Many contact center managers say, “Our senior
management just doesn’t get it.” You won’t hear such a
complaint from any managers (or anyone else) at Blinds.com – not with someone like Chief Operations Officer Steve Riddell in the boardroom. Few people are as passionate about and committed to the customer experience and a positive contact center culture as Steve is. And few people are as proud of what the Blinds.com team has been able to accomplish in terms of performance, customer loyalty and agent engagement.
I had the honor of interviewing Steve recently to learn more about what drives Blinds.com’s tremendous customer care success. Following are the questions I posed to him – and the insightful responses he provided.
Q: You’ve said that what sets Blinds.com’s contact center apart from much of the competition is its focus on “competence over compliance”. Can you please elaborate?
Most contact centers operate with a heavy focus on QA. What then happens is that success is defined by a score. But if you ask the average contact center, “Is it possible to get a great score and have it be a bad call?” most centers will say yes. And if you ask the converse, “Is it possible to get a bad score but be a great call?” they’ll say yes again.
So I ask, “Am I the only one in the room that thinks that’s wrong?” You’re not measuring the right thing. Score rarely measures skill – most folks in a contact center will exhibit aberrant behavior to change the score to increase their pay.
Scores rarely manifest great skill. Teach your team the skills that are important to you, the business, and you get greater compliance through improved skill. When you chase the right things, you start seeing double-digit performance improvement.
When skills get better, the customer experience gets better. That’s the value of competence over compliance.
Q: How do your center’s quality monitoring and performance management practices support your “competence over compliance” mantra?
After about a year of discovery, we were able to identify 10 skill sets that need to be exhibited during a customer interaction. By identifying such specific skills, our coaches can come in and help make agents and interactions better. We take QA and remove the ambiguity and judgment. A person can listen to a customer service call and say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on whether particular skills were demonstrated.
Actions speak louder than words. We practice daily coaching to build skill and compensate our team based on the presence of those skills – even customer service! Again, you need to chase the right things.
Q: I’ve heard you speak of the three components of the “Blinds.com Experience” for customers. Can you list them and elaborate a little on each?
Certainly, but let me start off by pointing out it’s the definition of the customer experience that defines the role of an employee, not a job title or script. If you ask the average contact center employee, “What’s your job?” they’ll say something like, “To answer calls”, or “To help our customers”, or “To assist customers in making a good purchasing decision.” Those are all great things, but that’s not it.
We at Blinds.com have spent a lot of time discerning what we want the customer experience to be, and have focused on that. When customers love the experience of doing business with you, they come back. People buy from people they like and trust.
Do customers really want their name said three times in a conversation? Wouldn’t they still buy from you if they truly liked you? Yes. Like me, trust me, buy from me. You must have the definition around that incredible customer experience that your employees can rally around.
Now, all that said, the three components of the Blinds.com customer experience are:
Customer solutions – A customer service rep’s job is to deliver solutions for everyone that talks to them. If they don’t, they haven’t done their job. Not only do you need to give a customer what they ask for, but also think ahead of what they might need next. Buying a blind? You’ll need a way to clean it. There’s a big difference between a commodity provider and a customer solution provider.
Make it easy – If it’s hard to work with you, customers won’t want to do business with you. Regardless of how challenging your job is or how hard your product is to sell, the customer simply doesn’t care what you have to go through. The easier you make it on them, the more they’ll want to return – and they’ll tell their friends.
Extraordinary service – When a person hangs up after a call with my team, their first reaction ought to be “WOW! That was great!” All businesses provide customer experiences, but I’d be hard pressed to say they are all good ones, or even average ones. We let employees know that providing extraordinary service is their job, and they know what really defines their job. All of our employee training revolves around how to deliver amazing experiences. Define your customer experience, make it easy to do business with you and you’ll see happier customers and happier contact center employees.
Q: What are some of the customer service and contact center related awards Blinds.com has received in recent years?
- Contact Center of the Year Award (10th Annual Call Center Week)
- Gold and Silver ‘Stevie Awards’ for Service, Innovation and Leadership
- ‘50 Most Engaged Workplaces in America’ ranking
- ‘Houston’s Best Place to Work’ (multiple years, presented by the Houston Business Journal)
- ‘Houston Top Workplaces’ (multiple years, presented by the Houston Chronicle)
- Internet Retailer Top 500 Companies
- AMA Marketer of the Year
- Houston’s Best and Brightest Company to Work for
It’s an interesting exercise to review what kinds of awards your business is winning – they tell a story about your brand. The awards we are most excited about are typically the ‘best workplaces’ awards – they are a testimony to how we pay attention to the internal workings of the company. When culture is thriving inside, it goes a long way toward great customer service.
Q: Great customer service and experiences don’t happen without great agents in place. What does Blinds.com look for when selecting new agents for the contact center?
Getting hired at Blinds.com is admittedly a lengthy process. We actually have a 7-stage interview process:
- General skill tests – can you type and navigate through a website?
- Screening phone call
- Initial in-person interview
- Sales/service manager interview
- Group interview with three members of the agent team – employee approval is important to us!
- Then you meet me – I’m looking for areas of trainability and how well you perform under pressure. This interview isn’t one of the fun ones.
- And finally you meet our CEO, Jay Steinfeld – he’s looking primarily for cultural fit and values. His questions are higher level and really insightful.
Culture is everything to us, and we are very protective of it. Just because an applicant is competent doesn’t mean they’ll be a good cultural fit. We take great pains to try to smoke out candidates that are not a good fit. We hire only about one out of every 50 applicants we meet.
So yes, our hiring process is very long, but our retention rate is unheard of – less than a 4% turnover rate annually. Agents don’t get on floor if they don’t hit the metrics during training (we call it ‘Academy Bay’). We just don’t let the bad ones in, and we have a great and exciting structure in place to keep the good ones with us for years and years.
Q: What kinds of practices and programs are in place to keep agent performance, engagement and retention high?
We don’t spend a lot of time on contests, awards and tricks. (We do occasionally employ these, but very selectively and only if I want an added push or extra benefit.) The best motivators around are a fun and positive work environment, a focus on personal development, great paychecks and opportunities to grow your career. Our employees legitimately love coming to work every day. It’s a fantastic environment and our customers hear that in our voices.
