Creating Exceptional Customer Experiences - Conatus 3 Partnership
A story of Strategic Partnership: Bellevue University, North End Teleservices & Conatus3 Inc.
The leadership team at North End Teleservices has been recognized as visionaries for their abilities to deliver exceptional customer experiences. As the Omaha Chamber’s Small Business of the Year in 2017, their mission to hire and develop underutilized talent was described as impactful to the Omaha community. Furthermore, David Brown, the Chamber’s President and CEO said North End Teleservices was “a company that checks all the boxes, whether we’re talking about premier customer service or dynamic-changing community involvement.”
Carmen Tapio, president and chief executive of North End Teleservices understands the challenges of finding and keeping talent. It's why she spearheaded efforts for North End to become the first workforce partner in a unique partnership promoting registered apprenticeship programs through the U.S. Department of Labor, the Nebraska Department of Labor and Bellevue University. Regarding the agents her team serves, she shared, “We talk to them about their lives, their hopes, their dreams, their careers. It’s not just about a job. It’s really about helping them create a vision for themselves,” she says.
In her quest to help employees, she engaged Conatus3 Inc., another Omaha-area small business and strategic partner with Bellevue University, who focuses on helping organizations with employee selection and development, coaching and mentoring, and performance appraisals.
Dave Gregory, president and chief executive of Conatus3, describes his human capital assessments as allowing organizations to identify their employees preferred behavioral styles, motivations, and how they think and make decisions. He shares “Improving organizational performance requires individualized self-awareness and authenticity to one’s strengths. Using science allows us to create a much more accurate representation or profile of the individual. Specifically, the Attribute Index™ provides an in-depth look at how we think and make decisions.”
THE SCIENCE
Unique to the Attribute Index is its ability to assess an individual’s cognitive structure (i.e., how their mind perceives themselves and the world around them). Unlike any other instrument, the
Attribute Index™ has a direct relationship with mathematics, and this is the secret behind its ability to accurately measure the core dimensions of how we think and make decisions. The result is an accurate ranking of personal attributes describing individual potential for workplace performance. Unlike many other instruments intended for a clinical setting but adapted to a business one, the Attribute Index was designed, from the beginning, exclusively for a business environment. Its overall intent, format and output are specifically tailored to meet the needs of business managers today.
A STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP
As part of the effort to help employees understand themselves more thoroughly, North End Teleservices had each of its leaders complete the Attribute Index™. Conatus3 provided individual reports and a team review for the leadership. The results were astounding. The North End Teleservices leadership team, who Carmen Tapio likes to say she would stack up against any contact center management team, outperformed the norm benchmarks, significantly in several areas. For example:
Using Common Sense (North End Teleservices 8.53 compared to 7.4 Norm)
This capacity is determined by their focus on practical thinking, their ability to see the world clearly, and their general intelligence as reflected in their scores in empathy, practical thinking, and organizational ability.
Attitude Toward Honesty (North End Teleservices 7.79 compared to 6.9 Norm)
This capacity examines a person’s view of honesty and of structure and order in society. It reveals the level of self-esteem available to accept the consequences of their own actions, and toward reporting the dishonesty of others.
Personal Accountability (North End Teleservices 7.32 compared to 6.5 Norm)
The ability to be responsible for the consequences of one’s own decisions and actions; taking responsibility for these decisions, and not shifting focus for blame or poor performance somewhere else, or on others. This derives from an internal responsibility to one’s self to be accountable and this internal willingness to own up will tend to be exhibited outside in one’s actions.
Problem Management (North End Teleservices 7.73 compared to 6.9 Norm)
The ability to keep critical issues in context so that people can understand what is happening, and effectively use their knowledge to solve the problem. This would include the ability to assign resources to people allowing them to solve problems, to be able to change plans to minimize the effects of operations problems.
These results represent just a few of the 78 attributes measured in the Attribute Index™. As you might expect with a management team who played an instrumental role in developing contact center capabilities locally and globally, the North End Teleservices leadership team scored an average of 604.41 compared the Attribute Index Norm of 585.1 and the Contact Center Norm of 563.25.
These results are reflective of the more than 50 years of combined contact center experience in the North End Teleservices team. Mark Johnson, Vice President of Implementation for Conatus3 described the North End Teleservices leadership results as “some of the highest team results I have ever seen in the five years of working with the Attribute Index™ across many contact center sites.” Mark shared, “Very few contact center leadership teams are as well prepared to deliver an exceptional customer experience consistently as North End Teleservices.”
The advantage for North End Teleservices and their clients is the leadership team’s ability to manage their client’s business needs. In a recent Everest Group research article “The Business Impact of Contact Center Attrition,” two costs were highlighted: 1) the costs directly linked to the exit of an existing employee and 2) the leakage in revenue due to attrition attributed to the gap in productivity between the exiting and the replacement contact center employee.
BUILDING A PLAN FOR AGENT DEVELOPMENT
The next steps for the North End Teleservices team is using the agent profile information to build individualized development plans and a hiring profile to help identify top talent in a process which limits the human bias in a traditional or interview-based hiring process. The profile information will also be infused into the Bellevue University apprenticeship certification program, resulting in a consistent approach across the North End Teleservices organization.
The Attribute Index™ allows for a specific top talent profile to be identified for employee selection and development. Dave Gregory shared that the focus on individual development allows for more engaging coaching sessions and employee’s deliver more effort or discretionary effort as a result. This increased discretionary effort has been proven to drive higher individual and team performance results.
Delivering exceptional customer experiences is the objective of every contact center. Having the leaders to consistently deliver the exceptional customer experiences are hard to find. North End Teleservices took the challenge of using science to develop their team. They passed with flying colors, again!
To learn more about how North End Teleservices leadership team would benefit your team, visit their website at: http://www.northendteleservices.com/
To learn more about human capital assessments and take the Conatus3 Challenge, visit their website at: https://conatus3.com/take-the-challenge