From call center to customer contact center

The context

Volta NXT is an installation and service company for central heating boilers, heat pumps, and air conditioners, part of the Essent organization. Customer contact is handled by a team of over twenty employees that functions in practice as a call center: answering calls, analyzing them, and scheduling technicians. The service figures underscored the urgency, while a strong foundation lay in service-oriented employees. The assignment for the department manager was: transform the call center into a customer contact center where approximately 80% of customer inquiries are handled at the first line. Complicating matters was the fact that the IT landscape is centrally managed at the corporate level, customer contact is partly shaped in collaboration with sister companies, and a parallel branding process is underway that only delivers the customer promise later. Consequently, a large part of the levers lies outside their own sphere of influence.

The approach

We acted as strategic advisors and sparring partners to the department manager, aiming for a plan that is not only sound in content but also internally supported and ready for decision-making. The common thread: first clarifying the promise, then translating it to the organization, and proving it with pilots within the organization's own sphere of influence.

• Situation sketch built from work sessions, conversation data, and documentation: where customer contact stands today, what the issue is, and in what context the answer needs to land.
• Service vision as the foundation, with a clear terminology chain from customer need to service promise to customer promise, aligned with the brand positioning of Volta NXT
• The ambition translated into people, process, and technology, with initiatives weighted by impact and effort, so that prioritizing becomes a choice rather than a feeling.
• Explicit distinction between own sphere of influence and dependencies (central IT, collaboration with sister companies, branding process), so that the plan remains feasible and the right discussions are held at the group level.
• Quick wins and a limited set of pilots have been defined, including a knowledge base as a foundation and an AI-driven troubleshooting assistant that helps employees handle technical questions on the first point of contact.
• Phased roadmap and decision documents (working document and presentation) for management and the Board of Directors, refined in short iterations together with the client.

What it yielded

Volta NXT has a well-supported plan that serves as a framework for the transformation of customer contact: a sharp situational analysis, a clear scope, a phased roadmap, and a concrete set of pilots and quick wins. This enables the department manager to conduct discussions at the executive level, while the first building blocks (including the knowledge base pilot and a proof of concept for the support assistant) have already been set in motion. The approach demonstrates that a customer contact transformation does not start with tooling, but with the promise you want to fulfill as an organization, and with honest choices about what you can do yourself and where you need to get involved.