Increased colleague performance and deeper insights into customer interactions

Why Principality engaged Maze

Damian Thompson has been in financial services for 20 years – and has spent a significant proportion of that time searching for ways to get colleagues closer to the customer.
“The challenge across any customer oriented business is to reduce variation and to quickly understand and spread best practice. At Principality we have always had strong customer satisfaction scores, I was looking for ways of further engaging colleagues in improving our service performance.”
Maze’s approach proved so refreshingly different, as colleagues engage with our members and then receive direct feedback on their interaction; he could see the potential to make a good business great, and how Maze could help him to take colleague performance to a world-class level.

Focus on cause to drive the right outcomes

“At Principality, we use Net Promoter Score® (NPS)® and we had to dig deep into the detail of the business to understand the actions that drive NPS, and to be able to make micro improvements to drive the macro goal of higher NPS scores.”
“Maze has helped us make enviable increases in our NPS scores across many areas.”
“Part of our business works solely with commercial (B2B) customers, and with Maze we have been able to help this part of the business focus on improving the drivers of broker satisfaction. It’s been great to be able to successfully deploy Maze in our service centre in addition to our field-based colleagues. It provides a common platform for communication and we’ve seen real gains in terms of service improvements.”
Thompson has found the Maze concentration on the customer experience to be invaluable.
“A key step in Maze’s consulting approach is to really challenge you to ascertain what you are trying to achieve. Their approach is focused on how to gain customer insight to help drive performance improvement for all colleagues and managers who come into contact with customers.”
Helen Sandford, Head of Customer Strategy and Insight, and Sponsor of the roll out of Maze in Principality, has shared her enthusiasm for the system.

“The maze tool enables us to drive insight through-out the business. By colleagues receiving the feedback directly, they take ownership of the problem or feedback, and make changes on the back of it. This makes the insight ‘Actionable Insight’ and not just a Head-Office Management Information Tool”.
Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

Multi-faceted benefits

One of most positive aspects of using Maze is that improvements can be observed across several fronts at the same time – in this case bringing about improved NPS scores, increased colleague performance and deeper insights into customer interactions and improving customer outcomes.
“Maze has given us a greater understanding of why the best people achieve what they do. It’s then given us the ability to translate these learnings into actions for our managers to coach their teams.”
“We now have a renewed focus to drive customer satisfaction because Maze helps us to translate the key actions of the top performers from one part of the country to the other quicker.”
“Maze highlights where we are good and also provides an opportunity for us to tackle any issues – far earlier than we would have expected. Our daily huddles are richer and focused on driving customer outcomes, which our colleagues are highly engaged by.”
Alun Parker, East Regional Manager has this to say about his Maze experience.
“After having Maze ‘live’ in my region for over a year now, I am pleased to confirm the proposition has longevity. We receive high levels of member feedback, my colleagues fully believe in Maze and how it helps focus on the very best in customer experience”.
“The major benefit is that you get feedback very quickly, which allows managers to perform ‘in the moment feedback/coaching’ which is powerful. This allows everyone across all branches to share best practice and also for development to be applied quickly where appropriate”.
“Additionally, Maze helps with evidence for staff behaviours in staff 1-2-1’s and performance appraisals reviews”.

The Maze contribution

Maze delivers a behavioural approach that drives large-scale, lasting change across an organisation. It helps businesses gain real traction and engagement of staff and provides excellent insights into the key drivers for change, whether this is branch-based or omni-channel.
Mark Richards, Head of Retail, Principality Building Society, gives another view from the client side.

“Maze is a revolutionary tool as far as we are concerned. It helps us to reinforce the right outcome for our customers, every time.”

“I love the simplicity of the end solution delivered to our front-line colleagues.”
“We’ve received excellent support and best-practice challenges from the senior practitioners within the Maze organisation, coupled with global insights which we can leverage,” says Thompson.
“We’ve also established relationships with other Maze customers that provide us with mutual benefits and experience from outside the UK – you just can’t get from within your own organisation.”
Sandford further adds, “Maze is also a great tool for our corporate information requirements. We review the information collated at a Head Office level to help identify on-going trends to identify improvements to be made across the Board. The fact that the feedback received is so prompt means that we can act very quickly on the feedback received, showing our on-going commitment to our customers, that great service remains at the heart of what we do”.
“Maze gets the colleague closer to the customer far more than any other proposition I’ve seen.”

Damian Thompson,
Distribution Director, Principality Building Society