Optus has announced an industry-changing transformation in their customer service space through the introduction of the ‘Community of Experts’ program whereby within 6 months every single customer will be moved into their own dedicated team.
The Community of Experts are a multi-disciplinary team entirely centred around collaborating and solving the needs of their customer base with the aim of eliminating transfers to different departments. While a customer’s request could cover a range of areas, such as renewing their contract, requesting more information about Optus products or asking for help with their bill, the best thing about this is that no matter what, the customer returns back to the same team; their Community of Experts, each and every time.
“No one wants to wait on hold, to be bumped around from agent to agent, repeating their enquiry over and over again, we knew we needed to be better at understanding our customers and resolving their needs”, said Optus Vice President of Customer Care, Mark Baylis.
Optus have also said farewell to customers getting the old contact centre run around by removing barriers such as complicated phone menus and complex routing- saying hello to a simplier experience, where they are connected to the same team every single time.
The Community of Experts will also offer personalised conversations and unique responses, including addressing challenges specifically faced in the region they care for such as outages, network performance or bushfires. Customers can reach their community of experts 24/7 via Messaging and if they want to and reach out over the phone during the day; they have the option to do so.
“We recognise getting help can come with a lot of friction points and that’s not good enough. Organisations often design their operating model based on efficiencies rather than really placing customers at the centre of the experience and we were no different, we had our teams set up based on specific skills or channels and we knew something had to change. We needed to organise our business around what the customer needed from us. It could no longer be about us. It has to be about our customers,” said Bayliss.