Our team gets unusually high conversion rates (approaching 50%) and a great Average Order Value. People here aspire to do a good job – always better than the day before. We are creators of opportunity, and when you have a company that’s growing and has opportunity inside, it’s a huge motivating factor.
Q: Can you provide a quote from a couple of agents regarding what it’s like working at Blinds.com?
“I feel more like an owner/operator of my own business than a design consultant in a call center here at Blinds.com. As a team, we are an important part of deciding what goals the company should meet, and are expected to voice ways for us to reach those goals. It really is a privilege to call myself a member of the Blinds.com family!” –Christian Quinn
“Working at Blinds.com is like being next to your best friends all day. We learn, get frustrated, find solutions, grow and celebrate together. The support to be the best person I can be is the greatest thing about working here!” –Rachel Bills
Blinds.com – The Big Picture
Contact center location(s): Houston, Texas
Hours of operation: M-F 7am-9pm CST; Sat & Sun 9am-5pm CST
Number of agents employed: 140 agents (with 180+ employees total)
Channels handled: Phone, email, chat, web self-service, and social media
What’s so great about them: Their focus is on ‘competence over compliance’. Internal scores don’t drive the business – it’s all about agent development and the customer experience, NOT mindless metrics. A very positive culture!
There are companies that talk about being customer-focused, and then there are companies like Dealertrack Technologies that back such talk up with real action.
A few years ago, Dealertrack – a leading provider of web-based software solutions for the automotive industry – implemented a ‘Voice of the Customer’ (VoC) initiative featuring a comprehensive and dynamic customer satisfaction (C-Sat) survey process. The initiative has enabled the company to continuously drive performance improvement, elevate the customer experience and enhance the bottom line.
I recently caught up with Dealertrack’s Senior Manager of Technical Support, Dayna Giles, who was gracious enough to answer my barrage of questions about her center’s VoC and C-Sat success with much eloquence and insight.
When did you implement your current Customer Satisfaction survey process, and what was the main objective for doing so?
The Dealertrack Customer Satisfaction survey process has been in place since early 2009 and rolled out through the different solution groups and teams through October 2010. The main objective of this is to understand from our clients’ perspective what we are doing well, and what can improve on, as well as whether or not they would be willing to recommend our solution in the marketplace.
How soon after an interaction with an agent is the customer surveyed? How many questions does the survey feature, and what are the nature of those questions?
The survey is emailed to the client immediately after the case is resolved.
We have a total of six questions on our survey. The nature of most of those questions are specific to the agent and the interaction (empathy, follow-up, understanding and satisfaction with technical resolution), with the other question being whether or not the client would recommend our support team. There is additional space for clients to provide comments or feedback to help improve our product, our service, or future interactions.
Do you survey only callers, or also customers who interact with Dealertrack via email, IVR and web self-service?
Our surveys are tied to the client email address so we survey any form of client interaction based on our case-tracking system.
Who evaluates the survey data/feedback, and how often?
We have an internal team dedicated to the VoC process. We have monthly debrief meetings that involve key leadership team members where discussion occurs around all VoC metrics and initiatives to improve results.
Do you have a “customer recovery” process in place for customers who indicate notable dissatisfaction following an interaction? How soon after such customers complete a survey does your center contact them, and how do customers typically respond?
Our supervisors and managers call our clients back on all the dissatisfaction alerts or client requests we receive. Once such a client responds to a survey, they are contacted within one business day. Clients typically respond positively to being contacted by a supervisor or manager on a dissatisfaction survey.
Do you incorporate customers’ ratings and direct feedback into agents’ Quality scores and coaching?
Yes, we incorporate customer ratings and feedback into team member quality scores and coaching in a couple of ways. We have a team member scorecard – Team Member Performance Index (TMPI) – and a Service Experience Index (SEI) that includes both the Quality Performance Assessment (QPA) score and the Transactional Net Promoter Score (TNPS) to give the agent an overall grade or ranking for the month. During monthly agent review sessions team members receive feedback on the above.
How do agents feel about having the Voice of the Customer integrated with your Quality monitoring process?
When we initially rolled out this program, team members were not confident that they would be able to influence client satisfaction. Team members believed challenges with a product or other issues that were outside their control would overshadow the service they could provide. We very quickly learned this was not the case – how a team member delivers the message and manages the interaction is often the determining factor in whether a client is satisfied or not.
What other kinds of actions do you take on the customer data and feedback you receive?
We often use client feedback to improve our internal processes. For example, since supervisors or managers make the callback to our clients, they receive direct feedback they may not otherwise hear. They bring that feedback to daily meetings where we are able to discuss where we are as a team and look to make improvements. It could be a lack of training on the team member’s part, and in discussing this feedback we may find that similar training is needed across the team. We then work with our training team to provide this specific training to improve the team member’s knowledge and confidence.
I hear your center has seen vast improvements to its Net Promoter Score. Care to elaborate? To what do you attribute such an increase?
Over the course of 29 months we saw a great increase in our Transactional Net Promoter Score. From February 2011, with a score of 5%, to June 2013, with a score of 75% – that’s a 70% increase! The biggest increase occurred between February 2011 and March 2011, when we saw 15% improvement (from 5% to 20%). The second biggest increase occurred July 2012 to August 2012, when we saw a 14% improvement (from 46% to 60%).
We attribute such an improvement to team member focus on VoC. We ran a number of competitions to improve team member awareness that each client interaction could result in a customer survey. It became part of our daily language and part of our culture.
High customer satisfaction doesn’t happen without high agent satisfaction. What kinds of things does your center do to keep agents happy and engaged?
Rewards & recognition
We have a couple of major awards that we give out on a monthly and quarterly basis, including Service Star of the Month, which is based on Transactional NPS scores and the number of positive customer comments the agent receives via surveys. We also have our quarterly Star Quarterback award, which is based on peer nominations regarding a team member’s demonstration of Dealertrack’s Vision, Mission and Values, as well as, internal and external client feedback and overall performance.
In addition, Customer Service Week is one of our favorite weeks here. We do a number of fun free activities – bingo, funky sock day, favorite sports team day – and some pretty cost-effective activities. Cotton candy machines are around $30 to rent and the sugar is roughly $8. Minimal cost and effort but maximum results! The thing our team looks forward to the most each year is the breakfast we make – bacon, eggs, pancakes, hash browns, fruit, OJ… the works! The leadership team cooks the breakfast and serves our team members. For a couple hundred dollars we can feed over 200 people and physically serve and thank them for all they do.
