing great customer service so much easier – from the C-level to the operations – even to the case C-level. And we hope to share what works for both TELUS International and Google here today.
Great companies are defined by great cultures:
Jeff – As we began to plan our presentation for Call Center Week, we knew we wanted to talk about culture – because we believe that corporate culture is the only truly sustainable competitive advantage in business these days. As almost everyone is talking about culture today – we wanted to find the best way to approach the topic and make it interesting for everyone here.
That’s what led us to ask Google to join us. As some of you may know, Fortune Magazine recognized Google with the number one spot in its 2013 list of “100 Best Companies in the World to Work For.” This marks their fourth time at the top – which is really amazing for a company that’s only 14 years old.
This best employer status reflects Google’s ongoing efforts to create a unique workplace and culture. And with some accolades of our own, as one of Canada’s 10 most admired corporate cultures for example, we are proud to share our insights on this topic and to showcase why cultural alignment matters in both customer service delivery as well as in selecting your customer service partners.
The challenge of course is that culture cannot be easily developed, nor can it be easily replicated. That’s why the right culture – focused on what matters most to the organization and its people – can be a significant differentiator among companies providing similar products or services.
A true test of a strong culture is the extent to which it influences the actions of your frontline – in other words, how your frontline team members, or in our case, agents, interact with customers.
Customer Service Challenges:
Scotch – It all boils down to that moment on the phone with a customer. My goal is to continually drive and reinforce a customer-service culture for the products and services I support on the Google
Enterprise side of the business. But there are some really unique attributes I’m faced with at Google that make it particularly rewarding and challenging to build that customer-service culture.
Let’s start with the educational background of my team – I hire from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Dartmouth – often people with computer science degrees. I have top performers in their class providing first line customer support. This presents some unique challenges – like how do you attract them, how do you engage them, and how do you keep them – period?
Jeff – And at TELUS International today, nearly 80% of our team members are Millennials. Millennials (or Generation Y – those born between 1980 - 2000) will make up roughly 50% of the U.S. workforce by 2020 and 75% of the global workforce by 2030. The sheer size of this demographic segment has forced us to re-think our practices around attracting, hiring, training and retaining our team members. We all know that attrition is one of the biggest problems in the contact center industry – so if we don’t meet Millennial’s unique needs for social collaboration, for constant feedback, continual team recognition and ongoing personal and professional development – they leave. In fact, this generation makes up their mind during training whether or not your company is a fit for them – and if not, they simply walk out during the break – and they don’t come back.
So just as Scotch described, our challenge is also, how to build a customer-service culture with tenured, motivated, and engaged team members.
The value of values:
Scotch – Exactly! Like many of you, I run a 7x24 operation across 6 continents. There is no way I can cover the globe every day. And there is no way a hierarchical, rigid, command and control management style will retain Googlers – even with great food and great facilities. We expect our Googlers to act independently and with little supervision. The only way to do this is through values.
What values do you emphasize to retain the best people and provide them the space to contribute in a meaningful way? How do you get people motivated and committed to stay in a support organization – what are the cultural underpinnings that allow us to do both Googley things – big, bold, and broad – and still provide support to a set of customers that need help on the other end of the phone?
Jeff – So when it comes to building a customer-service culture, there are a few things that both Scotch and I believe. For TELUS International, these beliefs form the pillars of our value proposition. These beliefs are communicated and reinforced among our team members on a regular basis. What’s interesting about our value proposition is how closely it aligns with a few of the core cultural aspects that Google embodies every day in its global offices. Let’s take a look at the first one.
Work as a family:
Scotch – At Google, one of the key building blocks of our culture is: Work as a family. This value is woven into the very fabric of Google – screening, interviewing, hiring, performance management, peer reviews – every aspect of the hiring and people management process. We hire people based on the ability to collaborate, to listen to one another, to respect one another, to work together on difficult projects, to provide difficult feedback in an open but constructive manner. To treat one another as we would a family member. It’s very much a part of our culture, but it’s also very much a part of how we work – and this video shows you just that: http://youtu.be/kcOUWjkGBUY
To expand on what you just saw…we combine these collaborative tools and working together with a high degree of transparency. We trust our Googlers with confidential company information, including open calendar systems and open group systems. Our internal docs setting is default to open. We also ensure that our Googlers have a voice at the family dinner table – so to speak. We want people to feel that they have a say in how we run the company. And, as shared earlier with our Gmail Blue video, we make sure to have fun. We don’t take ourselves too seriously – and we like to share that sentiment with our users. In life, you may not get to choose your own family members, but at Google, we get to choose who we work with – so we make it a point to find people who truly want to collaborate, be transparent, have a voice and have fun. Across 20 parameters in our employee survey, the one thing my employees consistently rate in the top 2 is their peers.
