Mayuri Fernando
Snr. General Manager Customer Interaction Centre & People Experience Mgt.
Dialog Axiata
Sri Lanka
Dialog Business Services (DBS) - a fully owned subsidiary of Sri Lanka telco Dialog Axiata - had outsourced its customer interaction centre since 2011. But with concerns over the standard of customer experience it was providing, Mayuri Fernando was hired in 2017 to transform its performance as it was brought back in-house.
With over 25 years of customer service experience to pull on, Mayuri has subsequently overhauled the centre and driven dramatic improvements. Focused primarily in handling Dialog’s high-net-worth customers, DBS deals with an estimated 40 million interactions a year, 15 million of which are passed on to associates for second level support offered by The Customer Interaction Centre.
Upon Mayuri's arrival, the priorities for her and DBS as a whole were to improve customer experience performance (NPS/CSAT/CES), improve SLAs, reduce staff attrition, develop a more customer-centric culture - and facilitate in moving the centre to a new location/facility.
Supported by her team and the organisation's service delivery management, she has launched a wide range of initiative to deliver against her objectives. These have included a new "Service From My Heart" culture transformation programme, through which employees are educated about the importance of CX and how everyone can contribute. This also includes efforts to ensure that best practices are shared throughout the organisation.
A new focus on Voice of the Customer insights has been fostered. A VoC Forum has been launched - where a cross-functional team meets monthly to discuss all the captured insights and focus on driving CX improvements. There are daily operational presentations to discuss real-time issues and present solutions. VoC insights are captured via a new CX pulse system, which enables them to be quickly escalated to the operations teams to act within defined SLAs.
New technology has been rolled out to support staff, including new dashboards based on an enhanced knowledge management platform; unified virtual assistants; new speech-to-text analytics tools; and 100% remote working capabilities.
And there have also been many initiatives to help improve the working environment, including new career development opportunities, focus group sessions to support Voice of the Employee, a new VoE board to escalate staff concerns and ideas, and a new mentoring/coaching programme for staff.
All of which has contributed to significant improvements in CX metrics such as NPS from 2021 to 2022, as well as improvements in Great Place To Work scores (which has risen consecutively for three years in a row). Furthermore, reflecting the turnaround in performance, the centre obtained its COPC Certification - something that it had lost when outsourced, and DBS is now the only COPC Certified Customer Interaction Centre in Sri Lanka, one of the most prestigious recognitions and standards in the industry for any customer experience operation.
My achievements in my role were recognised internally at the Annual Dialog Awards and externally within the Axiata Group of companies where I was selected as Axiata Champion 2021 in recognition of the improvement made in DBS and the value addition created to Axiata Group.
