Transforming Telstra’s Frontline Ways of Working

Telstra needed a solution to supercharge its existing Frontline Ways of Working efforts and unlock the potential of its people at scale. Using a combination of PwC’s ‘Perform’ methodology, and Microsoft digital tools, underpinned by holistic training and coaching, Telstra embedded new ways of working.

Like many organisations during the Covid-19 pandemic, Telstra – Australia’s largest telecommunications company – encountered productivity and engagement hurdles as its workforce transitioned to remote working. Exacerbating the challenge for Telstra was a rapid ramp-up of its Australian contact centre operations. Within two months, they had numerous new people hitting the phones. Telstra needed to ensure they hit the ground running and customer service didn’t skip a beat.

But this extraordinary scale and pace of change quickly shone a light on areas of opportunity. Telstra saw a need for more effective ways of working to reduce performance variation across teams, rapidly uplift agent capability and enable the operation to run seamlessly while working from home.

Telstra recognised that its people needed better access to performance data and required tools to provide deeper insights into the drivers of performance successes and areas of potential improvement. Additionally, there was an opportunity to enhance leadership skills whilst giving leaders more time ‘off the phones’ to develop their teams, build agent capability, and improve mental resilience in the Covid-19 remote working environment. Telstra saw a chance not only to overcome these challenges and drive greater productivity and engagement but an opportunity to transform their contact centre operations, enhancing service for customers and setting its people up for long term success.

To tackle the challenges of rapid expansion in a remote working world, it was important for Telstra that the solution leveraged existing tools and systems, could be put in place quickly, was cost-effective and simple to roll out. Seeing a rapid return on investment and benefits for Telstra’s people was also critical, and the solution had to stand the test of time.

To do this, Telstra implemented Frontline Ways of Working (FL WoW), a people-productivity approach underpinned by PwC’s ‘Perform’ methodology. Guided by high-level principles and guard rails, Perform takes a bottom-up approach to embedding a continuous improvement mindset and was customised to deliver the benefits Telstra needed. It catalysed new behaviours and accelerated productivity improvement by building leader capability and giving people the right digital tools and techniques for running effective virtual operations, upholding Telstra’s standards of excellence and achieving important business outcomes.

Telstra knew it was data-rich, and part of the challenge was how to present the right data to its people for deeper insights into potential opportunities. While Telstra had Microsoft tools at its fingertips, the tools weren’t deeply integrated across operations or used to maximum effect.

Leaders spent 30% of their day gathering data for performance and planning conversations. Team members had patchy visibility of what drives the right outcomes for customers and the performance indicators underpinning those outcomes. But by building new Power BI reporting tools integrated into Microsoft Teams, Telstra transformed the way data is accessed, presented and interpreted, across their operations. These tools arm Telstra’s people with all the intelligence they need to make decisions quickly, act with confidence and deliver results.

Used daily – by site leads, team leads, and agents – the reports connect disparate data sources creating a single source of truth. They provide the entirety of reporting and statistics, all the things Telstra need to measure, in one place but with no manual intervention and all pre-existing complexity removed. With a focus on effective daily and intraday planning, reports take a holistic view of performance, ensuring that one metric (e.g., productivity) is not driven at the expense of others (e.g., quality or experience). Integration with Microsoft teams and the use of visual management boards engages people to interact with the reports, allowing seamless access to the ‘so what’ insights that teams anchor onto daily for meaningful conversations around performance successes and areas of opportunity.

But getting the data right wasn’t easy – there were many disparate data sources, each with varying challenges. There were also gaps in performance visibility where key data wasn’t being captured. PwC Australia helped Telstra close those gaps with new data capture tools (using Microsoft PowerApps), which flowed into PowerBI, MS Teams and daily stand-ups. From this new data set, enhanced visualisations focused leaders on what was really important to drive performance.

Giving people access to digital tools was just one part of the puzzle for Telstra. Driving adoption and embedding the technology into new and more consistent ways of working was also fundamentally important for long term success. The coaching program invested in leaders’ capability strategically and deliberately.

A two-day virtual ‘boot camp’ introduced leaders to Frontline Ways of Working. Weekly 90-minute deep-dive sessions and personalised one-on-one coaching embedded the new technology tools and leadership skills through a behavioural lens. Frontline Ways of Working put theory into practice. Through hands-on weekly learning cycles of training, design, implementation and review, covering important topics from how to run effective daily stand-ups, rapidly identify underlying root causes of performance opportunities, and learning how to have tough performance conversations with best practices for end-to-end performance reviews.

The program gave Telstra’s leaders skills to - at pace - improve the performance and development of teams and run operations more efficiently. And it created consistency in how leaders lead in a virtual environment, embedding a working method that drives continuous improvement and a high-performance culture.

Frontline Ways of Working delivered immediate benefits for Telstra. Telstra transformed its contact centre operations and empowered its people to drive change with greater insight into performance, easy-to-use tools, and more effective problem solving and consistent operational cadences. 

It is no secret that supported employees perform better, making it easier to maintain business continuity in crisis. The new Frontline Way of Working program also impacts employee engagement, productivity, loyalty and customer experience. Everyone in Telstra’s Australian contact centres now have the right tools and structures they need to thrive and to provide better and consistent customer service.

As a result, Telstra has increased productivity, engagement, performance and customer experience, with Frontline Ways of Working leading to:

• Customer calls resolved 45% faster
• 10% increase in engagement
• 100% of leaders who participated in the Frontline Ways of Working program said they would recommend it to other leaders

• Leaders spend more time with their teams aligning on a common purpose and goals, rather than extracting performance data and ‘fire-fighting’
• 5% fewer multi agent handling events and an increase in first call resolution
• +500 people daily use FL WoW PowerBI reports, which are now the single most used PowerBI reports across Telstra, thanks to their ease of use and impactful design

Frontline Ways of Working has lifted the lid on the power of Microsoft tools. With fast and accurate information, Telstra’s people can make confident decisions and maximise productivity. The program has also built a solid foundation for Telstra to roll out new initiatives to enhance productivity, engagement and embed consistent ways of working for ongoing improvement into the future.