Empowerment
We run multiple focus groups concurrently where our team members are assigned a topic and given an opportunity to provide their feedback and any potential improvements they see we could make. In order to be successful, our team members have to feel we are giving them the opportunity to do so and as leaders we don’t always have the answers. It’s great to get ideas flowing from the team and create a ground swell. The company/leadership recognizes that support team members ARE the advocates for our clients and the client experience with products and service.
Also, our Level 2 agents are encouraged and empowered to train our Level 1 agents. Each L1 agent has an aggressive goal to complete 120 hours of training per year. L2s are encouraged to provide a vast number of those hours of training.
Advancement opportunities
Team members are often selected from the Technical Support department to move up to various roles in the company – from Quality Assurance to Installation to Product Management. We develop and encourage future growth for our team members. Many of our support teams have higher internal turnover (promotion/transfer) than external, which is rare in the contact center industry.
Work-at-home opportunities
We currently have a number of remote employees on our team. We like to give team members, based on their role, the opportunity to work from home.
Stress reduction tactics
When we have a system incident or outage, we often get the team lunch. Or if it’s a Friday, or if it’s hot, or if we simply feel like it, we’ll get ice cream or treats. It doesn’t have to be a great expense to the company to make someone smile.
Dealertrack Technologies – The Big Picture
Contact center locations: Dallas, Texas; South Jordan, Utah; Groton, Conn.
Hours of operation: Main Support Hours of operation are Mon-Fri 6am-6pm MT; Sat 7am-4pm MT; Sun on-call support.
Number of agents employed: 150+
Products/services supported/provided: Software for the automotive industry.
Channels handled: Phone, IVR, email, web self-service.
What so great about them: The ‘Voice of the Customer’ initiative they implemented in 2009 has led to huge increases in customer satisfaction and loyalty, not to mention a highly engaged frontline.
After embarking on a robust voice-of-the-customer project, Philadelphia Insurance Companies is more agile in identifying and addressing problems, leading to higher customer satisfaction.
(NOTE: This article was originally published in 1to1Magazine in August by 1to1Media, who has granted Off Center permission to use it here. The article, originally titled “Philadelphia Insurance Companies Listens to Its Customers”, was written by 1to1Media’s Senior Writer Cynthia Clark.)
It's not always simple for businesses to sift through the mountains of information that customers are providing, understand what clients are saying, and then build strategies that address problems. Philadelphia Insurance Companies wanted to find an efficient solution to get actionable data based on what its customers were saying. Although the insurance carrier was collecting feedback through several channels – including annual, transaction, and web surveys, as well as mystery shopping – the organization wanted to find a one-stop-shop solution to analyze its customers' feedback.
According to Seth Hall, the company's vice president of operations, customers were filling out surveys, and the data which was being collected failed to effectively measure performance and identify areas of improvement. "The results were objectively captured,” says Hall, “but there wasn't a lot of information as to how customers perceived the company, whether they were pleased with the level of service, and whether they would recommend us to someone."
Additionally, while the company was receiving thousands of calls every month and hundreds of emails daily, these multiple sources of customer feedback made it difficult to develop a holistic and enterprise-wide analysis of what customers were saying. On the other hand, Philadelphia Insurance Companies was putting a lot of emphasis on internal scorecards to determine whether processes were going according to established standards – e.g., the length of time it took the company to respond to a claim. Since the company was doing well and scorecard results were good, it was challenging to decide what changes needed to be made.
Making the Most of Client Feedback
Soon after joining the company in 2009, Hall noticed that the results outlined by the scorecards were not always reflected in the organization's results. He quickly realized that Philadelphia Insurance Companies was missing out on important feedback because of the lack of a reliable VOC program that could provide data on which to base decisions and to determine the success of new projects. At the end of 2010, the organization implemented MarketTools' customer satisfaction program, allowing the insurance firm to capture key data from customer feedback, which is aggregated and visible in real time. This allows the company to notice trends quickly and to be agile in taking the necessary action. Hall says low scores trigger automatic emails to the responsible person, who can then contact the customer, get more information, and resolve the issue.
The new information allows Philadelphia Insurance Companies to know exactly how it's doing in the eyes of its customers rather than depend solely on the internal scorecards. "We match our internal scorecards with external feedback," says Hall. This new strategy has led to some discoveries of problems that might have cost the organization money. Scorecards, for example, indicated the need to add more customer reps since the average speed of answer had slipped. But upon reviewing its VOC data, the company realized that first-call resolution was a much more important indicator of customer satisfaction. "This data was instrumental in us changing the metrics/goals and thus not hiring the additional staff we thought we needed," Hall explains.
Another incident that reiterated the importance of having a VOC program took place October 2011 when the company started administering a collector car insurance product. In order to cut costs, the company revised its policy of sending auto ID cards with the renewal notice. According to Hall, VOC feedback was astounding, with about 10 percent of the 130,000 policy holders criticizing the decision. This real-time feedback allowed the organization to quickly reverse its decision and just seven weeks after launching the new policy start sending out auto ID cards. "Without a VOC program, it would have taken us much longer to react, losing customers and upsetting people," says Hall.
VOC feedback has also indicated that some customers feel it can be difficult to get information from the company and contact the right person. "To remedy this we are now putting together targeted and transactional surveys to find out what exactly we can be doing differently, and obviously better," Hall says.
Although Philadelphia Insurance Companies is retaining its internal scorecards, it no longer needs to base all its decisions on these results. In fact, the scorecards indicated no major billing issues while the VOC program found there to be more negative comments surrounding billing than anything else. This is the information the company needed to start working on a new billing system that is expected to launch next year.
The impact of listening to customers has been noticeable, and Philadelphia Insurance Companies has seen an increase in NPS scores – from the mid to upper 40s before implementing the VOC program to 51 at the end of last year.
A Client-Focused C-Suite
In a bid to solidify the trust that customers have in the company and improve the one-on-one relationship, C-suite executives have been at the forefront of reaching out to clients who leave less-than-stellar feedback. According to Hall, customers are surprised to be receiving a call from the company's hierarchy.
Such a policy makes it clear that the company is not afraid to apologize for its mistakes, says Hall. "Although we do a lot of things well, we aren't perfect, but we're going to call you, apologize, and fix the problem. And we'll do it very quickly."
