Last week Ali wrote his thoughts about the team behind Telcom. There is no reason for me to try and change a pixel from what he said:
“Never before have I found myself surrounded by a group of such talented, dedicated people working together for a single purpose - it's a very exciting place to be, but also, in some sense, a position of incredible responsibility. It is this crucial stage as we gain traction, every decision we make dictates the nature of the company that we grow into.”
One of the main things we have implemented to make the above statement true to its roots is a focus on happiness.
So, what does focusing on happiness actually look like?
Firstly that we've been curious and actively engaged in discussions with new team members coming on board to understand what being happy means to them.
Secondly we took a step further embedding this into our job roles where applicable. So instead of ‘Office administration’ we have “Office happiness manager”. Instead of ‘Customer Service Team’ we have ‘Customer Happiness Team’.
Among my responsibilities is to cultivate and grow this culture in the Customer Happiness team, I was amazed at how a simple, seemingly insignificant change like adding the word ‘happiness’ to job titles affected the ethos of our team. Being someone tasked with ‘customer happiness’ rather than simply customer service creates a natural feeling of responsibility for our customers’ experience, shifting our priorities towards doing the best we can to achieve a positive customer experience.
A large amount of our inspiration in this focus has been Leo and Joel from Buffer a US based start-up that has implemented similar principles.
It’s a single word - happiness - but it has secret superpowers that changes our team’s mindset and thus its behaviour. Taking a step back and looking to the broader picture, customer experience is one of our big bets here at Telcom; We want our continued and open focus on taking a customer-centric approach in almost everything we do to be one of the things that makes us a great company both to be a customer of and to work for.
The result? We have had customers, who we’d been worried had a less than ideal experience with us still refer to us as an internet supplier to other businesses. We have a team that genuinely takes the extra step to provide a positive experience. Most importantly, we have heard from customers themselves how nice it makes them feel that we take this approach.
We are shaping our operations and processes around this word and, looking back, although we are just steps away from the starting point we are proud for taking the decision to implement this. Here it is, now you know one of our secrets and we would be more than happy to engage with us and let us know your thoughts about this.