Processes Are Everything | John Phillips

Processes are at the heart of every successful business, yet they’re often overlooked in favour of shiny new technology. In this insightful episode of WFM Unfiltered, John Phillips, an industry veteran with over 40 years in the contact center and consulting space, shares why foundational processes matter more than ever. Whether it’s customer journeys, advisor workflows, or finding hidden inefficiencies, John emphasizes how the right processes can make or break a company’s success.

During the episode, John explains why businesses should always start by perfecting their processes before investing in technology. Too often, companies rush to implement the latest tools and software without addressing the inefficiencies already embedded in their workflows. John shares real-life examples of how he’s helped organizations save costs, improve customer satisfaction, and streamline operations—simply by focusing on processes.

Irina and John dive into the sometimes “boring” but essential world of process documentation. They discuss how processes, when neglected, become outdated and how having a process owner is critical to keeping things running smoothly. If your business is struggling with maintaining efficiency or keeping up with customer demands, John’s advice is sure to provide actionable takeaways you can apply right away.

You’ll also learn about the importance of knowledge management systems and how they can drastically reduce handling times and improve employee performance. John’s hands-on experience and practical advice make this a must-watch episode for anyone in the contact center world or broader business operations roles.

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Transcript

Irina: 0:18

Hello, hello, hello. Happy Tuesday. I am your host, Irina, and this is WFM Unfiltered, and today we're traveling around the area of Milton Keynes, UK, and I have a great guest with me today that's covering Such an important topic, one that's in the foundation of absolutely everything, and it's around processes. But before we start with that, I would like to introduce you to John. Hey, John, how are you doing?

John Phillips: 0:47

I'm good. Thank you.

Irina: 0:49

So, would you mind sharing a little bit about your background?

John Phillips: 0:53

Yes. I started off in contact centers in 1983 as a advisor, and then worked as a team leader, contact center manager, and project manager. We've been an outsourced contact center, also outsourcing contact center, I should say. And then I became a consultant. So advising companies on how to improve and get the most from their contact centers. And I do around 20 percent of my work in the national health service in the UK. So that's mostly project management activity, sometimes contact center related. But contact centers is my main baby. Yeah. So that's the thing I like.

Irina: 1:37

Okay, so we share that baby together, I would say, and you have such an amazing career and it's just so extensive. And the thing that you and I have chatted about a little bit the previous time when we had a catch up was around processes. And being a consultant as well, one of the things that usually really, really annoys me is you're having a lot of companies trying to Just sell your tools and sell your bullshit and trying to explain you as a customer, just buy this one and it's going to completely change your operations in business. And you and I both know that this is complete bullshit. So can you walk me through your practice? Why do you believe that processes should be in place before any technology or tool is being explored?

John Phillips: 2:28

Yeah, sure. Firstly, I come from the principle of trying to make it easy for the customer to do business with your company and make it easy for the staff to do their job. Yeah. If you come from that approach, you, and you walk the customer journey and walk the advisor journey. You'll find lots of things that could be improved. Yeah. Lots and lots and lots. Yeah. And some may be small improvements. Some may be large ones. Yeah. All you need to do is just listen to 50 phone calls or look at 30 emails that come into a company. You'll, you'll ask yourself questions. Why is that call happening? Why is that email coming in? What didn't we do right further along the journey? So there's lots of improvements in customer satisfaction, efficiency, and so on and so on that can be achieved without applying new technology. Now, so technology should be come at the end, get your processes right, and then, you know, automate them and so on, or,

Irina: 3:41

What, what sparks me and triggers me when you're mentioning the word processes is that, and I believe this is what we discussed last time, is that whatever you're trying to do in your business and your organization, whether buying a tool, getting a consultant involved, it should always be led by the question, why? If it's just because we believe we need it. Why? Why do you think you need someone? Why do you want something new? And I think most of our organization, especially around the hype with AI, is just Something that everyone is talking about, so we feel the urge we should be ahead of the game and we should do it as well, we should pay money for AI, but why? What do we want to achieve?

John Phillips: 4:28

exactly. Yeah. People see technology in my view. Yeah. This is my opinion. People see technology as, Oh, that's a nice, shiny, new thing. If we do that, we will get more revenue, better results. Less staff and so on and so on, yeah. Which is fine. However, the thing that's normally right in front of people's eyes are what are we doing day to day, minute by minute, yeah, that could be better. And. Most people don't look at, most people don't, don't like looking at processes. Yeah. They think it's boring. Yeah.

Irina: 5:05

There you go.

John Phillips: 5:06

unreasonable. If you go onto LinkedIn, Yeah.

Irina: 5:09

Yeah.