In my support organization, a great example of our family work is our queue bash. Pods or teams assemble, across multiple levels, and share challenging cases and openly discuss troubleshooting steps, root cause, possible solutions – preferably product solutions – and key learnings. No voice is more authoritative or knowledgeable, even though some team members have two to three times the experience, and no ideas are bad ideas. The goal is to teach people to approach problems in different ways, share learnings, identify scalable solutions and identify subject matter experts for future issues.
Spirited teamwork:
Jeff – We have a similar desire “to work as a family” at TELUS International. We call it “spirited teamwork.”
Generally speaking, the contact center business is a process-centric one. It’s productivity-focused (how many calls answered, how many escalations, how many first-time resolutions, and so on). For agents, the most important thing has traditionally been to adhere to a process, or to a script, and to the metrics that will define success serving an account. This is hard work – and doesn’t sound like much fun. So at TELUS International, we’ve sought to change the dynamics. We’ve moved from being process-based to being people-based. We’ve developed an approach around being a community – we want to provide our team members with everything they have outside the walls of the company.
This fits well with a Gen Y workforce particularly serving Gen Y customers – where we are living in a very connected world – and in most cases, the workplace needs to keep up. To enable our unique approach, we developed our own internal social network called T.Life. T.Life was created after listening to our agents talk about how they want to communicate and collaborate at work. Have a look at this video that briefly describes T.Life: http://youtu.be/OEtgkWV1oSM
T.Life gives our agents a voice, allowing them to connect and engage at work in ways they never could before. Besides having a snack delivered right to their workstation, I also really like the Schedule Swap
feature – where agents can swap shifts with other agents with similar skill sets serving the same client, without management intervention. Scheduling is so often a driver of agent attrition. Schedule Swap empowers our team members to take more control of their work – and has materially contributed to our favorable engagement and attrition performance.
Agile thinking:
Jeff – This need to adapt our workplace to suit the collaborative and social nature of our team members aligns with our pillar of Agile Thinking.
Millennials are on course to become the most educated generation in history. As a result, TELUS International has positioned itself as a Career First destination – meaning we invest in the education of our team members to help them grow in their careers whether they plan to stay with us or not. When you say “career first, company second” to an employee – it resonates.
As an example, we created TELUS International University where team members can obtain university degrees in traditional liberal arts and business programs at a subsidized cost while they continue to work. Courses are taught by accredited university professors using standard university curricula inside our own centers at convenient times before or after shifts, or even at night.
We also recognize the importance of investing in our team members’ abilities to lift and transform client processes in ways that actively employ call reduction strategies, one-call strategies, and so on, beyond just hitting program metrics. And so, over 60% of our global frontline managers are Six-Sigma yellow, green or black belt certified.
The creation of these programs and tools acknowledges that many of our team members have
aspirations beyond their current position and that their career growth, even if it leads outside of TELUS, is good for them, good for TELUS, and good for our customers.
It’s also important from an emerging economy perspective. Many of our team members in other countries had to join the workforce prematurely to become the breadwinners for their families. Giving them access to education while working at our company develops them as human beings – enabling them to contribute back to their families as well as to society as a whole.
In an industry known for high agent attrition, we won’t succeed in serving clients like Google if we have a revolving door of agents and managers. Investing in our team not only makes them smarter, more confident, and more skilled – but also, it provides us with a very talented employee base to drive the business forward. And while there’s no requirement that people stay with us – Agile Thinking fosters that sense of loyalty and commitment which leads to tenure – and a door that’s not so revolving.
Culture of learning:
Scotch – To effectively support our products, it takes 3 months of training and case taking. And that’s one of the reasons we partnered with TELUS International – you have a handle on managing attrition. Whether you call it “Agile Thinking” or in our case, “Culture of Learning,” investing in the personal and professional development of people is critical to building a customer-service culture.
