Why are people in white coats flooding Terminal 3 at Heathrow?
Have Virgin Atlantic finally lost it?
Or is this part of their customer experience genius – an inventive way to make service training stick?
Virgin Atlantic have a long history of being impossible to ignore. Always on the side of customers, doing whatever it takes to make people fall in love with flying again. So, we were delighted when they asked NKD to help take their customer service to new heights.
But how do you help people who are already pretty awesome at service become altogether awesomer?
How do you seamlessly integrate digital and human service interactions?
In a world where a chatbot is enough to leave customers satisfied, and where seamless service means ‘instant and free’, how do you make the most of the human interactions?
The answer?
Don’t just invest in digital innovation. Remember to invest in the humans who work for you too, and customer experience, digital or otherwise, is likely to flourish.
One of the lovely things about Virgin is that their people stay on board. Of course, they have heaps of loyal customers, but travel from Terminal 3 at Heathrow and you’ll find loyal agents who’ve been in customer service roles for 20 years or more. And they’re still smiling. So why bring in the men in white coats?
Well, the ‘men’ are mostly women and they are all NKD coaches. Usually. But over the last few months, in partnership with Virgin, we’ve been turning our coaches into human scientists as they join “Scientist Red” to create chemistry between agents and their customers in Virgin airports and contact centres.
Here’s how it works. We took teams to a mysterious location and invited them to take part in a day-long human experiment to find out what mindset and behaviours it takes to create human chemistry in a digital world. Discover the formula that blows your customers’ minds and captures their hearts!
The formula?
Build a ‘human science lab’ and fill it with immersive learning where people experiment with captivating behavioural techniques. Adapt the learning and roll it out to all of your customer service teams and roles so that customers feel the difference at every step of their journey. Throw in some high-impact coaching along the way and the people who you thought already knew it all will come away feeling invested in, full of vigour and refined customer service mastery.
The findings of this experiment?
You can energise even the most seasoned customer service agent to find a new spring in their step and an extra ray of sunshine in their smile. But don’t forget to follow up or they’ll soon get frosty.
That’s why the women in white coats went back to the airport, turning up unannounced to remind teams of their training experience and brush up their skills with some in-the-moment, on-demand coaching. Making learning stick doesn’t have to be sticky… just well-timed, good fun and totally on-brand.
Want to create your own human-science experiment to make engagement fizz and customer service bang? Get in touch with NKD by hitting the connect button below.