John Phillips: 5:09

you hardly, and it doesn't matter who's you, who's in your feed. Very rarely do people say look at better ways of working. Yeah. Experiment with. Train this, these steps in your process instead of the ones you do at the moment, yeah? It's always about some new Initiative, some new technology, something fancy and, or it's something that's more creative. Yeah. It's a creative way of doing things. Yeah. Not about the nuts and bolts. Yeah. Now let's sort out the basics. Yeah. Get the basics to work, work, really well. Yeah. And it doesn't matter if you're a high end company or a, a, not a fantastically high quality company, but if you get it to work day in, day out, week in, week out. People keep coming back and the staff will have a decent experience.

Irina: 6:07

Honestly, I love that you're mentioning that because yesterday I had a conversation with Absolutely incredible professional. And we touched on the marketing aspect of things and it is exactly what you're mentioning. Currently, there is a lot of hype with AI and technology and it's all wrapped up in fluffy marketing wording and bullshit. And it's basically what triggers people to buy and invest. But overall, no matter what you buy, If the processes are not in place, it's not going to work. And Actually. from my perspective, I don't know from your experience and practice, but even if I'm talking about WFM tools and I'm going somewhere to implement a WFM tool, the tool is absolutely useless. If you don't have a process, it is just sell that you pay a lot of money for and it just doesn't do it's work. And that's what people don't understand and they're thinking, no, but we bought to, we invested our budget there. Why is it not achieving a service level of a hundred percent all the time?

John Phillips: 7:17

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And the same applies to CRM tools or, AI and so on, unless you actually set the groundwork up, and make sure that you're doing the right things at the right time and so on and so on. It won't make much difference. It's, it's, it's just, it's just, you've got a nice shiny new car. But you're still stuck in a traffic jam, it doesn't matter,

Irina: 7:41

Yeah. Why are you not getting there faster? Because there is a traffic jam and I can't just do anything about it.

John Phillips: 7:47

and there's always a traffic jam. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, there's always a traffic jam. So being in a shiny car, you get there, you feel more comfortable when you get there, but you still get there in the same time.

Irina: 7:57

And the thing that. I really relate to and I feel and I have been hearing so much in companies that I have worked with and for is that the processes are boring and somehow people are thinking, Oh, if only you were to be more techie and we're talking about fancy stuff and important stuff and the next generation of stuff, it's going to be much better for the business. But that Techie stuff and next generation technology is also build on something that you would like to achieve. And I feel like there is a lot of looking down on processes and people that are involved with process. So what do we do, John? How do we educate people about it?

John Phillips: 8:43

Maybe motivate them by money. basically if, if I said to you, I could make your customers 5 percent more happy and your staff 10 percent more happy and save you 15 percent or whatever figures. If I said to you, yeah, great. What's that? Fine. Look at what you do end to end and really look at it and ask the staff what it's like and what the problems are. And. What annoys customers or ask the customers what annoys them and so on. Yeah. Now, but really look at what you're doing and why you're doing it and how you're doing it and when you're doing it as well. And the answers are there. The answers are there in your company. Yeah. And you'll get 10 percent just like that.

Irina: 9:37

So this, this is interesting because, and this has always been the conversation that I have with other fellow consultancies. We're often doing audits, right? Whenever I go to a new organization, what I'm doing is show me what you do, show me how you do it, show me why you do it. So I can understand your thought process. So I can understand where your gaps, maybe I can offer fresh set of eyes in your problem, but I always start with the investigation of why. And people always ask me why do we need consultants for that? Can we do it internally? Yes, you can, but there is something that I have discovered. Once you work in an organization, People have those ideas, but they're like, it's always someone else's problem,

John Phillips: 10:23

someone else's problem, or yeah, it could be someone else's problem. Sometimes you may find that people want to stay as the expert, they won't pass that knowledge on to people. It could be, we've always done it this way. It could be that someone said, okay, we're going to bolt on this new system or this new block of processes and not really thought it through in terms of, what's what's good about it, but what slows us down or makes things worse and so on, but really looks at the nuts and bolts of what they do. And it's having that outside eye, yourself, myself, or someone else to say, actually. Why don't you do it this way? Cause I, why are you wasting time there or annoying the customer there when you could be doing something else?

Irina: 11:11

So what do you do initially when you start working for a new organization? What is the first thing that you do there? How is your journey going with them? Yes.

John Phillips: 11:24

terms of, goals, ambitions look at how they're structured and how they, and how they work. It could be numbers of staff, ratios, Who does what? Listen to phone calls, listen to a lot of phone calls and look at emails and the journey that different customers have been on. Lots of interviews with people normally. People will tell you what's working. If If you ask someone, okay, you've got three wishes. Yeah. What three things would you like to have to make your job easier or make it easier for the customer? And normally they ask for 10 wishes. Yeah. If you give them three, they normally come up with three and more. And if you ask a director or an advisor, they know the answers. They know the things that will make things a bit easier or better. It's just, they're too busy or they haven't had time out to look at it. Yeah, it's there. The answers are there.

