Effectively Capturing Interactions to Improve Results
1 Jan, 2004
By: Mariann McDonagh**Editor''s Note** Many tables are referenced throughout this article and are necessary for complete understanding of this material. The complete article, includeing all tables, may be found in the printed edition of this issue.
Product Overview
Verint’s ULTRA Intelligent Recording is a unified platform and suite of solutions for contact center recording and analytics that captures and analyzes contact center interactions for critical business insights, which are delivered automatically to desktops companywide.
This suite of products is designed to generate “actionable intelligence” by providing performance improvements across the enterprise and equipping contact centers to deliver a consistently high quality customer experience. It makes quality an enterprise initiative, connecting the contact center to the company and the company to its customers. ULTRA includes the following:
• ULTRA Contact Center Quality provides quality monitoring and agent evaluation applications with automated delivery of recordings for workforce performance optimization.
• ULTRA Enterprise Transaction Management records transactions in their entirety and makes recordings directly accessible enterprisewide to facilitate compliance and dispute resolution and minimize liability and loss.
• ULTRA Customer Xperience Management flags contacts that do not meet call-handling standards or that lessen customer satisfaction, and forwards them for rapid follow-up, helping preservee valuable customer relationships.
• ULTRA Customer Intelligence Analytics mine patterns, trends, and cause/effect relationships from recorded content to help build more effective customer strategies and uncover new revenue opportunities.
Built on non-proprietary industry standards, ULTRA Intelligent Recording provides a platform for the future, delivering measurable ROI today and ongoing ROI tomorrow.
Hypothetical Contact Center - Eastern Service Center
Eastern Service Center provides customer service on behalf of mobile phone companies in the Pacific Northwest. Staffed by 250 agents, 20 supervisors, and 3 trainers in the company’s two contact center locations, Eastern handles 2.4 million calls from 300,000 mobile phone customers every year.
In addition to meeting its own business objectives, Eastern must also address the goals of the mobile phone companies it serves. However, escalating operating costs and growing competition from upstart mobile phone companies threaten to derail Eastern’s best efforts. Additionally, process logjams and communication breakdowns have resulted in a growing number of disputes concerning equipment orders and billing errors. And with wireless carriers losing as much as 2.5 percent of their existing customers on average every month —and acquisition costs as high as $250 to $300 per new subscriber —Eastern must deliver the best possible service to sustain customer levels and keep their own clients happy.
Consequently, Eastern has identified three primary business issues that must be addressed:
1. To institute significant cost efficiencies in its own operations by streamlining processes, boosting productivity, and reducing attrition
2. To increase customer satisfaction, thereby keeping customers from defecting to rival phone companies
3. To generate greater revenue from the phone companies’ existing clients
Eastern Service Center is a fictitious enterprise created to demonstrate potential benefits that may be realized by utilizing certain of Verint''s products and solutions. In the case study of Eastern Service Center, Verint has provided a variety of statistics and metrics regarding Eastern Service Center. These statistics and metrics are an integral element of Eastern Service Center achieving certain benefits from the use of Verint''s products and solutions. While Verint believes it has made reasonable assumptions regarding the statistics and metrics it has provided, unless otherwise noted, these statistics and metrics are based solely on Verint''s anecdotal knowledge. The assumptions made by Verint. may not apply to your company, either in whole or in part, and your company may not achieve the same results or experience the same benefits as Eastern Service Center. Verint expressly disclaims any representations or warranties regarding its products and solutions, or the results that may be obtained therefrom.
Three Problems
1. Too Many Inefficiencies
Escalating costs presented the most obvious challenge to Eastern. As with most contact centers, agent salaries were the single largest expense at nearly $7.3 million annually. Eastern’s training costs were also significant, with approximately 4.5 training hours delivered monthly to every Eastern agent— nearly $200,000 annually in lost productivity alone. Attrition costs were also high—the firm typically lost 60 agents per year, at an annual replacement cost in excess of $360,000 ($6,000 per agent to recruit and train). Performance evaluation costs topped out at more than $675,000 every year, with productivity of particular concern to Eastern.
