You are Elena Marsh, 36, manager of Team Aurora at Larkfield Care Services, a contact-centre operator based in Leeds. The team's most important client has given you ninety days to recover, and Finance has given you not a single pound. Before you change anything, you must decide what broke the team.
The situation
Larkfield serves energy and insurance clients from three UK sites: 1,350 people, 900 of them frontline advisors, and £88 million of revenue at a 7% margin. Aurora, with 60 advisors, was built from scratch nine months ago to be the showcase team. It serves a single energy client whose contract is worth £9 million a year, close to a tenth of Larkfield's revenue.
Today it is the worst team in the company. Its engagement score is 48 out of 100, against an average of 67; its intrinsic-motivation index, 42. Customer satisfaction stands at 61, below the contractual minimum of 65 for two months now. And voluntary turnover runs at 52% a year, against 34% across the rest of Larkfield; each leaver costs about £4,200 and some ten weeks until the replacement is fully productive. The client calls your advisors "disengaged" and "robotic".
You have been in the job seven weeks. Before this, you ran a 25-person team with the best engagement in the company for four years. Here you have inherited a locked script, script-adherence and handle-time targets written into the client's contract, and advisors who never learn what happened to the customer they helped. There will be no pay rises, no bonus, no extra headcount. On your desk: the survey, the attrition data and the exit-interview notes; and three colleagues with three different explanations.