Today’s interview is with Ray Biggs, Head of Customer Care at John Lewis & Waitrose. Ray joins me today to talk about their customer care programme, their focus on agent/partner well-being, particularly in the face of turnover, attrition and burnout and changing working arrangements, the implementation of well-being time outs, the changing nature of management and leadership, especially in the customer care environment, a quote from Martin Hill Wilson and Kicker shoes no less.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The connection between flight simulators, agent attrition and better outcomes – Interview with Brian Tuite of Zenarate – and is number 463 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at TextExpander for sponsoring this episode of my podcast.

TextExpander is an auto-complete tool that allows your team to eliminate repetitive typing and stay on the same page with just a few keystrokes allowing you to delight more customers in less time.

Click here or on the banner image above to find out more and to get a 20% discount for the first 12 months of TextExpander if you use the code: SWINSCOE

Here are the highlights of my chat with Ray:

• Ray is a big fan of Kickers shoes (so am I). Look them up 🙂
• For those looking from the outside in John Lewis and Partners is a bit like looking into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. In many ways, it’s a magical place but not without its challenges. But, we have a real laser sharp focus on the care and welfare of our partners i.e. all employees who are co-owners in the business.
• I’ve been knocking around for 20-odd years and I think it’s actually getting harder working in a call centre now on the front line.
• When I look at what my partner’s are having to deal with, it’s all predominantly demand failure.
• While automation has removed much of the simpler type of activity, which is great, what it does mean is there’s no respite from the challenging stuff that comes in.
• Recognising that we started looking at how can we better support the well being of our partners.
• People do forget that a call centre environment is tricky one because the people that are in it spend 80% of the time with something over their ears.
• We need to be mindful that people working from home are potentially bringing conflict into a domestic environment.
• The nature of team leadership has a bigger welfare lens than what they had before.
• But, how are team managers supposed to be able to spot changes to/risk to well-being? They are not trained counsellors.
• We assume that leadership is based on physical collocation, and we train and we educate for that.
• Our assumptions around what good supervision, team, management and leadership looks like if from a different context and the context has changed. Therefore the inputs doesn’t necessarily match the requirements.
• But, I don’t think we really know the answers completely around what good looks like in this new context yet.
• Covid was a real wake up call to say what’s important and what isn’t and the true value of human to human interaction and connection.
• My job title is head of customer care. It didn’t used to be. Previously, it was something like head of customer contact and customer service. I changed that because what we do is about care. We care for customers. But, we can only care for our customers if we care for our people.
• How we needed to respond in this changed context wasn’t for some people. That doesn’t make them bad people.
• The job changed and that the new requirements where well-being and welfare was a much larger part of the job wasn’t really what they signed up to.
• Our new approach has seen our employee engagement rocket. Now there’s absolutely a halo effect which I think most organisations saw during covid and and certainly for us customers, a bit of a galvanising against, you know, the big the big bad.
• We’ve implemented well-being time outs. So, say you’ve just had a really horrible call and you’re at home, on your own and you’ve got nobody to bounce off then we’ve implemented wellbeing time out. It’s 30 minutes. You request it. We take you off the system and you’ve got 30 minutes to go for a walk, have a fag, drink coffee..whatever it is that you want to do in order to give you space to het your head back to the right place.
• As of the end of 2022, 68% of the team were regularly using their monthly well-being time out and were actively managing their own well-being. That’s up from a position of about 10 or 15%.
• 90% of partners (our people) in a survey told us that they did feel that their well being was being supported by their people managers.
• In one of my regular town-halls, someone asked me how I was taking care of my own well-being and I realised I wasn’t and I needed to start if I was to be congruent with the team and what were asking of them. That was a big shift.
• Technology, AI and chatbots have taken away a whole lot of easy stuff because that’s what those technologies can do really effectively. But, what they leave is the much more complex stuff.
• The problem with that is that agents used to get their ‘breaks’ with the simple and easy calls.
• A lot of this stuff is requiring a rethink of how we approach things and particularly around the well being of your agents, particularly when, if we’re automating a lot of the simple stuff away, then it’s all complex and more complicated kind of things, and that the cognitive load on that is is kind of relentless.
• How am I proactively looking after my agent’s well-being? And/Or what am I doing that with my systems and my processes to help with that? And, how am I enabling and empowering my agents to reactively just hit that ‘red’ button and step out and to be OK with that?
• That’s a big challenge for contact centre ops.
• The fundamentals: Give me the tools to do a great job, and I’ll do you a great job. Look after me and tell me that I’m doing great. Help me when I’m not doing great and if you can be sensitive when I need you to be sensitive, that’d be pretty cool as well.
• Mental health is an evolving proposition. You don’t fix it and walk away.
• We’re now doing a whole load of stuff on diversity and inclusion. We’re actually holding a bit of a mirror up and going how inclusive are we?
• I’m pretty proud of some of the work that we’ve done in that space. But, boy oh boy, have we got a lot more to do. But again, kind of similar to well being, a lot of it is around education and awareness.
• What we’re actually now looking at is to see how can we bring well-being and D&I together as belonging. We’ve got 22 groups of people that are working on these things almost in tandem.
• While there is little additional investment available right now, it’s important to remember that you’ve already paid for the head space that’s already there. So, why don’t you use it to the max.
• Martin Hill Wilson once said to me, probably over a couple of glasses of wine, something along the lines of ……now more than ever, because of what we’ve described, automation and technology has taken a whole lot of simple stuff away. Now, we’ve got complexity. As a result, we really need to wake up to the fact that these frontline contact centre teams are now communication experts. They will succeed based on their ability to interact with another human being and being able to be flex between knowing Oh this is Ray Biggs and he just wants a yes or no and to get out the door and this is Mrs Smith, and she wants to chat….. and I have to have the capability and the nous to know which lever to pull, depending on who I’m dealing with. And by the way, I’ll make that decision within about 5 to 10 seconds of hearing the customer’s voice.
• That’s what our teams do, and and there is little recognition or regard for that as a skill.
• Ray’s best advice: Care. Really care. In case someone doesn’t know what that means….A lot of it’s about listening. A lot of it’s about honesty. A lot of it’s about empathy. But, you know, you’ve got to be engaged in something to care about it.
• Ray’s Punk CX word: True
• Ray’s Punk XL brand: The independent coffee van just off Sefton Park in Liverpool.
• Don’t underestimate the intelligence, acumen and nous of the people that work for you.

About Ray

Ray Biggs is Head of Customer Care at John Lewis & Waitrose. Ray has worked in contact centres for over 20 years, predominantly in retail. His career started ‘on the phones’ and is one of a handful of senior contact centre leaders who truly came up through the ranks. Comfortable in both operational and strategic roles he has considerable experience in both in-house and outsourced operating models. Enjoys agitating in the boardroom but happiest with his sleeves rolled up with his teams.

Find out more about John Lewis & Waitrose, say Hi to them on Twitter @JohnLewisRetail and @johnlewishelp and feel free to connect with Ray on LinkedIn here.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay