Our work with
Halifax
In a perfect world, everyone who buys an investment product would know how different it is to a savings product and how they should use it. However, features like ‘instant access’ allow, and can even encourage, some confusion between the two. Halifax Building Society had discovered that customers were taking money out of their medium-long term investments before they’d become profitable for either Halifax or the customers themselves.
They created a retention team and gave them a target of retaining a certain value of business over three years. They asked Quietroom to prepare and deliver telephone communication training to help the team achieve that target.
Listening to the team’s calls, we realised that they had no clear objective, consistent approach or structure. Sometimes calls were led by the customer and sometimes by the adviser, but rarely were they trying to go to the same place. Crucially, if their job was to hold onto business and the customer wanted to take money away, then both of them had a different objective. So what was a ‘win’ for one of them was likely to be a ‘loss’ for the other. We wanted to make it possible for everyone to win. That meant giving everyone the same objective – the right decision for the customer.
So we gave them a clear role – the customer’s guide – and established the language and behaviours that supported that role. Instead of stopping their customers taking money out, they were now there to give them the information they needed to make the right decision. We devised call structures so team members could take control of their conversations and make their customers feel they were in safe hands. Everyone got three days of training followed by six hours of one-to-one coaching. We also created ‘champions’ from within the team to maintain the project’s momentum once we’d gone.
The project’s been an incredible success. An external audit rated the team’s culture, training and call scripts first in the market. And in just nine months, they saved five times their three-year target.
