British Gas Business, part of the Centrica group of companies, recently undertook a complete review of their business processes and customer account management functions. As a result of the review, the Small Enterprise Customer Care group were brought together at the Marriott hotel to gain a deeper insight to the recent transformation. PowerVote played a key part in the communication and interaction at this meeting.
The agenda included a review of the business and what lay behind the changes as well as the aims and objectives of the business going forward. And team members were encouraged to take part in this and help shape the way that the processes and operations of the business could better serve both their own needs as well as those of the their customers.
In 2008 British Gas acquired 100 PowerVote Smart handsets within another division of the company and it was felt that the system should be used to help engage and include the Customer Care team. As the team consisted of 350 people additional handsets were required to supplement the ones already held. 250 additional handsets were ordered from PowerVote’s hire stock.
Conference organiser Amanda Irwin had never used the system before, and had to learn the system from scratch as she would also be responsible for running the voting at the event. She downloaded the software and undertook a crash course using the customer training manual and support from the PowerVote technical support team.
PowerVote handsets were used to ask 5 key questions, as well as being used to bring some light hearted interludes to break up the day. Questions related to the delivery of service and delegates were asked to express their preferences. Responses were displayed instantly allowing decisions to be made immediately with a clear mandate from the team to move forward and where appropriate change business processes.
For example the team were asked whether the internal weekly award ceremony should remain or should be changed in some way. The team voted overwhelmingly for a change that would mean that it would be held less often but with more worthwhile prizes. The team felt engaged and involved in the decision making process and Amanda and the team believe that this will have a terrifically motivating effect on our people as they enter new and challenging areas. A survey run after the event clearly showed that people liked the interactivity and the fact that they could see the answers immediately indicating that there was a clear transparency in the decision process. PowerVote was a clear winner
Amanda said “We will certainly be using the system again for our events. We saved a lot of time that would have been wasted had we used an alternative paper based system and our people felt that they were able to make a huge difference to their own working environment, and this can only be a good thing. We asked for a lot of support from PowerVote and this helped to make the event to go smoothly.”
British Gas use the PowerVote SMART handsets and the powerful PowerVote software.
Tags : audience response systems, British Gas, British Gas Business, powervote
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