Innovative service concept at thyssenkrupp Aufzüge

Ensuring and maintaining excellent service is also a challenge in the industrial environment. The pitfalls of everyday life, the strain on employees, ever-changing priorities, projects, and last but not least, the much-quoted inner pig quickly cause the customer focus to slip out of sight.

Turning good conversations into excellent ones

Many service units hang on to that last, crucial 20 percent. They have good conversations, but not excellent ones. Service excellence is measured by the so-called NSP value (Net Promoter Score). This is the rating index for the degree of emotional customer loyalty and willingness to recommend. Only if the customer assigns a value above 8 on a scale of 1-10 is this considered high service quality. Excellent service is also becoming increasingly important for industrial customers.

The leap from a good conversation to one with a top level is not easy. The hurdle can often only be overcome with new, surprisingly different behavior. The leap in the direction of 10 (= excellence) was achieved at thyssenkrupp Elevators with a concept that puts the joy of conversation and empathetic customer dialog in the foreground.

New service concept at thyssenkrupp Aufzüge

Service24, the emergency call center of thyssenkrupp Aufzüge, is located in Berlin with its team. Here, the company's own service technicians ring through, as do passengers who are locked in, plus property managers and owners with their concerns. 90,000 calls come in every month, 85 calls per minute at peak times. Many calls are ultra-short and are purely for equipment checks. Others are very demanding in terms of content. Then there are the emergency calls from trapped people, which require not only speed from the service (90% of emergency calls are answered within 15 seconds), but also a high degree of empathy. The high call volume, the mix of short routine calls, demanding customer conversations and urgent emergency calls demand a lot from the staff. Added to this are the technical demands of the technology leader thyssenkrupp. Service communication is professional, friendly and objective.

The new service voices from the elevator

But that is no longer enough for the teams around department head Bärbel Rensch. In order to be able to respond more empathetically to customers and shut-ins and to better cope with the high emotional strain and stress in everyday life, Service24 has recently started working with the "Emotional Power" service concept from Top-Perform. The motto developed by the team leaders themselves for this purpose, "Drive the fun to the top" including the hashtag #fdsno, is the program: customer conversations should be easier, more enjoyable and more understanding.

Culture change

Because, as thyssenkrupp has also discovered: To touch customers emotionally, friendly conversations that focus on the factual solution are not enough. Instead, the aim is to create an empathetic, relaxed dialog with customers that puts everyone involved at ease. "The aim is to emotionally mirror the situation of the conversation partner and at times to pick up on it in a thoroughly humorous way" explains department head Bärbel Rensch. This is intended to improve the good service even more and also to make the employees more satisfied.

To achieve this, the atmosphere and attitude in the teams had to change. The cultural change was initiated by workshops, initially in the management circle, followed by impulse days for all employees.

Just do something different

The instructions are as simple as they are demanding: simply do something different, in which employees break out of the conversational routine again and again. Since then, the service technician has been made to laugh during the system test instead of fobbing him off with standard phrases. The effect: the service employee suddenly looks forward to the next call and finds the many routine phone calls much less stressful. "We can also turn the mood in the team around spontaneously," says team leader Martin Sahm, describing the concept, which also uses playful approaches such as phrase bingos to promote and maintain a good mood in the teams. The increased attentiveness and alertness in the routine dialogues help with empathetic communication with shut-ins or in difficult customer conversations.

Experimentation allowed

However, if you want to surprise in a conversation, you have to dare to test it out. This is no easy task for managers. After all, they have to allow employees to try things out in real dialogue. Team leader Mirko Ebel has done his homework in this regard: "I trust the employees and allow significantly more experiments than before," he says happily.

Service that is easy to handle and well received

The conclusion of department head Bärbel Rensch: "I was surprised by the very positive response of the employees, how readily they accepted and implemented the new impulses. My team leaders also did a good job." Overall, the atmosphere at the friendly service voices from thyssenkrupp's elevators has loosened up considerably. There is more laughter, positive conversations are perceived much more strongly by everyone, and the competent, surprisingly friendly new way of communicating is also excellently received by the interlocutors.

Authors:
Together with founder Helga Schuler, Ralph Lange developed the successful program "Emotional Power" for service organizations. Since 2019, Ralph Lange has been the head of the consultant and trainer network. www.top-perform.de