Irina: 12:24

Or nobody's listening to them, which

John Phillips: 12:26

I know it's listening to, yes,

Irina: 12:28

problem. Yes. I feel like I'm often involved with consultants in the process.

John Phillips: 12:34

yes,

Irina: 12:35

You are investing in that external expertise. So you feel forced to listen to their advice, which is, I would say a shame because as we said, the knowledge is there, of course, you are getting much more advice and best practices if you're involved in a consultant, but if you're coming from the position that your own people are absolutely clueless, then you have a bigger problem than But,

John Phillips: 13:04

some great examples. I remember once I was managing a contact center as an interim and the, The Managing Director came up from London, yeah, and he said, he said, Custer, could I listen to some phone calls? So I said, yeah, yeah, there you go. That's a mid range advisor, not the best, not the worst, sit with that person. And they listened to five or six phone calls. And opened up their eyes as to what's going wrong at head office. The product offering the processing time at head office and so on. And the pain that it was giving to the customers. So I thought he'd be there an hour, hour and a half. He was there for a half an hour and he said, wow, that, thank, thank you for letting me listen in. Yeah. He learned a lot, just in half an hour. Told him a lot.

Irina: 14:00

if only we pay attention to our own business, things can look much different. Um, to bring you back to the topic of processes, one thing that bothers me, and it's actually probably the reason why Processes as a concept is something theoretical in a lot of companies is that you initially start with having something on paper or in a flow chart or something, and that quickly gets outdated. And everyone is lazy to update it, to share it. You have new people, they're like transferring knowledge here and there. And you realize that the process that you have in place was somehow Amend it into something different and everyone has their own version of the truth, what they should and how they should be doing it. So, any, to be honest, even for me, it is boring to put a process in place.

John Phillips: 14:57

Yes. Yes.

Irina: 14:58

I know somebody has to maintain it and I know that people don't really like looking and maintaining things. They're much rather remembering and doing it their own way. So tell me, what, how do we get around that? What do we do?

John Phillips: 15:12

How do you get around it? It's a good question. I think firstly, have a process owner or a group that

Irina: 15:19

Thank you. John.

John Phillips: 15:22

job is to look for efficiencies and better ways of working and so on. Yeah. And they should use your advisors, team leaders, directors, whoever, to get that input and maybe give them an objective such as, okay, I want 20 percent reduction in failure demand activity. In other words. Calls and emails that we shouldn't be getting coming in, give them a, a target that's achievable. So, cause the ideas are there, there's need to get it out of people and also make it interesting. Um, so, so how you document processes, you can, you can do it in a very, Boring step by step, it is a step by step way of doing things, but make it interesting if you can. Yeah. Put in screenshots of how to use the system. Make it colorful, make them usable. So when the training department picks them up, they can, they don't have much to do with it. Yeah. Because it's written in a nice way that people can understand in a nice step by step simple way. Yeah.

Irina: 16:25

I love that you're saying that because even now there are solutions that are making the processes much more interactive that you can follow along and that you can quickly update something that's instantly shared with everyone. Because my problem has always been go to folder X somewhere and try to look. And then I'm going there and trying to look in it. And then I see version one, version one, version one, version one, version one. And I'm always like. How the hell do I do with that? But thank you so much for starting with the process owner. Because one thing that really annoys me in any type of work is when we have the concept of if everyone's responsibility to update it, if something is everyone's responsibility, it's no

John Phillips: 17:14

it never gets done. Yes, it's their, it's their responsibility to give ideas as to how to improve it to the process owner, in my view, yeah? Not, not to actually do the updating, but, If they've got an instinct around what could be better and they've got some data, it could be anecdotal data or hard data to back that up, then that's a good case to put forward. And yeah one of the, one of the projects I worked on was to roll out a knowledge management system across thousands of advisors, a huge company. And What that gave them was more consistent ways of answering technical queries. And what we did was we went out in training groups to different contact centers, and we didn't tell them how to do their job in terms of, you must press this, you must press that, as I said, We, We, we taught them how to fish. So we taught them how to find the answers and how to use the system. It's really easy system, really intuitive, nice and straightforward. Yeah. It was, yes, no answers. Is it this? Is it that? You got a certain routes and within five or six clicks, you got the answers.

Irina: 18:31

hmm.

John Phillips: 18:32

And it was great. Yeah. Now, so I could answer any, even though I wasn't trained in the product, really, I could answer any technical question. And I got the advisors and say, give me, give me a technical question, a problem you have. I showed them, I went through the system, asked them questions and said here's the answer. So if you've got a well designed process and a good knowledge management system linked to it, so they are always up to date and so on and so on, you can get massive increases in performance. And what we got, actually, we had a, a, a test group. And a control group. They both started off at the same average handling time, yeah?

