Hoist Finance
About
Who is Hoist Finance?
Hoist Finance provides debt resolution services, helping people keep their financial commitments.
We worked with seven of its contact centres (based across Europe) to help the Hoist team deliver a performance-boosting programme.
The brief
To improve the standards of performance in contact centres
Hoist’s performance had dropped and its contact centres were not meeting a number of targets.
The contact centres did not have a high-performance culture because of a lack of support and challenge. Managers and agents were lacking commercial focus, plus home-working was causing additional challenges.
A number of company metrics were not being met due to the arrival of COVID-19 where performance dropped.
Conversations - amount of eligible customers converted onto a payment plan
Yield - what percentage of the total debt is being paid each month on the customer’s payment plan
Negotiation effectiveness - the percentage of a figure (provided by a Credit Reference Agency (CRA) such as Equifax) to suggest the payment amounts a customer could afford, based on the customer’s CRA data
Kept promise rate - how many agreed payment plans were committed to by customers
Our approach
Diagnose weak behaviours & improve sales negotiation skills
We identified that Hoist’s agents were not building the right kind of relationships with customers.
They were also not assertive enough and lacked negotiation skills. Team managers were having poor quality conversations about standards of performance with their agents.
The culture in the contact centres did not support high performance - previously there was not enough support or challenge, a lack of commercial focus from managers (and agents) and with additional challenges from remote working.
Our Penguin team created a report that diagnosed these poor behaviours. We then worked side-by-side with Hoist to focus on specific areas that could improve the company’s performance.
We delivered two programmes, using a staggered approach: one for agents and one for managers. We also used a blend of behavioural tools and sharpened leaders’ commercial focus.
What we did
Diagnostics and Findings
We created a 10-point behavioural diagnostic report after reviewing business Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and agent and manager activity which identified disparity between high and low performing agents.
Together with hoist, we focused on three key areas:
Building the relationship with customers
Effective negotiation with customers (using content such as behavioural flexibility, negotiation mindsets, negotiation from a position of logic and knowledge to overcome objections from customers)
When and how to be assertive with customers (not allowing the customer to dominate the conversation or ‘coerce’ the agents)
What we discovered through diagnostic was there was a significant difference between the actions of ‘high-performers’ vs. ‘low-performers’.
From our observations and call listening we identified:
Call behaviours and call quality are determined by the opening 60 seconds of a call
Poor negotiation is often the result from incomplete data capture and agents making assumptions about customers
A lack of assertion from agents when talking to difficult and ‘challenging’ customers
Our Solution
1) Agent Programme
We created an agent programme focussing on:
Accountability – to increase ownership and empowerment amongst agents
Negotiating – using logic to create a position of strength - based on customer responses to finance questions
Emotional intelligence – provide tools to show empathy and make agents more emotionally resilient
Mindsets about customers – challenge learners on making assumptions about customers and their affordability
Behavioural flexibility – tools and techniques to help agents adapt their behaviour specific to the customer to build rapport and control the conversation
2) Management Programme
We also created a management programme focussing on:
Commerciality – focus on the ‘inputs’ that drive ‘outputs’ instead of focusing on just ‘outputs’
The emotional bank account – using praise vs. criticism ratios as many team managers were only providing negative feedback
Behavioural flexibility – adapting the team managers communication and behaviours to the agents
Coaching and feedback models – providing team managers with ‘quick hit coaching’ techniques that would work in a remote contact centre environment
Our performance
Following our high-performance programme and input, Hoist’s leaders’ effectiveness in negotiation increased from 35% to 56% and its sales conversions increased from 12% to 22%.
9.38% increase
in Conversion
1.85% increase
in yield
22% increase
Sales conversions
0.5% increase
in Promise Kept
“Working with Penguin last year was seamless, they are extremely easy to work with. Professional and fun and with a level of attention to detail, flexibility in approach and focus on lasting results that enables success. Great results from a great team!”
