Case Study
Redesigning Service Around the Whole Customer
Compassion, Clarity and Measurable Impact
Listen
The Challenge
Kura delivered multichannel customer service for a national charity, handling around 40,000 telephone, email and webchat contacts each year through a stable, experienced team. Customers reach out for highly varied reasons, including financial hardship, bereavement, loneliness, declining health, social isolation and other difficult personal circumstances.
These are rarely transactional interactions. Customers may be distressed or overwhelmed after navigating several organisations without finding help. The charity can provide trusted information and explore available support, but it cannot guarantee decisions made by government departments or other third parties.
The challenge was to deliver compassion with clarity: ensuring customers felt heard while expectations were managed honestly, policy was applied consistently, and colleagues stayed within appropriate service boundaries. The service needed to resolve straightforward enquiries efficiently while protecting time for customers requiring empathy and professional judgement.
Annual contact volume
Customer satisfaction
Shape & Bring to Life
What We Did
Whole-customer service
Resolve everything within remit and clearly explain onward routes
Quality redesign
Measure empathy, judgement and outcomes beyond tick-box compliance
Vulnerability capability
Develop empathy, safeguarding and expectation-management skills
Continuous calibration
Use fortnightly reviews and root-cause insight to sustain standards
The service was redesigned around the whole customer rather than the opening question. Colleagues resolve everything within their authority and explain clearly where an outcome depends on another organisation. Customer-journey analysis showed that one in five customers had contacted the service more than once within a three-month sample, demonstrating that sharper routing at first contact could reduce avoidable repeat demand.
Kura and the client jointly overhauled the original compliance-focused scorecard across three connected dimensions: customer service, data recording, and knowledge and outcome. Monitoring now examines whether an interaction felt friendly and caring, whether the colleague explored the customer's wider circumstances, and whether the customer understood their options and next steps.
The redesign was delivered through a controlled 12-month programme without disruption to live service. Colleagues received scenario-based development in empathy, vulnerability, safeguarding, bereavement and expectation management for emotionally difficult conversations.
Advisor-level insight identified variation in after-contact activity, leading to targeted coaching and clearer customer records. Talk time increased from 66.9% to 76%, wrap reduced from 32% to 21%, and average handling time fell from 12 minutes 3 seconds to 11 minutes 12 seconds.
Ensure every customer feels listened to, receives the most appropriate support available, and leaves understanding what happens next - even when the outcome they hoped for cannot be provided.
Deliver
The Results
Moving from a compliance-only scorecard to one measuring empathy, judgement and outcomes empowered colleagues to resolve more at first contact and gave leaders clearer visibility of wider customer needs.
Customer satisfaction
Quality Score (against 90% target)
First-contact resolution
Support checks booked
Operational capacity
Cost per interaction
Nurture
Key Learnings
The service is sustained through shared governance and fortnightly calibration. Quality findings are traced to their root cause – colleague capability, unclear guidance, system friction or the wider customer journey – and addressed through coaching, learning, technology or process redesign.
The strongest lesson is that empathy does not replace accuracy, and policy does not remove compassion. A quality framework built around real customer outcomes can improve service, increase capacity and identify more opportunities for meaningful support at the same time.
The long-term partnership continues to deliver transparent insight, sustained performance and constructive challenge where processes create unnecessary customer effort.
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