The company’s old recording system logged calls, but did not have any quality monitoring capabilities. Consequently, Eastern’s supervisors listened in on agent calls as time permitted, often catching calls in progress and seldom being sure that they were monitoring a representative sample of customer interactions. Supervisors scored agent quality using an online form and their own recollections of the calls. When call volume slowed, supervisors reviewed evaluations with agents. Due to the manual nature of the process, supervisors could only monitor and evaluate three calls per agent per week.
Monthly scores were manually collected and transferred onto spreadsheets that were combined with data collected from Eastern’s switch, which then was reviewed by a team leader who calculated averages and trends and built charts and graphs to depict the findings. An administrative assistant placed all of the detail and summary information in binders for distribution to senior management.
2. Challenges to Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction was a key concern for Eastern Service Center, and several potential points of failure were identified:
• Poor agent performance
• Repeated calls to place orders or solve problems
• A reactive approach to a poor customer experience, which did not address preventable customer defections
• Inadequate agent proficiency in products and/or programs
• Communication breakdowns and process logjams both inside and outside the contact center
• Products and programs that do not truly address customer needs
To combat the problems, Eastern believed it needed to increase first call resolution, preserve customer relationships and reduce churn, streamline its dispute management process and reduce related automatic settlements.
3. Inability to Use Information to Generate Revenue
Eastern knew that their contact center recordings were rich with intelligence about customer preferences and perceptions, but they had no way to easily access and use that information. They wanted to use the intelligence to help their clients (the mobile phone companies) develop customer-centric sales and marketing initiatives to generate revenue from the company’s existing client base. However, Eastern found the task of unearthing this intelligence a formidable challenge.
Eastern had depended on its agents to supply information about customer behavior and patterns during regularly scheduled staff meetings. Unfortunately, this process generated inaccurate findings based upon subjective recollections. To complicate matters, Eastern’s management was skeptical about using analytic technologies to unearth this intelligence, due in part to the enormous commitment of time and cost required to build complex models and translate findings into a useable format.
Solutions for Three Problems
1. Achieved Significant Cost Efficiencies
Following the implementation of ULTRA, Eastern’s supervisors no longer had to “listen in” on calls as time permitted because ULTRA recorded all calls in their entirety and automatically delivered the right number and types of recordings for evaluation to each supervisor’s ULTRA IntelliPortal desktop.
Using IntelliPortal, supervisors and management were able to quickly zero in on specific contacts of interest, and were able to flag and forward contacts for further training or follow-up by staff in other departments. ULTRA’s graphical displays provide supervisors with an up-to-the-minute look at their own productivity and agent progress in meeting quality goals. Further, they were able to play back recordings, view agent screens, and evaluate calls with ULTRA evaluation forms customized to Eastern’s specific business objectives. With ULTRA’s screen recording, supervisors were able to gauge agents’ understanding of company’s business processes by reviewing how effectively agents navigated order fulfillment, account update and customer service screens.
After ULTRA, Eastern’s supervisors were able to increase their monitoring and evaluation from three to five calls per agent per week, giving them a much more representative sample of interactions. Further, supervisors were able to review the complete call recording enriched with contact information captured by the company’s switch and CTI system.
Using ULTRA’s analytic reports, Eastern’s managers were able to determine when attempts to increase productivity jeopardize the ability of agents to provide excellent customer service. They also were able to compare evaluation scores within groups and among groups throughout the company to identify high performers, then listen to recordings to find best—and worst—practices.
ULTRA IntelliFind enabled managers to categorize calls that uncovered the root causes of failure—late shipments, billing errors, and so on—so that the company could address potential causes of customer defections. This holistic approach helped Eastern significantly boost agent proficiency and productivity.
Moreover, since Eastern’s agents now play back evaluated calls and review their evaluations from a single IntelliPortal screen, company standards are more effectively conveyed and reinforced. As a result, Eastern has seen its agents shave an average four seconds off each call and three seconds off wrap-up time.
The cost of training was high at Eastern Service Center, but its importance was indisputable. As a result, Eastern’s management was hesitant to reduce training hours. Clearly, proficient and productive agents were deemed key to delivering the high quality customer experience that would generate customer loyalty and increase customer value. Moreover, the confidence and success that this sense of proficiency engendered among agents was key to retention, thus reducing recruiting and training costs.