At Google, we believe there’s no single model of innovation – as an organization, you can facilitate it by providing the infrastructure and the cultural norms, but you can’t force it or engineer it.
Instead, we create an environment where we empower employees with information and the freedom to take risks and pursue their passions, giving them the time to pursue them. An example is our “20% time.” This is a company policy to provide individuals with free time to explore things that they are deeply interested in, and that may have little or nothing to do with Google. It’s thinking like this that helps us deliver on our corporate mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. In fact, Gmail was an outcome of this “free” time.
This big Google view extends to my support teams as well. I have highly educated people providing support. It’s my job to help them develop their social skills to handle support calls and influence their peers across the organization while building their technical skills to deeply understand the product. But more importantly, I’m in the business of creating entrepreneurs. If these people are willing to invest 2-5 years of their time in support, I need to help them become the entrepreneurs we need at Google, to give them enough latitude to innovate for big impact.
Innovate for big impact (purpose):
Scotch – Googlers have the opportunity to work on products that serve hundreds of millions of people around the world. At Google, we tackle big problems. To quote Larry Page, our CEO: “It’s about impact at scale.”
It’s about having ambitious goals and committed teams. It’s about finding the best people who want to work on the biggest bets because there’s no-one else crazy enough to try – which means there’s little competition. As you know, Google is involved in many projects. And you might think...what is a search company doing inventing these things? The answer lies in our culture.
A good example is our self-driving cars. The idea for a self-driving car didn’t come about because it was cool. It came about because our engineers fundamentally believed that there were too many deaths on the road. They also believed that traffic, and your time spent in the car, could be more efficient. They didn’t think about incremental improvements – they thought about how to revolutionize driving.
The result – we announced our self-driving car in 2010. Having safely completed over 140,000 miles of computer-led driving, I’d like to share the impact it has had on Steve who is legally blind, getting behind the wheel: http://youtu.be/cdgQpa1pUUE?t=1m44s
This large scale innovation extends to my support teams who are being coached and encouraged to think big when improving our support offering on our products. It’s my job to give them the leeway to make customer service better by having access to and influence over our engineers, our vendors and our help centers. Our goals, to improve customer satisfaction, reduce our customers’ contact rate and improve our products, may not be as ambitious as the self-driving car, but the same principles apply – be audacious, think big, plan at scale, execute with breadth.
The results speak for themselves. Within 2 to 3 years, these team members are delivering impressive work. A few examples:
Analyzing large data sets to answer high impact questions like: how can we improve online conversion rates by 50%?
Advising a Fortune 500 company on how to re-engineer their IT team to support a cloud based infrastructure.
Redesigning and coding a new billing flow that reduces case volume by 50%.
Working across a handful of top tier partners to help them develop and staff their own support desks.
Again, this is after only 2 to 3 years on the support team.
Jeff – Like Google, we also believe in having a higher purpose. To attract the right people – both employees and customers – companies and their brands need to stand for something bigger – have meaning. For us, this takes shape in our corporate social responsibly (or CSR) initiatives.
On the slide is a quote from one of our CSR partners, Tony Meloto – the founder of Gawad Kalinga (or GK), a non-government organization in the Philippines focused on housing and community
infrastructure, ensuring that families have proper access to land and private ownership in the areas in which GK builds. GK definitely has a higher purpose – it envisions a slum and squatter-free Philippines and hopes to end poverty for 5 million of the country’s poorest families by 2024.
It’s comments like this from Tony that help our team to understand that they are making a huge impact in their local communities. For us, the term “caring culture” describes one of the things we value most at TELUS International, which is our commitment to invest in our people, in their education and welfare, and in the communities in which we live, work and serve. It’s part of our deeply ingrained belief that, if we can delight our team members and meet not only their professional needs, but also their personal needs to take care of their families and their communities, they in turn will delight our customers.
Why culture matters? It drives business results - engagement:
Jeff – So why do these building blocks matter? It’s nice to say “work as a family,” “support learning,” “innovate with purpose” and so on – but do these things really translate into better customer service? Can you empirically correlate culture and engagement to productivity, performance and financial success? A lot of business leaders talk about culture but they struggle to quantify it.
So here are some of the things that I look at to validate our ongoing investment in our culture and in CSR....
