Empathy rather than the KPI is the key to the good customer experience

The implementation of P-GAP was a challenging eye-opener for the telecommunications group Norlys Digital. And a key tool in the work of improving the customer experience and creating a uniform culture.

Norlys Digital started in 2021 with a targeted project to improve the customer experience. In collaboration with nps.today, the group implemented a new tool, P-GAP (learn more about P-GAP). A unique method for calculating the difference, perception gap, between a customer’s and a frontline employee’s experience in a given point of contact. CX project manager Dan Lauritzen says that they wanted to become wiser about the good customer experience. The goal was to create a common, uniform culture and service with the customer in focus across all brands in Norlys Digital. Applying P-GAP was for Dan a challenging eye opener that gained significant significance for the project.

Discrepancy provided valuable insights

Via sending outNPS surveys through text messages, to the customer directly after a customer inquiry, Norlys Digital was able to take the temperature of their customers’ experience. Compared with the employee’s assessment of the call, the emotional distance between customer and front employee was calculated. The measurements gave different results, but both the employee with good customer surveys and the employee with bad customer surveys seemed to do the same thing to provide a good customer experience. “When both employees respond that they listen to the customer, are understanding and patient, the problem is not that the employee with the bad measurements does not perform. The problem is that none of them are aware of why they are actually doing good or bad. With P-GAP, we get the answer and can find the solution, ”says Dan.

Focus on learning gives significant results

By listening to customers, Norlys Digital can optimize the customer experience with the customer as a supervisor. “Every day, customers try to teach us something through the feedback they give us. It is about understanding their needs and being aware of our own behavior. The more we train our empathic ability, the better our performance will be, ”explains Dan.
Norlys Digital has already been able to feel the difference. Their agents have become more skilled and customers have become more satisfied. Dan says that the employees are particularly happy with the built-in dashboards in Puzzel. They give them a constant overview of data while sitting and working in the system: “The dashboards nps.today have developed are really insightful, and they give the agents the huge advantage that in the actual contact with a customer they can act proactively based on it. individual customer satisfaction.”

Frontline employees take responsibility

Another noticeable difference the implementation of P-GAP has made for the work with CX is that the employees themselves take the initiative and responsibility now. They have been given direct access to a tool that can create learning, and a method to train behavior to be able to find the answers to the good customer experience themselves. Previously, it was the managers who folded the numbers out for the company’s performance. Now it is more the employees who come to the managers to get sparring based on the insights they themselves have gained.
“We have already come a long way in focusing less on KPIs and results and more on training behaviors and understanding customers in a new way. Most can also see that two different employees can have vastly different behaviors and still provide excellent service. The task is to let the individual employee’s talents shine through and balance them in the right amount for different customer types, ”says Dan.

The solution for Puzzel became Plug & Play for everyone

The implementation of P-GAP started as a tailor-made pilot project with the development of a plug-in for Puzzel, the contact system Norlys Digital uses. By involving both customer and system developer in a joint collaboration, nps.today could take into account all features of the system and to a large extent the customer’s needs. “It is the nature of a pilot project to foster frustrations, but we now have an effective tool that anyone with ambitions to become wiser in customer service can benefit from,” announces Dan. Today, nps.today provides a ready-to-run tool that is fully integrated with Puzzel.

Unique collaboration created common culture

It was not difficult for Norlys Digital to choose their partner to complete the project. “We chose to work with nps.today because they offered to develop P-GAP for Puzzel. It has been an incredibly rewarding collaboration, where nps.today has understood our needs and been really good at fine-tuning the tool for our call flow, ”says Dan.
P-GAP has been crucial to improving the customer experience and creating a common culture in Norlys Digital, and the group plans to expand across the entire organization and to more contact points and communication channels. Dan’s ambition is for Norlys Digital to understand their customers’ needs so well that P-GAP will be a redundant tool for them in the future.