The winner of the Customer Service of the Year award, 2M-IT, shared their journey in developing customer service. It was impressive to hear how much emphasis has been placed on leadership, especially on human interaction.
Big congratulations to the winner on our behalf as well! QualityDesk is actively involved in the competition, which upholds and further enhances the appreciation of the customer service industry. The application is used as an evaluation tool in the competitions.
Consistency for an excellent customer experience
The wonderful Belinda Gerdt from VodafonoZiggo also spoke excellently about human communication and how consistency is the cornerstone of developing an excellent customer experience. Personally, one suggestion stood out: “Throw the process aside and serve the customer!”
I understand that customer service cannot always rely solely on processes, as that can indeed lead to poor customer experiences. However, I believe it is essential to provide structure through processes while also giving every customer service representative the freedom to help the customer by any means possible and, at the very least, show empathy and understanding when they cannot.
AI Supporting Customer Service
AI also emerged in the speeches, with the main focus on how AI serves as an excellent assistant that enhances processes and helps customer service representatives perform their jobs even better.
We also focused on this in our presentation with our client S-Bank. We shared the stage with Customer Service Manager Pirjetta Knuuttinen and Service Manager Elisa Jernmark.
S-Bank’s Transformation Journey with QualityDesk
We began our collaboration with S-Bank in 2023 and shared how the implementation of QualityDesk has led to a significant transformation in leadership and competence management – shifting from quantity to meaningfulness.
Over the past year, S-Bank’s customer service has achieved significant improvements across almost all metrics, with NPS increasing by up to 15 points.
This was not achieved with the help of AI, but through traditional coaching-based leadership — from person to person. Over the course of the year, 1,328 one-on-one discussions and 1,178 coaching sessions were held. A total of 10,581 customer interactions were evaluated. Employees conducted an impressive 6,870 self-assessments of their work. Competence was evaluated 2,142 times.
AI to Improve Leadership with QualityDesk
AI will inevitably become part of everyone’s working life. As mentioned, it supports and assists work so that experts and supervisors can focus on what truly matters.
For example, we will introduce a coaching tool in QualityDesk that records coaching sessions, completes coaching forms based on these sessions, and automatically generates action points from the discussions. AI analyzes the content of conversations, identifies patterns and behaviors, and helps supervisors coach each individual in the best possible way.
When QualityDesk is enriched with other data, such as customer and employee satisfaction surveys and hard data, the AI assistant can provide supervisors with ready-made analyses of their team’s performance. Senior management can see how teams and units are performing, what is being discussed, and what expectations exist at the customer interface. This helps improve operations together with employees and achieve desired goals.
We provide organizations with practical benefits – time, which is even more valuable than money! Especially in leadership, when supervisors save several hours per week as they no longer need to manually document and remember “what did we talk about a couple of hours ago” or “what did this note mean?” Now is the right time to adopt solutions that take leadership to the next level.
