We have just celebrated National Customer Service Week, and at Chess that’s a big deal. NCSW is a week-long opportunity to raise awareness of the importance of great customer service and the vital role it plays in business practices and future growth. 

Customer Service at Chess

2021 and 2022 have been challenging for us all. More disruption and the pandemic forced a change to the way we work, and whilst we all thought the move to home working was temporary, it has continued and become an everyday reality for many of our customers. Chess has continued to act and adapt quickly to changing circumstances throughout the year.

 

The pandemic forced us to change the way we deal with incoming queries, and the emphasis has been towards online self-service through our Customer Portal. Phone lines continue to prioritise answering customers with urgent business-critical queries.

This change has understandably been a source of frustration for some customers, and we’ve worked hard to resolve some of the difficulties you may have experienced when we initially launched online self-serve.

I’m delighted to say that our feedback tells us that customer satisfaction is improving. I am immensely proud of how our people and our customers have responded during a challenging 2-year pandemic journey.

Our Customer Portal continues to be invaluable in helping customers manage their account online, and customers can self-serve 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Our Customer Survey told us there were improvements our customers wanted to see across all aspects of our business, and we're proud to be making changes in five key areas.  

  1. Customer Portal ease of use to improve customer experience.
  2. Making more phone calls to customers to resolve issues for account, billing and technical faults that have been raised on the Customer Portal ticket system.
  3. Reduce the time it takes to respond to a ticket from five days to two.
  4. Increase training our technical teams to achieve first time fix.
  5. Introduce account reviews so that the sales account managers can discuss products/services, competitive deals, and 2025 PSTN switch off.
Celebrating Customer Service Week

Customers are at the heart of our business and throughout the week we will be highlighting the importance of the service we provide to them. We ask our people to think about how we can change or adapt processes to make our service even better, and we thank them for making Chess a great place to work, and a great place to be a customer.

Home working hasn’t stopped us having fun and more than ever we’re a One Team culture who know how to celebrate:  Here’s a taster of what went on during the week.

  • Chess Dragons Den we asked our people to give an example of the best customer service they had received so Chess adapt that good practice.
  • Team Hub Days our people got together in our hubs to share knowledge as improving employee engagement and capability leads to higher customer satisfaction.
  • Customer Service Quiz a mammoth quiz for over 300 people hosted online over the 5 days.
  • Recognition telling people how well they are doing is something we do every day at Chess, but this week we’re asking for some extra special love. We call it the ‘good deed feed’.
  • Bake Off to round off the week we’ll be asking our star bakers to show off their cookies and we’ll be rewarding all our winners of the week with a range of Perkbox prizes.

If you are interested in finding out more about National Customer Service Week, take a look at their website, there’s lots of great information and it’s a fantastic way to engage your own business in this great initiative.  

Visit NCSW Website