Marianne Avery - Business Implementation Consultant

Helping you take your company further

I’ll provide the hands-on support you need to engage your employees, improve your customer experience or build a stronger community platform. We’ll learn from your insights to build processes, teams, or technology that achieve your goals.

If you know you need to make changes in your business but don’t know how or don’t have the people you need to do it, I can help. I’ll bring that outside perspective without the overhead of a full-time employee.

The case studies below show how I’ve helped some of my clients achieve their goals.

Using customer insights for product improvements

Harnessing customer insights is key to addressing customer pain points and implementing product fixes and enhancements. I worked with a software company alongside their change function to establish a framework for combining all of the sources of customer insight to prioritise the pain points.

Historically contact centre volumes had been used, without factoring in other sources such as tNPS, usage of help articles, call recording and sentiment scores.

This process has been fully adopted across strategic products working collaboratively with the product engineering teams. Over 200 customer pain points have been surfaced onto product development roadmaps.

Leadership development

An ambitious programme to upskill all front-line team managers across a global organisation required some project management support. There was no capacity in the organisation and I was brought in to support for 1.5 days per week.

Drawing on my previous experience I was able to support the programme lead by pulling together the regional plans, tracking progress. Setting up the programme governance and reporting frameworks and stakeholder engagement.

My scope extended to include supporting the selection of third-party training suppliers, drafting the Statement of Work, liaising with procurement and managing the project budget.

I also acted as a sounding board for the programme lead, discussing new ideas, providing objective feedback and providing a different perspective.

The programme has already delivered a performance improvement and high tNPS scores.

Call centre implementation

Implementing a new call centre is complex, with many workstreams and moving parts. In a recent project delivered virtually from the UK into South Africa, I was instrumental in setting up the new team and ensuring effective engagement.

My work included defining and agreeing on the requirements, building a plan, and implementing the plan across workstreams: facilities, technology, recruiting and training the team, building processes, and setting the KPIs. To drive motivation, we ran it as a Champion Challenger between this new in-house team and an existing outsourced team. The project was delivered at pace, meeting all the KPIs, and was deemed incredibly successful, with the client planning to move the work in-house and ceasing their outsourcing deal.

Community platform development

A client needed help reinvigorating an existing low-cost to serve customer service channel that was being under-utilised. The community platform operated in the UK and Ireland, the US, Canada, France, Spain, Portugal, and South Africa, enabling customers to post questions and get answers.

The platform had been managed “side of the desk” and ultimately deprioritised, leading to poor service levels and low satisfaction scores; customers ended up calling instead, which carries a higher service cost.

I led the team in setting up processes, templates, and a playbook, defining a consistent tone of voice across the regions. A squad was set up with one full-time person in each region responsible for replying, commenting, sharing announcements and linking in with product experts. The platform was also upgraded to a new UI improving the user experience for everyone. Service levels were achieved, satisfaction rates improved, and the need for contact by phone was reduced.

Using customer insights for service improvement

“I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work directly with Marianne for over a year. Marianne played a pivotal role in driving the growth and development of our Global Online community during a period of significant change, which was moving at an incredibly fast pace. Her ability to quickly grasp the intricacies of community management, made her onboarding seamless.

Throughout our time working together, Marianne consistently upheld a high level of organization, provided unwavering support for our workloads, and displayed a readiness to tackle even the smallest tasks. She also never hesitated to collaborate with other teams to amplify the impact of our collective efforts. She was a champion for our team and our work.

Personally, I deeply appreciate the guidance, feedback, and strong work ethic she shared, and I very much looked up to her as a mentor. The valuable lessons she imparted continue to shape my career positively, and I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity to have worked with Marianne”.

Marisa Wright, Community Manager