With ULTRA IntelliPortal and ULTRA analytic reports, Eastern’s management was able to review agent scores and compare quality across its locations. This helped management better understand and target specific areas for skill improvement. Moreover, because Eastern’s supervisors were equipped with a wider sample of contacts to play back and evaluate, they could more easily target training to individual agent strengths and deficiencies, especially with regard to new sales and marketing programs.
By delivering only the training that is actually needed, Eastern was able to reduce training time by 10 percent. Targeted training, plus the availability of a “knowledge base” of recorded interactions for training purposes, dramatically increased agent proficiency. And greater agent proficiency increased job satisfaction, contributing to the company’s ability to retain an additional 10 agents a year. This translates to more than $8,500 monthly, as shown in the table referenced in the printed version of this edition.
Additionally, ULTRA helped Eastern zero in on several key aspects of increasing the enterprise value of recording while decreasing total cost of ownership, including: integration with existing infrastructure, centralizing administration, streamlining call retrieval and storage, leveraging existing technologies and desktop software, and providing web-based access to recordings.
2. Increased Customer Satisfaction
Eastern’s enterprise quality approach using ULTRA helped the service bureau better align its training, scripts, programs and products with customer requirements. As a result, Eastern Service Bureau increased its 75 percent first-call resolution rate to 78 percent. In addition, with ULTRA, alerts were automatically delivered to Eastern’s customer retention specialists when contacts fell below identified standards or when customers closed their accounts, enabling Eastern to act quickly to save valuable customer relationships.
ULTRA’s analytic technologies helped Eastern zero in on processes that negatively impact customer satisfaction, as was the case when calls were being routed to the wrong agent group, routing this intelligence directly to decision makers without requiring complex models or highly trained analysts. This allowed Eastern to reroute the calls, reducing the callback rate. Further, ULTRA IntelliFind helped Eastern find recurrent breakdowns in processes and products based upon phrase and category searches, which helped management learn more about customer behaviors and ultimately reduce churn. Because of access throughout the company, this information can be used cross-functionally as a window on customer satisfaction.
With all interactions captured in their entirety and instant direct access to millions of recorded transactions, information about customer transactions has become readily available, helping streamline dispute management and reduce automatic settlements.
After just six months, an intelligent approach to enterprise quality helped Eastern Service Center lower its 8 percent customer churn rate to 7.5 percent, as shown in the table referenced in the printed version of this edition.
3. Generated Revenue
With ULTRA’s automated analytics, it has become easy to mine the insights from its customer interaction recordings and deliver these insights as actionable intelligence directly to decision makers. For example, using ULTRA IntelliMiner, Eastern discovered that calls related to a new mobile phone calling program that did not result in a sale were consistently between 1.25 and 1.5 minutes long. In listening to the call recordings gathered by IntelliMiner, Eastern’s management noted that agents began to discuss the program’s higher pricing approximately 1.2 minutes into the conversation, before explaining the program’s features. With this information in hand, Eastern revised the agent’s scripts so that agents discussed benefits and features before giving customers pricing information. Thus, Eastern was able to change tactics in the first three months of the campaign to significantly improve the success of the new program.
With ULTRA’s actionable intelligence, Eastern has been able to increase its 15 percent cross-sell and up-sell conversion rate to 25 percent, netting the company significant additional revenue.
Moving forward, Eastern plans to use ULTRA analytics to find its most profitable customers and to develop specific promotions targeted to these lucrative customer segments. By raising the value of 10 percent of its customers (30,000 customers) by 10 percent each (or $50 each annually), Eastern projects that it can increase the overall value of each existing customer by 1 percent, for a total increase in revenue of $125,000 per month.
Return on Investment
Eastern Service Center reported the following return on investment beginning three and six months after full deployment of ULTRA.
Conclusion: ULTRA Intelligent Recording Makes Quality an Enterprise Initiative
By deploying an Intelligent Recording solution that extends quality throughout both its contact center and its company, Eastern is meeting its core objectives:
• To increase business efficiency
• To enhance customer satisfaction and retention
• To generate additional revenue
For a full Executive Brief on this topic, log on to www.contactprofessional.com and click on the link, or contact Verint directly at 1-800-4VERINT for more information.
