Pépite-Café AMARC : December 2022

Roole is a motoring club which provides free and paying services to French motorists, most notably additional securities complementing main vehicle insurances.

Roole works together with 1500 groups and independent car dealerships and has a customer portfolio comprising more than 1.2 million members.

This edition of the Pépite Café allowed Customer Experience Director Anne-Marie Quina to introduce the seven major points used at Roole to offer a quality customer experience.

Anne-Marie Quina (Roole): “We’re keen users of the test and learn practices. We proceed, we halt, we step back and we then decide whether to validate the tested steps.

At first, Roole comprised two separate departments which were in direct contact with customers: Customer Relationship and Assistance and Compensation. We found that as many as 25% of all phone calls were transferred between these two departments, as customers very often had several demands. Each of these departments had a limited scope of action, leading to a certain frustration among our collaborators as they couldn’t assist customers from beginning to end.

The creation of a new position stemming from these two departments was consequently considered. This was made possible by the setting up of our first Lab. Five volunteers coming from these two departments spent six months outlining the contours of a new position that would permit providing customers with a single counsellor. They notably worked on a training programme which aimed to improve the employees’ comfort while on the phone as well as their posture. This was a conclusive experience which allowed to merge our two departments into a single service, the Club à l’Écoute.

This experience strengthened our willingness to make use of test and learn practices through the setting up of labs. We notably reiterated this process when it came to implementing the chat and video conference channels, taking into account these channel’s specificities, used tools, processes, etc.”

“Our counsellors have been granted some leeway regarding their work hours. At first, a supervisor used to draw up our counsellors’ work schedules; we however very quickly realised that forced modification of work schedules would lead to employee irritation.

We consequently tested the autonomous management of work hours: the teams are able to set their work schedule themselves, while taking care to have business hours covered. A certain framework was nonetheless needed. The amount of phone calls per period of time most notably served as a transparent basis to design it. The underlying idea was to provide meaning to this framework, and we are confident that it helped to foster commitment within the teams.

The general rules and the various work schedule adjustment plans were then formalised under the form of a charter drawn up by our collaborators.”

“Roole’s counsellors are able to work in a highly autonomous manner. They do not follow any predefined scripts when assisting customers, providing them with genuine freedom in their expression: it is up to them to adapt to their interlocutor. What we ask of our counsellors is first and foremost to be genuine.

Our recruitment policy relies upon such criteria: rather than technical skills, what we’re looking for is more of a specific personality or mindset. We believe that technical skills are something that can be acquired and we are willing to spend more time training our new collaborators if required.

We’ve also implemented several measures in order to help our counsellors exchange with the customers. Among those, non-violent communication training courses which cover subjects such as the commonly encountered causes of dissatisfaction as well as discontent customers. We’ve also set up Best Friend workshops, during which collaborators get to listen to phone calls along with their manager before answering this question, as if on the job:”

« What would you do if this was your best friend? »

“When we merged our two customer service departments, the length of a typical phone call went from 3:30 minutes to 6:30 minutes. We then removed the phone call length criterion. Should a pick-up rate problem arise, we assume this stems from management or from wrongly assessed team sizes, rather than from our counsellor.

Our goal is to take our time, and to make sure that this time is well spent, when it comes to assisting calling customers. Some are in a hurry and need a swift answer while some require more attention. By taking our time, we mean that going further than merely explaining and detailing our warranty policies is important.”

“The underlying idea is to fully fulfil our customers’ implicit needs!”

“We want our collaborators to be enterprise-minded. Our goal is that our collaborators act and think in the same way that they would if they were running their own company. We really did develop this reasoning further by granting them a monthly budget, fully dedicated to commercial gestures, which they can use as they see fit.

This most notably applies in cases where a customer’s demands do not match their warranty policy’s provisions. A healthy relationship between this customer and their counsellor may lead the latter to be willing to provide assistance nonetheless. A gift given to a satisfied customer, as the exchange concluded in a satisfactory manner, would be another example of such a commercial gesture.

This process really must feel sincere from the counsellor’s part, as if they were gifting something to a relative or a friend. It is to be noted that the counsellors themselves choose what gift to send to the customers.”

“The primary means of assessing customer enchantment is exploiting verbatim. Counsellors may directly assess their interlocutor’s feelings while on the phone, yet it feels even more rewarding to discover the customers’ enchantment under the form of a verbatim.

We’ve implemented a surveying solution which we use to investigate our customers’ opinions at each moment of truth, most notably following phone calls. This is a very short survey that takes place entirely by SMS: customers are asked whether they were satisfied with their interaction with the counsellor and what grade they would award. They are also asked an open-ended question, such as ‘Could you tell us more?’

Grades were at first our main focus, but we eventually realised that customer feedback did not always match with the awarded grades. Some promoters would sometimes be expressing dissatisfaction while some detractors would on the other hand be rather satisfied.”

“ERDIL customer verbatim analyses provide us with a great deal of data, which allows us to assess where our strengths and improvement levers lie but also to congratulate our collaborators.

Several measures may be set up following customer verbatim analysis. An example would be the implementation of alerts, triggered by verbatim bringing up problems found in such fields as the handling of demands, the use of our digital tools or even the logistics surrounding the delivery of courtesy cars.

Some customers sometimes also ask us to showcase the work of our collaborators. We curate each morning a selection of one or two verbatim which are sent to the collaborators. A (good) way to begin the day with a smile!”