Janaki Venkatesan

Building a Customer-Centric Workplace

BBry FCU is a credit union serving a small community of residents in Pennsylvania. The mission
of the credit union is to provide excellent member service, one member at a time. While the
front-line staff were providing the best of service in carrying the credit union’s mission, the call
center hit a snag with the increase in number of unhappy members. Some of the unhappy
members started reaching out to senior management for resolution of their problems for which
they had reached out to the call center in the first place. The morale of the team of 10 call
center employees was down because they were not receiving proper coaching or guidance
from their supervisor.

Before long, I became the supervisor of the call center. My first challenge was to step up from
the role of a call center employee to being the supervisor of the call center. The next was to
find ways to coach the team on the credit unions product and services and customer service
skills. While enriching the knowledge base and the customer service skills, I was also faced with
the challenge of making sure the team respected each other and created a healthy atmosphere
at work.

As the team members where not new to me, I was somewhat aware of their strengths and
challenges. To build their confidence, I asked everyone to choose topics from our products and
services that they would like to present to the team in the form of games, trivia, or role play.
From Pictionary to playing musical chair, the team really got engaged and conducted such fun
learning sessions to improve their technical skills. Such sessions also made them feel included
and respected. While the strengthening of technical skills was working excellently, with the
help of or training department, I made sure the team attended coaching sessions in small
batches to sharpen their customer service skills.

By empowering everyone, the team started respecting and appreciating one another. We all
took time to acknowledge and support each other’s efforts in providing the uninterrupted
member service. The team began to realize the value of comradery regardless of personal
differences. The entire call center team felt comfortable enough to approach me with any
questions and concerns. They were also getting confident in providing feedback and
constructive criticism.

While we were busy helping one another in building a strong team in a period of six months, we
were surprised by an email appreciation from our CEO. Our CEO commended us for the
excellent feedback that she had received from our members praising how well customer service
has been. She also shared with us the report of the current rating that BBry FCU’s call center
had received proving that in six months’ time, we had gone from a 3.5 to a 4.6 rating.

To keep this momentum going, I created an employee appreciation program which contained
points and gift cards. The program enabled my team members to provide shoutouts and
highlights of their coworkers if they witnessed or heard them go above and beyond. As a
supervisor, I had the ability to provide gift cards to those coworkers who received a greater
number of shoutouts and highlights in each month. While all of this might sound fun, they
were also tied into their performance plan.

Having completed a year with this program, our call center has been stronger than ever. As
product and service knowledge is a key in providing the best customer service to our members,
the call center staff are getting more creative in keeping their knowledge current. I am proud of
my accomplishments and truly believe that I was able to achieve them by focusing on the
people in my team.