Winners Stories: Team engagement and morale key for Gousto

“It was a great feeling to win Gold.” That’s what Nick Williams, Director of Customer Care at Gousto said after winning the Most Effective Improvement Programme award at the European Contact Centre and Customer Service Awards last year.

“As a team we’ve worked so hard to build something amazing for our customers,” he said. “It was such a huge boost for us to receive this recognition from our peers in the industry.”

The project that delivered this win for Gousto was an improvement strategy aimed at responding to rapid business growth. Customer contact had grown and CSAT was under threat. The initiative was led by Nick and delivered an increase in CSAT from 73% to 90% and productivity went up by almost 20%. The icing on the cake was a strong set of employee engagement results.

What did they do?

The improvement strategy was immense. It focused on being available when customers were making contacting, delighting customers that were unhappy, reacting faster to resolve customer delivery issues, focus on improving quality, identifying high performers in recruitment, employee engagement through ownership, improving use of the tools and technology and the business expanded through building a strong relationship with an outsourced partner to deal with spikes and opened a second contact centre.

“The results speak for themselves,” says Nick. “As a team we pulled together and everyone shared the vision, passion and commitment to achieve results. We are lucky enough to have a highly dedicated team at all levels who regularly find innovative ways to go the extra mile for our customers.”

“Winning at the ECCCSAs was great for team engagement and morale. It was a great way for us to benchmark ourselves against what our indicator metrics were showing us. It also gave us a way of showing our customers the level of world class support we are aspiring to provide.”

Inspired by the judging process

We asked Nick about the judging process that he and the team went through. This is what he said: “The judging team are great. They make you feel relaxed. They aim to get the best out of you but at the same time the questioning often gives food for thought to help you evolve your business area further.

“As a result, it inspired us to do a completely different retrospective session to what we would usually do. We’ve kept in touch with the judges and found them to be really useful to share ideas with and act as a sounding board for us.”

Advice for 2019 nominations

“Go for it!” That’s what Nick has to say to those thinking about entering in 2019.

“If you become a Finalist, empower your team to deliver and take ownership of this stage. It’s a fantastic experience which I feel will only help them grow in their careers.”