It’s easy for a business to say it puts customers at the heart of everything it does – but putting this into practice is harder than it sounds.

Here at Crest Plus, we have a number of initiatives in place that demonstrate our active commitment to customer centricity. Ongoing monitoring of our calls from workers we are paying is just one example.

This benefits workers and helps to reduce call volumes, but it’s also good for our agency partners to know we are properly looking after the people they are placing into roles.

This programme is led by Peter Briggs who joined our customer service team a couple of years ago and quickly realised that listening back to calls and identifying learning points would help us provide a better experience to our clients as well as reduce the volume of calls coming.

Each month Peter reviews a specific number of calls with each call handler and together they identify any areas for improvement. Calls are rated on a scale of 1 – 4 with 1 being the highest possible score.

To achieve a level 1 score the call handler must provide support above and beyond to assist the customer. We know we set the bar high for our team as providing clear, accurate and full information and explanations to our clients is of paramount importance to a company like ours that handles queries daily relating to pay, tax and compliance.

Our management team receive monthly reports and measures the percentage of calls that score 1s and 2s. We are pleased to say that we are consistently achieving 100% of calls with level 1 and 2 scores – a record we are keen to maintain. As market leaders, we expect these high standards of ourselves.

Peter said: “Whilst many calls are straightforward and relate to the processing of pay, a good number are more detailed and require explanations of things like pension auto-enrolment, holiday pay, how an umbrella company works and how pay is calculated.

“This means our team must be on the ball at all times to provide clear and accurate explanations, it’s certainly not easy. However, by listening back to calls on a regular basis the team has adopted a programme of continual improvement, it’s just one of the ways in which we help make our aspiration for excellent customer service into reality.”