Case Studies

Client Success Story: Customer Care Team

Coming to the Rescue During Significant Financial Hardships

By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy.
Learn more

Always unblock YouTube

A recent Bridgeforce client identified a need to do more for their customers in the gravest of financial situations. They wanted to support customers at a human level. To do so, this global lender asked Bridgeforce to help develop a new customer care team focused on empathy and results.

Senior Program Manager Lynne Cox shared how Bridgeforce helped this client stand up a new customer care team. She recounts the objectives Bridgeforce tackled, and the customers’ overwhelming positive experience.

In the video above, see how our client rose to the occasion to create industry-leading customer support.

Standing up a New Customer Care Team

The client, a top-ten global bank, recognized that to uphold their focus on being a responsible lender they needed a different approach for struggling customers. A new team would need to manage difficult emotions during calls and craft the right solutions for both the customer and the bank. Similarly, the team needed to understand what would be most helpful to the customer — even if it meant saying “no.”

To execute their plan to build an empathetic collections team with new treatments for customers, they engaged Bridgeforce to assist.

Bridgeforce’s Job

Bridgeforce helped the client meet an extremely aggressive deadline of 6 weeks to recruit, hire, train and deploy the new team with the following activities:

Designed and delivered 9 new job responsibilities and success profiles along with an 18-page hiring guide
Recruited for the positions, including sifting through more than 70 candidates with interviews and debriefs
Onboarded 28 specialists and managers (on target, despite hiring challenges faced)
Designed an end-to-end operating model with >20 policies, process maps and Day 1 Procedures
Created and implemented a comprehensive performance management framework and quality controls
Design, built, and executed training (agenda, 52 modules, training aids, participant workbooks, assessments, surveys and facilitator guides)

“Our ability to navigate governance helped because we've been on the client side and we understand how to work with stakeholders to get them on board and make sure change can be affected in the right way and with the right backing.”— Lynne Cox

Key Challenge: Recruiting During a Pandemic

For many organizations, recruiting during a global pandemic has been an uphill battle. Because the client needed to hire an entire team, Bridgeforce provided careful consideration to the recruiting process. The client ultimately avoided high decline and attrition rates with three key elements:

Ensuring job advertisements were attractive
Clearly stating what type of employee the client was looking for
Having a strong onboarding process

The result? An attrition rate of less than 5%.

The Completed Team

At the end of the engagement, the client had their new customer care team in place. Helping customers to this extent was something the client could be proud of and present to the industry as a refreshed standard in consumer collections. The team was highly engaged and well equipped to handle complex situations. In fact, the training suite we delivered had received a score of 9.8/10 — leaving the client’s team confident in their role.

“I've worked with a lot of consultants and by far you have been the best.”— Client

Lasting Results

While the initial training was complete and the team was primed to start taking phone calls, Bridgeforce ensured that the client could continue to deliver at superior levels for years to come. To do so, we provided the client with:

A full suite of training that other groups in the organization could leverage
Process and procedural documents
Bespoke KPIs and performance/reward structures

Most importantly, customers noticed the difference immediately. During listening sessions, multiple customers had “tears of delight” with how well they’ve been treated and the solutions put into place to help them.

Customer satisfaction results were 92% (which was 150 basis points above the former collections team). These amazing results continued after taking 4,000 calls and putting customers in 200 programs. Those customers also have a very low delinquency rate.

The client believes the program will pay for itself within a year.

“The work that we did has helped hundreds of customers in a material way...Overall the effort to stand this up has been the most meaningful work of my career and I feel fortunate that you were there to help move it forward.”— Client