(Reprinted with permission by 1to1Media.)
This month’s Contact Centerfold features an interview with renowned contact center expert Tim Montgomery, Managing Partner of the uniquely though aptly named contact center outsourcing firm Culture.Service.Growth (CSG). Tim shares what sets CSG apart from other customer care organizations, and why agents, customers and corporate clients keep smiling and sticking around.
(In the Q&A session below, “GL” is yours truly and “TM” is the one and only Tim Montgomery.)
GL: CSG prides itself on “managing people rather than efficiency”. Could you please briefly explain what that means and why it’s important?
TM: Prior to starting CSG, we worked with hundreds of contact centers to help them improve service and efficiency. In most of the companies we advised, the real opportunity was to refocus the leadership team from managing by the metrics to managing to agent behaviors.
This is a lot more difficult than it sounds, as the leaders have to spend time understanding the drivers behind metrics in order to have an effective behavior-based conversation with agents. At CSG, we train all of our leaders to focus on the person first and understand the "why' behind the metrics.
The real difference is seen in the feedback we get back from our agents, who tell us how their experience in our contact center feels very different than their experience in other contact center environments they have been in.
GL: Could you please provide a few specific examples that clearly illustrate CSG’s progressive management style?
TM: Sure. Our philosophy is simple – treat every agent as an adult and assume everyone wants to do their best every day. We limit the amount of formal policies we have in place and focus more on the expected outcome. For example, we don't have a formal attendance policy other than we expect you to come to work on a regular basis. Same with quality – it's not about a score on a form. We focus on continuous improvement on every interaction. Our lack of formal policies expands to our dress code. We ask our reps to look in the mirror and if they'd go to dinner with their grandmother dressed like that, then they can come to work dressed like that. In two years, we've never had to send anyone home because of dress. We spend all our time focused on what agents do and no time on what they wear.
GL: How do agents feel about the contact center’s unique approach? What are engagement and retention levels like?
TM: We believe a strong indicator of employee engagement is the percent of new employees that come from internal referrals. About 60% of our current staff was hired as a result of another employee referring them to this ‘great place to work’, with many being family members and close friends of existing agents.
GL: To succeed as an outsourcer and get clients to trust you with their customers, you obviously need to have a highly experienced management team. Can you talk a little about the collective experience of your leaders?
TM: Quite simply, we know contact centers and world-class service better than anyone. Our owners and leaders have more than 100 years of experience running contact centers for USAA – the world's most celebrated contact center organization. Our core team members at CSG are experts in contact center leadership, operations and improvement. We are trusted advisors to some of the world's top brands. We've taken the lessons learned from decades of running and improving contact centers to create the core of what will become the new standard in contact center outsourcing relationships.
GL: I’ve heard you mention – and seen you write about – something you call ‘Service 1st’. Please tell us what that is in a nutshell.
TM: ‘Service 1st’ is based on a call reduction philosophy that generates improved customer experiences. Driving improvement from the frontline is the foundation of a world-class organization. This frontline-driven approach allows us to provide continuous feedback to our clients to adjust areas of their organization that may be generating unnecessary customer contacts. Such an approach not only saves money; it directly impacts the customer’s perception of the organization. One of our driving principles at CSG is to help clients continually reduce operational defects, and we do this one call at a time.
GL: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
TM: Our value is based on the fact that we don't see a call as merely a transaction or a number. We see every contact as an opportunity to gather intelligence. From day one, our agents are taught to think of their role as ‘process engineers’ and to look for ways to help the company they're supporting get more out of every contact. By focusing on the total cost of ownership, clients incur lower support costs (fewer calls) and improved customer loyalty (fewer defects).
CSG – the Big Picture
Contact center location(s): Two locations in San Antonio, Texas.
Hours of operation: 24/7
Number of agents employed: 250
Products/services supported/provided: Outsourced contact center support for a wide variety of industries and client types.
Channels handled: Phone, IVR, email, chat, web self-service and social media
What’s so great about them? They pride themselves on a unique contact center culture where efficiency never comes at the expense of quality, and where people are viewed as more important than metrics.
(Reprinted with permission from 1to1Media.)
Organizations serious about making the best decisions for their customers are often challenged with ensuring that everybody within the company, from decision-makers to frontline employees, is fully aware of the needs of their customers. In order to do this, customer-centric organizations are trying to eliminate any disconnect between the C-Suite and their end customers.
Canadian telecommunications company Telus wanted to make sure its senior leaders were sensitive to customer needs. The organization was happy with the products and services it was providing, but recognized that delivering an outstanding customer experience was the main differentiator in the competitive telecom sector. Thus, it decided to embark on a journey to dramatically improve its customer experience. As Carol Borghesi, senior vice president of Telus' Customers First Culture, explains, the organization essentially turned its attention to putting customers at the heart of everything it does.
As part of its overall strategy of understanding the customer experience and putting the customer first, Telus embarked in 2010 on what Borghesi describes as a "lifestyle change." This company-wide initiative brought together decision-makers with frontline employees to map the customer journey and identify problems – small and large – which could be addressed to improve the ultimate experience.
The journey started by pairing the company's most senior executives with a frontline employee from a different department for an entire shift.. "We told them to clear their calendars so that they weren't disturbed and could sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the frontline employee," Borghesi explains.
This initiative was meant to give the organization's decision-makers a glimpse into the problems that frontline employees were facing on a daily basis as well as provide face-time with customers. "It was a truly eye-opening experience and meant that people who wouldn't normally know what's going on in the frontline had the opportunity to [do so]," Borghesi says.
But Telus didn't want this to be solely a data-gathering exercise. The organization wanted to take action on the insights it gathered. Borghesi says at the end of the day each two-person team agreed to present one specific issue that the frontline worker was facing and which was preventing him from providing the best experience to customers. These issues were then discussed during four senior leadership forums across Canada and the organization outlined a number of recommendations generated from those meetings that could help improve customer experience. Borghesi says within two years about 70% of the list has been addressed.
Although the initiative started with pairing about 350 senior managers with frontline workers, it was so successful that the organization decided to extend the program. Today about 4,000 people – a tenth of Telus' staff – have gone through the experience. "We've included everyone, including network technologists and architects," Borghesi says, adding that the initiative has "ignited renewed vigor and passion around doing what's best for customers."