Irina: 19:15

Oh.

John Phillips: 19:16

Within, yeah, they both started off, yeah? Within three weeks or four weeks, the the group that was using the new system, they had a 30 percent lower average handling time. And the team leaders of the, of the test group, they were getting 50 percent less queries from their advisors. Now, how do I do this? How do I do that? Now, cause anytime they were asked, how do I do this? The managers just say, go to the knowledge management system. It'll tell you how to, it'll tell you the answers there. And yeah, it's huge. So, if you actually invest in your processes, invest in your knowledge management system look for ideas on how to improve it. Because one of the things with this knowledge management system, for example, was anytime a advisor went through the process steps, they can leave feedback to say, Oh, adjust this, adjust that. And that was adjusted almost overnight. Yeah.

Irina: 20:15

I love that. And this brings us back to the first, first issue about processes and the way that we document the fact that in most organization, there isn't necessarily process owner is that Processes are seen as something that you do once, you build it once, and then you forget about it. And that, that's where it all goes wrong.

John Phillips: 20:42

That's right. No, you don't build it once. It's if you're a football manager or in any industry or any type of work, if you're a football manager, you don't just say, here's our formation and here are our tactics. Go do it. You don't say that once at the start of the season

Irina: 20:58

And you forget about it, and you never

John Phillips: 20:59

about it, sit in the stands and just watch. Yeah, you adjust. Yeah, you adjust what you're doing based on what you're facing. Yeah, and it's that ability to to say actually It's not as good as it could be, let's, what else could we do, and it takes owning up sometimes to say, and to being open to, to changes. Plus also, you'll get a lot more buy in from staff in terms of how they feel about the work they're doing. Because they feel as though they can have an effect on what they do day to day, yeah,

Irina: 21:38

Thank you so much for this tip, because, again, we're forgetting that sometimes processes are created by people that do not do the job and, unfortunately, people

John Phillips: 21:50

yeah, exactly. And that's okay because they've got the capacity to do the design, but they've got to take the knowledge and learning from the advisors, team leaders, other managers, and so on, and to blend that into the process itself, and to keep doing it as well. Because once you do it once, Things will change, the market will change. People's knowledge of the company will change. You have to keep looking at it all the time. Yeah. Always looking for those marginal gains. Yes. There's very small gains. Yeah. You've got lots of, lots of marginal gains. You win.

Irina: 22:26

You're giving such a brilliant advice and I was just about to wrap up using that exact same thought that you just mentioned is that you can't put your processes once and forget about it because that basically kills your business growth and with time even your customer behavior changes. We're talking about, I don't know how we're calling Gen Z, millennials and so on, I'm not so, knowledgeable about the different terminology, even with generations, you have people that are using your products in different way that communicate with you in a different way. So you can't rely on something that was okay, 10 years ago and just enforce it to people because this is also how you're making the word boring for people. And you're basically stupidifying your own operations this way. So that's my final word of advice. Any last words, any tips, any tricks that you would like to share?

John Phillips: 23:26

Hmm. Now, so I think we've covered it all. I think, but I know processes are boring. Yeah. And it's not very exciting to talk about processes and what, what you do, how you do it, when you do it. It's not that exciting, but you can, you can get a lot out of it. A heck of a lot in terms of savings, Better performance, better conversion rates, happier customers. It's I guarantee it. I guarantee it.

Irina: 23:55

I think, John, we just need to start using better marketing for processes. So we get people on board. That's the trick.

John Phillips: 24:03

a bad rep, cause it's boring. It's for eggheads, it's for boring people, that's the image.

Irina: 24:10

WFM and I absolutely hate it. When I hear someone saying WFM is boring, it's I wanna make a gesture, but I'm gonna be polite about

John Phillips: 24:19

Yeah, but also if you see something that's really well designed, I've, I've had this a few times I saw a process flow once, and just the way it was done, and I said to the person that designed it, that's a work of art,

Irina: 24:32

no.

John Phillips: 24:32

know, and that's brilliant, like it was so well represented that anyone could understand it, where it's just a one pager, that's brilliant, and sometimes you see things that you know, It's practical, you can understand it straight away, and so on, and that's what gets me excited. I'm very sad, but that's what gets me excited, because I know it's usable. If I can understand it just by having a quick look, the advisors will, and the customers will as well.

Irina: 25:02

Simplicity is the key. I've always said, don't overcomplicate things more than it's necessary. So, make it work, make it as simple as possible, and just socialize it with everyone. Don't put it just somewhere on the shared drive and hope people will find it. And that's it. That's, that's a wrap for today process. I hope we're getting everyone on board saying how much important processes are. And thank you, John, for joining me on today's episode. It was absolute pleasure talking to you and we'll chat again here on the podcast.

John Phillips: 25:38

thank you.