Starting with employee engagement – we conduct an annual online survey across all levels of the organization. The survey, called Pulsecheck, is administered by Hewitt Associates, a third-party provider. Results are compiled by our HR team and presented to our entire employee base together with action plans to address identified issues.
Collectively in 2012, TELUS International team members in each region indicated unprecedented scores of 90% in “customer focus and putting customers first,” 91% in “respect for fellow team members’ diversity”, and an impressive 90% in “our role in the community” – all considered important drivers for keeping our teams engaged.
To get to best employer status, our philosophy is simple. Happy, engaged team members that bring passion and commitment to their roles deliver the absolute best customer experience. Our employee engagement scores place us among the most engaged companies, not just in our industry, but in the world.
Why culture matters? It drives business results – attrition:
Jeff – Another “hard data point” I look at is attrition. As we continue to invest in our people, their education, welfare, and communities, our efforts are rewarded with loyalty and engagement around the world. The TELUS International attrition rate is almost 50% below our competition, because we work diligently to develop, grow and keep our high-potential team members.
We know that tenured agents lead to reduced hiring and training costs as well as more efficient and satisfying customer experiences. The average tenure for Gen Y agents at TELUS International used to be around 13 months, but now, many of our Millennials are staying up to 7 years or more because they feel our workplace is designed specifically for them.
Why culture matters? It engages:
Scotch – When it comes to employee engagement, we take a very similar approach at Google. It’s important for Googlers to know they have a voice in how we run the company and for Googlers to know that we act on their feedback.
Like TELUS International, we conduct an employee survey each year. The majority of Googlers believe that meaningful changes are made in the business as a result of this survey. Results from our
Googlegeist survey are shared annually via detailed reports with the company's executives, managers, and employees – and the company makes a point of letting employees know about the actions it takes in response to their feedback.
We want our people to know that we care about our culture and that we will deliver against it. You can’t pretend or declare to have a certain type of culture – because your employees will call you on it. Surveys are great way to get a true pulse on where you stand as an organization.
Why culture matters? It fuels positive CX:
Scotch – And finally, let’s take a look at culture’s connection with customer experience and satisfaction. The true test of a culture that works is seen in frontline team members.
It’s clear that actions and behavior drive culture more than words. So take a good look at your frontline. Do they act and behave in a way that truly embraces a customer-service culture? Are they engaged? Are they motivated? Are they happy at work?
Culture is not just a soft thing. To give you a data point, our global CSAT is consistently over 90%, measured as top 2 box scores on a 7 point scale – and this is for technical support (not just customer support). This is a tough threshold to hit across a product suite as large as ours and with an enterprise customer base. And it couldn’t be done without a global team that fully embraces a customer-service culture day in and day out.
So it’s important to go back and examine your own corporate culture – to make sure that your culture is well aligned to your strategy. And to define those key principles that your own people can embody in everything that they do. Your cultural values, and knowing how to reinforce those values, will be critical to your success.
And don’t think culture matters only within your corporate walls. Your cultural values should extend well beyond that to the partners you choose and the relationships you build with them. What we’ve shared today doesn’t mean that you have to aspire to have a culture like Google or TELUS International. These are just two examples. It’s about finding what works for your organization and the partners you choose to work with.
Create a culture with meaning:
Jeff – In closing our discussion on the building blocks of a great corporate culture....and to go back to Scotch’s quote from Larry Page – [It really is all] “about impact at scale.”
Last year, almost 6,000 TELUS International team members took part in philanthropy events across the globe. In Guatemala, for example, we built an entire new school with 9 classrooms, benefiting 1,000 children – all in just in one day.
On the other side of the globe, thousands of our TELUS International Philippines team members came together in Manila to refurbish a single school attended by 9,000 students!
It’s making this type of impact in the communities where we live, work and serve that lights up the faces of our team members. They see real results in their own backyard, in areas that truly need support. This fosters a sense of commitment and engagement, of loyalty and pride, in our team that directly impacts if they decide to stay with our company, and how they treat customers on the other end of the line every day.
Let me end by sharing just a glimpse of the story of Leslie and Neo in the Philippines:
http://youtu.be/JNOLh0PNDrA
View our Resource Centers for additional best practices:
Online Chat for Service & Sales
Social Media in the Contact Center
Serving Gen Y – tactics for the Millennial generation
Outsourcing Done Right – 8 Habits, with Everest Group
Thank you! We invite you to learn more!
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TELUS International
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