Borghesi explains that the second part of Telus' Customers First strategy included gathering and making sense of customer intelligence from a variety of different touchpoints, including emails, chat sessions, calls to the contact center, and escalations. Additionally, the organization wanted to determine its customers' likelihood to recommend Telus and wanted every employee to be privy to customer insights and "likelihood to recommend" results on its Intranet landing page. Further, Telus shares customer comments on the same page and encourages employees to read them.
Insights Lead to Results
Being closer to customers has helped Telus make remarkable improvements in its customers' likelihood to recommend the company. According to Borghesi, Telus has registered a 15% year-over-year improvement when compared to its competitors, something she described as a "huge result" when considering the effort needed to improve this key metric.
Borghesi also points toward an "enormous improvement" in employee engagement, specifically employees' likelihood to recommend the company. "We realized that [customer satisfaction and employee engagement] move together. As employee engagement improves, so does the customer experience. And as we work to improve customer experience, in turn we're improving employee engagement," Borghesi says.
Telus believes that it achieved these results because every employee is living and breathing the Customers First strategy. "We've turned up the volume in listening to customers and in doing so have focused on dissatisfaction, which is where customers were experiencing pain." For example, Telus was aware that the repair experience has been traditionally problematic for the wireless industry. "People are giving a lot of importance to their smartphones and if something goes wrong with their phones, they can barely live without them," Borghesi says. However, the organization didn't have a great track record in delivering a seamless repair experience. By drilling down into customer insights and recognizing the need to improve the repair experience, Telus has reduced overall dissatisfaction by 50% in less than two years. "We've taken listening to customers and paying attention to voice-of-the-customer to heart and are channeling our attention to what customers are telling us."
Prioritizing the Mobile Experience
The next step in Telus' Customers First strategy was to be mobile-savvy and integrate mobile service within the overall service strategy. Customers are increasingly interacting with companies over their smartphones and Telus knew that it needed to focus on giving its customers the ability to seamlessly interact via mobile. "If something goes awry when interacting with an account via smartphone, customers need a seamless way to access a contact center agent," says Borghesi.
The result of this goal was the Mobile First strategy, which focuses on facilitating customers' need to self-serve over their smartphones. According to Borghesi, Telus' mobile strategy has been a success. Not only has customer feedback been positive, but the organization has seen deflection in contact center calls. This win-win-win situation means that customers are happy because they're getting their issues resolved without having to contact Telus, the company is saving money, and employees are satisfied because they can focus on more complicated issues which require greater attention.
According to Borghesi this is the way forward for organizations which need to focus on making transactions simple so that customers can serve themselves. But first, business leaders need to put their ears to the ground and listen to what their customers are saying before taking action. Sometimes they will be surprised by what they learn.
This article was originally published in 1to1Magazine in July by 1to1Media, who has granted Off Center permission to use it here. The article, originally titled “Telus Focuses on Customer Experience”, was written by 1to1Media’s Senior Writer Cynthia Clark.
Note from Greg Levin of Off Center: This month’s “Contact Centerfold” feature comes courtesy of guest writer Sherry Leonard, President of contact center outsourcer CaLLogix. Sherry shares how her organization has greatly enhanced agent engagement and performance via a comprehensive wellness program that’s focused on much more than just employee health.
If I hadn’t experienced it, I wouldn’t have believed our wellness program could reduce attrition by 50% and absenteeism by 80% while cutting our insurance premium increase and improving our overall company performance.
These fantastic results are exactly what we experienced over a recent nine-month period. As President of CaLLogix, a lean contact center company headquartered in New Hampshire (an expensive geographic area for a contact center), my focus is on being highly responsive to our clients’ changing requirements, delivering exceptional service and managing a profitable company.
Attrition, absenteeism and rising health care costs negatively impact our service and bottom line. Our ability to provide superior service depends on our staff being ready to take the important calls coming into our center.
When 15 people are absent on a single day in a 200 person contact center, we have to scramble to cover the calls those 15 people would have taken. Prior to implementing our Consciousness @ CaLLogix wellness program, we averaged 15 absences each day. Today we average two. As you can imagine, that’s much easier to manage.
A More Conscious Contact Center
We initially designed the Consciousness @ CaLLogix program to address a few big challenges for our agents: Smoking cessation, weight loss, and stress reduction. Our goal was to enable our agents to be healthier and happier by helping them to quit smoking, to eat healthier, and to better manage the stress they face in their personal and professional lives. Healthier and happier agents are better able to serve our customers. Not only has our wellness program increased the health of our employees, it has solved some of our key management issues.
Following are some of the key components (and partners) of the program:
Smoking Cessation. We offer this course twice a year through Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. More than half of the program participants stopped smoking initially, and many are still smoke free one year later.
Stress Reduction. This program, provided by Conscious Success LLC, teaches agents how to quickly reduce stress through easy-to-use mindfulness techniques, which can be used at any time to immediately calm the nervous system and increase effectiveness in the present moment.
Monday Minute. A weekly newsletter featuring monthly stress management themes and providing techniques to reduce stress – posted on our internal site. Examples of past monthly themes include: Managing Holiday Stress, Focusing Your Attention, 4 Keys to Easily Accomplishing More and Enjoying Yourself, and Navigating Change.
Success Matters Webcasts. Conscious Success offers a monthly webcast in which the monthly Monday Minute theme and stress reduction techniques are discussed and questions are answered.
Meditations. We hold brief stress reduction meditations a few times a week using recordings provided by Harvard Pilgrim and Conscious Success.
Program for Leaders. We used Conscious Success’ Emotional Intelligence for Leaders program, which focuses on reducing negative thought patterns and stress that effect leadership and management abilities. We conducted a 360° assessment of each supervisor’s emotional and social intelligence. The supervisors receive comprehensive coaching on the results to help them further develop their emotional and social intelligence competencies.
Healthy Eating. We run this program internally with the aim of making lasting improvements to agents’ eating habits and energy levels. Examples of program features include:
· Healthy Recipes.In celebration of National Nutrition Month, we researched and posted a week’s
worth of healthy recipes and healthy dietary guidelines and tips on our internal website.
· Healthy Start.To encourage a healthy start to the day each morning during Customer Service
Week, we offered a snack of apples and peanut butter, granola bars, yogurt or orange juice.
· Happy Healthy Day. On Valentine’s Day, we introduced agents to the delicious health benefits of
oranges and dark chocolate.
