The customer experience is so important to many businesses, but so often overlooked when trying to manage every other part of the process. The team at Woven, under the capable leadership of Paula Constant has been able to transform this process for many businesses since its inception. Recognised for her efforts by being named Most Influential CEO, 2022 – London, the United Kingdom in CEO Monthly, we decided to dig a little deeper and uncover just some of the secrets of her success.
Woven is the partner of choice for many companies because of their proven success to create bespoke customer experiences. When thinking about the customer journey it is so important to provide an exceptional service to maintain loyalty and no one understands this better than Paula Constant and her talented team. With a leadership team that comes predominantly from the ‘other side’ of FTSE250 customers, where they’ve owned the customer goals, targets and P&L, they make sure that when their clients outsource to them, they deliver the high standard of service that is expected from both them and their customers. Woven offer services ranging from call answering solutions to a fully outsourced customer experience operation including robotic automation, social media monitoring and much more!
Leading from the front, Paula has a wealth of experience behind her in a range of different positions, switching from conversations with the board to working the front line without skipping a beat. Paula’s career began at Accenture, specialising in telecoms strategies, before moving to Vodafone and British Telecom. She spent ten years here, morphing from a strategy professional to running sales, service and engineering battalions in the small business, global business, and consumer fields. It was an incredible chance for her to learn from the best in the business whilst pushing the standards of service ever higher.
Being hands on has always been a core component of Paula’s approach to work, and this is emulated through the Woven proposition which makes them unique in the marketplace. Her talent is finding data driven solutions and pushing the boundaries on sales into service, marketing for loyalty, and appetite for amazing digital experiences.
Paula has a huge focus on the employees that make up ‘The Woven Family’. The contact centre job is tough, and a lot of work has recently gone into replacing classroom training for employees. Training needs to be fun and radically reinvented. She has led the way by including music, drama, art and sport into this often-challenging field. With their inspired workforce, working harder than ever before, she was able to increase pay by over 20%, providing people with a living wage plus bonus, significantly above national wage, even with the industry effects of Brexit and Covid.
Having to navigate any business through the COVID-19 pandemic would be an impressive feat, but it’s especially true when there is a 1,200 strong workforce depending on you making the right decision. The contact centre market has dramatically shifted in this time towards digital solutions and will accelerate further. Woven have identified this shift and are evolving their innovative digital solutions such as chat bots, voice bots and live chat. But there is still an important role for the human touch in customer service, with the appreciation of a need for vulnerable customer management far more prevalent than ever before and the requirement for complex customer issue management through a specialist is really critical.
During the last two years Woven has built out its offering and developed new ways of working that have allowed it to thrive. Paula has managed to build a company that has a trusted, and singular, identity from five very culturally different organisations. It’s a credit to her skill and the team’s trust in it that the results have been so positive. She has also made a point of working closely with the CWU to ensure that the union was part of the firm’s ongoing strategy.
Looking ahead, Woven has plans to expand their people proposition, growing their 16+ years Academy which offers young adults their first job experience, their highly successful bureau business, as well as consolidating the utilities and financial services play through acquisition. Woven want to ensure that as they expand, they maintain the level of personal attention, both to their clients and their workforce.
Paula has experienced a huge amount of change in the last year, having relocated from Australia to the UK during the pandemic, she is excited about the various plans to build out Woven in the long term. It’s an incredible business with incredible potential. We can’t wait to see what she does, either!
