Great employees translate into great customer service, and great customer service is the cornerstone of increased revenues and business growth. This is particularly true in the IT space, where real customer service can make or break the business.
AIGS understands and recognises that people are the key to the success of its business, and therefore embarked on a coaching programme to ensure individual and organisational values became collective ethics.
“AIGS is a small business operating in a traditionally male-dominated IT environment with a staff compliment that is exceptionally diverse,” explains Gustav Piater, sales and marketing director of AIGS. “In understanding both our industry and our staff compliment we identified that additional skills development, across the board, would help both unify our team as well as enhance our service offering. By implementing the Delight@Work programme we felt we would further enable our staff to become exceptional in both their personal and professional lives.”
“We chose the Delight@Work programme because of its unique approach in coupling both online (technology) and offline (workshops and discussions) coaching practices.,” Piater adds. “It is the only programme that cultivates one-on-one interactions with online methodology offering sustainable, scalable behaviour change over time. The methodology, created by Cognician, allowed our staff to work through a series of 18 conversational coaching sessions covering ‘soft skills’ such as communication, accountability, teamwork, and attitude.”
Coupled with interventions and, where required and requested, one on one coaching sessions and discussion forums where employees put their new skills into practice and share their experiences. The chat-based coaching, as well as the activities, were customised and tailored to AIGS’s specific needs, and were designed to create sustainable change. The process was designed to be easy yet meaningful, incorporating each user’s own experiences in order for it to be more engaging learning experience.
“Allowing our staff to become more accountable for their work outcomes motivated them to produce better results. Through the online and offline coaching solution, we promoted elements that can sustain satisfied and engaged employees. Through individual, personal engagement, everyone was encouraged to change their mind-set, resulting in more enthusiasm and energy for their work as well as their personal lives,” says Piater.
It took AIGS just under 12 months to go from commitment to Delight, and by adopting the programme AIGS has benefitted by retaining existing customers, and getting new ones through improved customer service. Service excellence, improved internal communications, increased productivity and happy employees are some of the additional benefits that the company is starting to realise.
“The whole team got involved in the programme and process, enabling us to completely re-evaluate ourselves from inside out. Key enhancements, which included exposing the team to Emotional Intelligence (EQ) right from the get go and some soft skills, helped us redefine our customer journey mapping and, ultimately, grow together and individually,” Piater says.