Awaken Your Inner Radiance book. We bought this book for our supervisors and administrative staff to help them learn how to reduce negative thought patterns and live a more healthy life.
Summer BBQ. This is a fun and relaxing outdoor lunch that helps to foster a sense of camaraderie and team among agents.
Theme Days. For additional fun and motivation, we hold frequent themed events in the contact center. Recent example include: 50’s Day; Red Sox Day; Ugly Sweater Day; Hat Day and Super Hero Day.
Customer Service Week. Many of the aforementioned programs are offered during National Customer Service Week (the first week of October each year). Our most recent Customer Service Week theme was “Refresh. Recharge. Reconnect.” During this week we offered such things as a Healthy Start “Souper Heroes” soup and sandwich lunch, fun and educational puzzles each morning, blood pressure screenings, smoking cessation programs, flu shots and office yoga classes. In addition, supervisors wrote agent compliments on paper leaves that we then hung from big paper trees on the walls.
+500 STEP CHALLENGE. A few times a year we give pedometers to all agents and encourage them to log the number of steps they take each day. Each time we offer this challenge we get greater participation. In addition, many agents participate in our walking club, which meets three days a week during lunch. Our agents are now aware of the number of steps they take each day and have become more active. During Customer Service Week, we have a 24-hour step challenge which gets the whole office moving.
Snowfly Program. Agents who consistently meet or exceed goals in key areas – such as attendance, call quality and up-selling – receive Snowfly tokens that they can redeem for cash and other terrific rewards. Agents can also earn Snowfly tokens for active participation in key programs and initiatives. Examples include the center’s walking program, peer mentoring program and the wellness program’s kick-off survey.
We fully believe in walking our talk. Our management team participates in the Consciousness @ CaLLogix wellness program, dresses up for theme days and creates much of the content for our employees. We also celebrate our achievements with our staff. For instance, in honor of our sixth anniversary as a company, we gave each employee a chocolate dipped strawberry, a glass of sparkling cider and a note thanking them for their commitment and outstanding support in fulfilling our promise to our clients and their customers.
Wellness Improves Reps, Revenues and Customer Experience
The wellness program has brought the following notable results:
· Employees are more likely to quit smoking for good and eat healthier once they’ve participated in the Conscious Success program.
· Each time we offer the +500 Step Challenge participation has grown and the group has become very competitive. Now, during 10-minute breaks on rainy days, we see groups of employees walking the halls rather than sitting in the break room.
· The number of employees asking for meditation breaks has grown and attendance keeps rising in these sessions.
But the most notable result is that the company saved $380,000 during the first year of the program – that equates to $2,000 per employee! Further, we haven't had to conduct our usual monthly new hire training in the past 8 months due to big reductions in turnover.
The wellness program has greatly improved our bottom line, our employee health and engagement, and not least of all, the customer experience.
Everybody is talking about “social customer care”, but few companies are able to provide specific examples of how they’ve embraced social media to improve customer service and sentiment.
Don’t lump Lenovo in with those merely talking the talk. When it comes to social customer care, the personal technology giant is most certainly walking the walk.
I recently interviewed Lenovo’s Community Manager, Mark Hopkins, and posed a host of questions regarding the company’s social customer care strategies and practices. Read on to see his comprehensive and insightful responses.
Does Lenovo monitor conversations about the brand on social sites across the web?
Yes, we monitor broadly across the web, and consider multiple types of social content – whether on Twitter, blogs, discussion forums or our Facebook pages. Content matters regardless of venue, however customer behavior and participation dynamics can and do vary by channel.
How does Lenovo track the hottest discussion topics and use that info to make product/service improvements?
Tracking and trending hot topics broadly helps us guide our focus on the issues that matter most. Discussion forums are particularly valuable in bringing multiple customers together to share information, opinions and experiences related common issues.
The Lenovo discussion forums – available in English, Spanish and German – are strategic in this regard. Through them we are able to recognize important issues and better understand those issues to help us improve our products and services. Many of these interactions lead to updates delivered via software downloads, such as updated drivers, basic input/output system (BIOS) and software features. Some lead to changes in PC hardware, or changes to design and test specifications for future products.
For example, we heard from the community how important our automated update application – ThinkVantage System Update – is to our customers. Knowing that, we made a strategic course change to continue it. Most recently, we entered the tablet market with several new products and discussions of these Android based devices have been particularly helpful in understanding the customer experience and improvements via over the air updates.
In what ways does Lenovo interact/engage with individual social customers to answer their questions and address their issues and complaints?
We’re focused primarily on enabling peer-to-peer support by encouraging our most knowledgeable, helpful and prolific contributors to build knowledge that can be shared with other social networks. Since we deployed the knowledgebase feature in 2010, the community has built nearly 2,000 articles and more than 12,000 discussions have been identified with a proven solution. We also receive feedback from individual customers, and we prioritize our efforts to address these opportunities.
Please discuss Lenovo’s use of blogs, tutorials and other useful content on social sites to keep customers informed and to proactively address common issues.
Lenovo blogs feature commentary on upcoming technologies, design innovation, event news and highlight new products and services that are available. Through the blogs, and increasingly our Facebook Wall, we solicit customer feedback. Sometimes it is in general terms about which features customers love, or love to hate, and sometimes it is in structured ways that collect results that we incorporate into products. Some examples include putting stripes back on the ThinkPad trackpoint buttons and introducing a BIOS feature to allow Function (FN) and Control (Ctrl) keys to be swapped.
How long has your online user community been in place, and how active is it?
The community launched in December 2007 as a worldwide English site. We added German and Spanish communities in 2010 along with the integrated knowledgebase and integrations with Facebook and Twitter.
The community has grown quickly with more than 120,000 users registered. It’s important to note that interactions from those just browsing can often be 100 times that of those who log in to post, so considering this, the effective audience is likely above one million users. We believe good content and a rewarding experience attracts the best members, and we recognize and empower some of our most trusted members to help us manage the community by serving as volunteer moderators. As with most communities, content contribution is often highly disproportionate to the user base. We’ve found that over the past three years, slightly more than 40% of the proven solutions have come from a highly engaged core group of approximately 30 members.
We’ve recently started to run special events in the community. These are short duration (a week or less) events where a panel of experts lead a discussion and answer customer questions about new technologies, our products or common customer needs. In November we brought together a panel of experts to talk about malware and security and to field questions on everything from smart phone vulnerability to whether it’s beneficial to have more than one anti-virus package on a PC.
