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The CX Files Podcast Blog 1: The Journey to World Class Company Culture and Employee Satisfaction

13/01/2022

Our CEO Gill Marchbank was interviewed by Mark Hillary of The CX Files Podcast in December, who is a world-renowned CX Commentator, author, and blogger. During the episode, Gill shared her thoughts on the importance of receiving recognition of a World Class calibre within the industry via the Best Companies Three Star Award; sharing the hard work and steps taken to get to this point over several years. Learn how ResQ prides itself on embodying its core values and positive can-do culture at every step of an employee’s working life, enabling every person who works as a part of the vast team to build the skill set to advance their career and achieve in a thriving, supportive and positive environment. Read on to discover part one of the podcast interview:

Mark: ‘So Gill, I recently saw your video about the Best Companies Three Star Accreditation, it was an amazing video, it looked like you had great fun filming that as well. What is the importance that ResQ attaches to this kind of industry recognition?’

Gill: ‘Thanks Mark, it was incredibly important for us personally as a business but also for the industry. I know we are the only three-star accredited outsource company in the UK. The real thing for me is that it was voted for by our people, and they work for us, and they believe they work for a three-star company, so my team and I are very, very proud of that.

The thing about Best Companies is that it is all about employee engagement, but it does cover several distinct areas. I’m not sure if you know about the detail of these awards. It covers health and wellbeing, fair deal, my company, my manager and giving something back. So, when we started the process a few years ago when we got the results, we were able to really target key areas where we needed to improve or do better. We worked on our health and wellbeing by putting in place mental health first aiders, ResQ Ambassadors, introducing the Talent Spotting program, and we launched our course ‘The All Hands’. So, in our first year we got ‘Ones to Watch’, in our second year we got a one-star rating and in our third year we received a three-star rating. So that was our progression as we went through things.

For me what was most exciting was when we got three stars it was during lockdown, everybody went berserk! On our ResQ Facebook hub people were telling us how proud they were of me, and I was going, it wasn’t me, it was you guys, it was you guys that voted so a huge amount of internal recognition from our people who are really proud of the three-star accreditation’.

Mark: ‘That’s amazing, and I think it’s really interesting how you listed specific steps that you took there. But I think taken as a whole, it seems that it’s clearly the culture of the organisation and that sort of all adds up into the culture, and that must play a really important role in attracting people to the company. How difficult is it to use culture to attract people and, also, to maintain that, now you’ve sort of hit that three-star level how do you maintain that?’

Gill: ‘The reason we did the video was to really show inside our business as somebody sat at home maybe thinking about looking for a new job, because I think it really does embody the culture of our business, the singing, the dancing, they even got me, Nic and Matt dancing at the end, which was the first time we have done that on a video. But I really believe that that culture comes from day one with any interaction with our company whether that’s from the onboarding process right through to the training and you have to start at the very beginning. I think the reason we have been successful culturally is that we treat our people as individuals and with respect from the minute they come into our business. It’s something that was very important to me when we set ResQ up that we’d create local jobs for local people and be able to give them a career and opportunities to grow and be the best they could be through the support that we could give them. I think one of the big parts of working at ResQ is we give you all the skills that you need to be very good at your job and it doesn’t stop on day one either, because that gives people the improved confidence and they start doing better and they start earning more money and then they want to stay working with us. The other part I would like to say is around our team leaders, I think that our success starts and end with our TL’s. They have such a huge role to play, particularly over the last two years, they are not just managing performance anymore. They are councillors, they are agony aunts, they are mentors, relationship advisors, they cover the whole spectrum and I think they do an absolutely amazing job of maintaining our culture at the grassroots level’.

Mark: ‘One of the things that comes across in the video about the award, was that it seems like everyone actually has a good experience working at the company, you know, so clearly your culture focuses on employee experience, do you think that there is a direct connection between that and the customer experience? I mean, can you have a great customer experience if you are not looking after your employees’?

Gill: ‘I think in a symbiotic relationship I 100% agree with you that a happy employee will provide a vastly superior customer service and care to any of our client’s customers. We see that through the feedback scores and net promoter scores. If they are happy and they want to work here they don’t want to let us down, they don’t want to have a bad call. They want to look after that customer and do a good job. Plus, if they are confident and they are trained properly and they have the right skills, it becomes much easier to do a good job on that call. I think, well I know for a fact, that we have the lowest complaint rate across our competitor estate, because of the work that we do in those areas, and we allow our agents to have access to self-manage on their own performance scores as well on the customer side so that creates a little bit of healthy competition amongst the guys as well’.

ResQ places a huge emphasis on its people, the whole company played a part in achieving The Best Companies Three Star Award, living, and breathing this strong employee culture is one of the many things we believe makes ResQ a great place to work and partner with!

Look out for further instalments of this podcast blog series coming soon, the second blog covers what building a career looks like at ResQ and our highly effective recruitment process.  if you simply cannot wait, follow the below link to listen to the CX Files Podcast!

If you feel inspired after learning more from our CEO about ResQ and would love to delve further or experience our company culture first-hand, please contact us here.


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