Jun 14, 2013 By Jason Boies

6 Ways Google Builds Company Culture

in Customer Service

Culture and its relation to customer service was a hugely popular theme at this year’s Call Center Week in Las Vegas. Two top brands with well developed company cultures took to the stage at Caesars Palace to discuss the role of culture in helping to deliver world-class customer service; Google, Fortune’s “Best Place to Work” , and Telus International, whose parent company is now recognized as one of Canada’s “Ten Most Admired Corporate Cultures.”

First up, Google’s Director of Enterprise Global Support, Peter Scocimara offered up three key values that help shape his organization’s culture and drive their customer service efforts in the process.

1. Work as a Family

The idea of family is woven into Google’s fabric, from their hiring processes, to performance management, product development, and customer support. They trust their associates, or “Googlers”, with sensitive information you’d only trust with people you think of as family. Googlers have a voice and are actively empowered to have a say in how the company is run. You can’t choose your family members at home, but you can in the work environment, and Google does so very carefully.

2. A Culture of Learning

Actively try to invest in both the personal and professional development of your employees. Create the time and space for your team to think and innovate. Scocimara makes note of the company’s 20% Time philosophy, in which they allow employees to pursue any initiatives they want, even if it’s not part of Google’s immediate business goals.

Your contact center may not have the ability to duplicate the Google model, but your customer service team spend countless hours dealing directly with your customers, they’ve likely got some ideas that may be of note, encourage them to spend time shaping them. This is how a search engine company ultimately creates things such as the self-driving car.

3. Innovate for Big Impact (purpose)

As a complimentary value to their culture of learning, Google says to think big and try to tackle the big problems, rather than run from them. The self driving car stemmed directly from the company culture and this value in particular. Their engineers believed there were too many deaths on the road. They thought big, and decided to try working on a way to revolutionize driving. Everyone at the company, particularly those in customer support roles are motivated because they believe they are changing the world, and they are.

Telus President Jeffrey Puritt added that in today’s business world, corporate culture is actually a strong business advantage. And nowhere is your corporate culture more on display than in your customer service efforts, where your frontline meets the world.

Puritt offered up three of his own values that help shape Telus’ corporate culture.

4. Spirited Teamwork

Build a community, not just a company. Telus has moved from a process based culture to a people based one. They have their own internal social network (TLife) that allows employees to swap schedules (crucially, without any management involvement), schedule break alerts, order food to their desks, and even make car pooling requests. The ease of schedule swapping is a huge factor in cutting attrition rates, since lack of flexibility is a top cause of agent churn, so they do their best to make shift swapping as easy as possible.

5. Agile Thinking

At Telus, it’s career first, company second. Puritt notes that this value resonates with millenials in particular. This generation has huge career aspirations, and makes up their mind during training whether they’ll work in customer support at your center. Telus University allows employees to gain arts and business credits while still working with the company. They fully invest in their customer support team members. These educational opportunities also contribute to a decline in agent attrition rates, which is still large challenge for the industry.