What impact, if any, has the online community had on call volumes and the bottom line in your contact center?
The community, along with other online support initiatives, provides an alternate source of solutions instead of calling a contact center. The volumes of calls we’ve received relative to our rapidly growing market share have been declining by about 20% the first year after the community launched. While this metric flattens out, the overall trends are encouraging.
Communities allow a company to move beyond one-to-one support delivery mechanisms like chat and phone and shift to “many-to-many” support formats by drawing upon community experts as well as company support resources to provide answers that have a long shelf life in the community and pay dividends through the power of Internet search.
While this is considered call deflection, people have an opportunity to preempt the need to call Lenovo entirely by leveraging the community to identify and escalate issues faster than they would otherwise bubble up from the contact center or the field as a coherent and actionable issue. Over the past year, we’ve dedicated resources to this effort and have reduced the cycle time to resolve issues escalated from the forums by an average of 60%.
How involved is your contact center with Lenovo’s social customer care strategy? Do they “own” it, or is social customer care more the responsibility of your Marketing or other dept.?
Today, social support and our community teams reside within our service organization, however they aren’t owned by the contact centers. Our social marketing teams are an important resource in growing our engaged audience with a clear focus on our brand. Opportunities for social support scale along with this.
As for our traditional contact centers, we see a natural convergence over time. It’s an opportunity to involve senior support agents working collaboratively with our customers to arrive at a solution and have that become a part of the community rather than hidden in an internal database. We want to make this a resource for all support agents along with the formal knowledge available through support site. We also see synergy with agents becoming more active in the social space as customers begin to shift their own preference from voice to electronic interactions. Consider how many people use their smartphone for voice alone versus other interactions like texting or tweeting.
What special social media management solutions/tools does Lenovo have in place? (For monitoring, interacting, posting, etc.)
Over the years we’ve used multiple paid tools and many free tools. None seem to do everything perfectly, which is probably why there is a marketplace of perhaps 200+ competing tools. Today our marketing and services social media teams use several monitoring tools as well as others that help co-ordinate responses on Twitter and Facebook. We continue to evaluate the capability of multiple tools/platforms and look for opportunities to coordinate our support efforts across multiple teams, business functions, social networks and languages.
What would you say are the biggest challenges involved in implementing and managing a solid social customer care strategy? What has Lenovo done to overcome/minimize such challenges?
There are several challenges as social support becomes increasingly mainstream. As the volume of customer requests grows, companies need a scalable strategy. A community platform, especially with Twitter and other networks integrated, helps in enabling many to many support collaboration and in providing persistence of content and accessibility to the big search engines. This allows every successful support engagement to build knowledge equity that can potentially offset future requests.
Another challenge is language – providing social support in the languages that support your customers. For example, monthly community traffic from Germany has grown 250% since the German community launched. Certainly, many Germans were already interacting in English, but providing native language support accelerated use in a dramatic manner.
Customer expectations of social support have changed dramatically over the past five years. In 2006 or 2007, customers were pleasantly surprised if a company replied to a post on their personal blog and offered support. The mainstream adoption of Twitter, Facebook and smartphones have enabled customers to post about their experiences in real time. This presents a growing challenge to not only engage, but to manage these to a successful outcome. Back end processes, resources and logistics all must accelerate to support the new speed of social – this is a transformation in progress.
What are the biggest benefits of social customer care?
Immediate visibility to emerging concerns – especially those shared by multiple customers – provides an opportunity to address issues earlier, thus reducing total support costs and providing a better customer experience. Demonstrating the brand in action – how a company responds to support issues – is important and when done well, can be a differentiator.
How do you see social customer care evolving?
Social support is becoming increasingly mainstream and a community-centric strategy scales better than one based solely on dedicated direct engagement by contact center resources, especially for companies with complex consumer product portfolios. Facebook and Twitter are dominant today, but other social networks may be more relevant for certain customer segments or geographical regions. Social tools that allow collaboration and preserve content and reputation equity will be the long term winners. There can be opportunities for support collaboration across business relationships where there is a mutual customer. Likely scenarios could be complex consumer goods companies and big box store / online distributors, or points where multiple companies are working together to deliver a solution – hardware and software vendors or phone handset-makers and wireless carriers. A current example of this collaborative intersection is Microsoft outreach teams and MVPs engaging in PC manufacturer communities as well as Microsoft hosted communities to provide support for mutual customers who have operating system questions.
If somebody were to hand you a copy of informedRx’s organizational chart, you might think that you were holding it upside-down. After all, who ever heard of a contact center organization positioning its agents at the top?
Well, informedRx, for one.
“Without them, there is no us,” says Kelli Barabasz, Senior Manager of Customer Care for informedRx, a leading provider of pharmacy benefit management (PBM) solutions. “[Agents] are the frontline for our members, pharmacies, doctors, and clients. Imagine having two call centers, a director, senior managers, managers, supervisors, team leads, an escalation team… and no agents. How successful would the call center be? The easy answer is there would not be a call center any longer.”
Placing agents at the top of the org chart is much more than just a symbolic move or a publicity play. InformedRx backs its org chart model up with employee-centric action – implementing programs and practices that foster a true culture of agent empowerment and engagement.
The payoff for such employee-centricity? How about an agent turnover rate that’s been slashed in half – dropping from 54% in 2008 to 27% today.
A Finned Philosophy Has Agents Hooked
You might say there’s something fishy about how informedRx keeps its agents inspired and in place.
The agents wouldn’t have it any other way.
The contact center firmly embraces the famed Fish! philosophy, which comprises four simple, interconnected concepts and practices:
· Be There – being emotionally present to improve communication and strengthen relationships.
· Play – bringing a spirit of creativity, enthusiasm and fun to everything you do.
· Make Their Day – serving or delighting people in meaningful and memorable ways.
· Choose Your Attitude – taking responsibility for how you respond to challenges and how that
impacts everyone around you.
Of course, a company can’t just command employees to embody the Fish! philosophy; managers have to live it and let employees see its powerful effects. At informedRx, it’s incorporated into everything from agent selection and development to incentives and facility design.
“To our company, the Fish! Philosophy is not just an engagement tool – it’s a way of life,” says Barabasz. “The philosophy can be embraced in many aspects in and out of work.”
