The Client

Telecommunications company with over $1 billion in annual revenue and approximately 4,000 employees.

The Problem

The senior management team of this regional telecommunications company wanted to understand the issues its frontline employees were encountering when serving their customers. While the company regularly conducted customer satisfaction surveys, they wanted to better understand its employees’ perspectives as well in order to improve the level of service provided.

Secondly, leadership wanted these employees to create solutions to address the most significant issues, which would then be presented back to leadership.

Previous attempts to solicit this information and corresponding solutions from employees failed for a myriad of reasons including fear of speaking up, group sessions dominated by one or two individuals, and objectives that weren’t clearly defined.

The Solution

Soarington met with senior management to understand and ultimately redefine the project objectives. Next, we worked with the client to recruit employees from different client-facing (in person or via phone) roles to attend the sessions.

Soarington facilitated several sessions taking care to ensure that a comfortable environment was created for open communication. Facilitator guides were created, which supported the project objectives while also allowing ample opportunity for free flowing discussion.

• Sessions were restricted to facilitators and participants (i.e., no observers allowed)
• Each session included attendees with similar roles (e.g., one sessions consisted of installation technicians, while another session included call center employees)
• Introductions and warm-up topic readily put everyone at ease
• Exercises increased level of engagement, improved group dynamics, increased creativity, and expedited problem solving

Ultimately, the facilitators were able to quickly develop a rapport with the session participants and maximize the group potential, while managing any domineering personalities thus ensuring the sessions stayed on track.

Session attendees were very forthcoming when providing their perspectives on customer service issues, but had some difficulty switching to solution mode. For this portion of the discussion, the group exercises were especially important as they gave participants the freedom to openly contribute without individually having to come up with complete solutions. Exercises used included the Stepladder Technique, the Crawford Slip Method, and the Reframing Matrix.

The Result

Soarington was able to solicit in-depth feedback on numerous issues pertaining to each service touch point. This feedback and resulting conclusions were presented to senior management by the facilitators. Additionally, an employee representative from each of the sessions presented the top solutions created to address the most significant issues.

The client was highly satisfied with the level of employee engagement and project outcomes and brought Soarington back to facilitate a full-day session on similar issues with the leadership team.