So how exactly does Fish! fit into the contact center? According to Barabasz, it starts with hiring candidates who not only have the skills and knowledge for the job, but who also have the right attitude and personality to thrive in a highly team-oriented and customer-centric environment. “We make sure they are a great fit for the work they will be doing and the people they will be working with.”
There’s plenty of Fish! in agent training, too, says Barabasz. “We create a playful business atmosphere right off the bat with our training classes.” In both initial and continuous training, agents acquire key skills and knowledge via a variety of compelling learning tactics such as role-plays, games and shadowing. Agents also see early on that leadership is “there” for them. “Within the first two days of each training class, it is required for all leadership to introduce themselves to the new team,” Barabasz explains. Throughout training, they are encouraged to stop in when they walk by even if they only have time to say hi. This shows the new team members that we are here, and here for them. It relaxes them and gives them the family feel that we promote within the call center.”
The “Make Their Day” aspect of the Fish! philosophy is highly evident in informedRx’s rewards and recognition programs. Agents who exceed objectives or show notable improvement in key areas (like Quality, Hold Time and Attendance), or who go “above and beyond” with a customer or colleague, receive plenty of public praise as well as prizes likes Fish! trophies, award certificates, gift cards and tokens that can be redeemed for merchandise in the SXC store. Some top-performers have even been rewarded with a TV or an iPod.
Fish! may seem simple on paper, but as Barabasz points out, it requires a lot of effort from management for notable increases in agent engagement and commitment to occur.
“Anyone can read Fish!, show the videos and wait for results, but the philosophy has to be embraced and change has to take place in order to have success. Our leadership team spent months behind closed doors reading and talking about Fish! in order to have a clear understanding of it. If you do not truly believe in something, then how can you expect others to?”
Agent Engagement Begets Customer Sat
With leadership working so hard to “be there” for agents and “make their day”, it’s no surprise that informedRx’s agents aim to do the same for customers. And judging by the contact center’s average C-Sat rate of 88%, the agents have succeeded.
“The impact [on customer satisfaction] is huge!” says Barabasz. “In order to have happy customers, you have to have engaged and happy employees on the other end of the phone.”
Despite it’s consistently high C-Sat results, the center hasn’t become complacent. Managers continue to carefully analyze scores and comments from customer surveys to help identify training gaps and ensure that a high level of service is provided.
“It’s easy to lose focus on the positive things you are doing and let them slip away, and then you see your C-Sat scores fall. We look at the results to formulate a game plan to improve on the lower scores while continuing to focus [on the things that drive] the higher ones.”
informedRx – the Big Picture:
Location: Lisle, Ill, & Scottsdale, Ariz
Hours of operation: 24/7/365
Number of agents: 200-300 (depending on time of year)
Products/services provided/supported: Pharmacy benefit management (PBM) support for members, pharmacies, and doctors.
Channels handled: Live phone, IVR, email, web self-service
What’s so great about them? The contact center strongly embraces the famed Fish! Philosophy to drive agent engagement sky high and deliver stellar customer experiences.
_ A few years ago, the North Texas Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA) made a strategic decision to put its money where its mission statement was – implementing a dynamic “Voice of the Customer” (VoC) initiative that has since had a Texas-sized impact on agent performance, customer satisfaction and the company’s bottom line.
“[We wanted to] synchronize with customers and measure performance through their eyes,” says John Bannerman, Assistant Director of the NTTA’s Contact Center. “Our goal was to transform our culture to fully embrace our mission statement in becoming a truly customer-centric organization. It has become more than a mission statement to us – it is the way we treat our customers and each other.”
Turning Customers into Coaches
The key component driving the NTTA’s VoC initiative is a unique and potent customer experience/performance management solution called Customer Driven Management (CDM), developed by Tamer Partners Corporation (www.tamerpartners.com). Using this new tool, the contact center is able to cleanly capture and analyze detailed customer feedback across all contact channels right after an interaction, thus arming the NTTA with timely employee-specific scores and commentary that can be used to continuously improve performance.
Here’s how it works: Following an interaction with one of the NTTA’s agents, the customer receives an email asking them to provide “advice” to the agent about service they provided. The customer clicks on a link to access the survey, which features questions about things like the agent’s skills/knowledge, courtesy/professionalism and ability to efficiently resolve the issue at hand. But this is not your everyday generic customer satisfaction survey application. What sets CDM apart is its customization; the NTTA is able to create “Individual Action Surveys” that ask for customer feedback on particular areas that each agent is working on.
In essence, CDM has turned the NTTA’s customers into coaches, says Bannerman.
“CDM not only provides feedback directly to the service representative from the customer; it also adapts to the unique skills of each representative and seeks feedback from each customer to directly guide the employee on their specific opportunities for improvement. Our customers are now directly coaching employees on all areas of improvement including listening skills, empathy, call control and energy, to name a few.”
The NTTA has programmed the CDM system to provide alerts whenever a customer scores an agent either very high or very low, thus enabling supervisors to identify issues as they arise as well as to praise/recognize agents whenever they receive accolades.
CDM stores all customer responses including scores/ratings, yes/no responses, and text comments. The NTTA’s supervisors and managers can view and report on all surveys and responses for their team. Each of the center’s agents has access to their personal feedback in the CDM system, as well.
Lower Headcount, Higher Performance on the Frontline
The NTTA hasn’t handed its entire QA function over to its customers. The contact center’s internal quality monitoring staff still evaluate recorded calls to ensure that agents are providing accurate information and complying with established policies and procedures.
Still and all, Bannerman says that efficacy of the CDM solution has eliminated the need to hire four additional frontline managers. He adds that the supervisor-to-agent ratio has increased from 1:12 to 1:17 without sacrificing the level of coaching/support.
Of course, the VoC initiative isn’t all about managerial headcount reduction; it’s about providing a forever better level of service. Since implementing the initiative, the NTTA has seen agents’ quality and productivity results improve significantly. “We’ve found that the best opportunity for frontline change was putting our customers in charge,” says Bannerman. He points out that CDM scores and feedback are used not only during quality monitoring coaching sessions but also in annual agent evaluations and action plans. As much as 50% of the feedback during an agent’s annual review comes directly from customers. “Customers are effectively managing the quality of their future service experience by coaching and developing employees to meet their needs and expectations.”
And that’s just fine by the employees, Bannerman says.
“Agents love the VoC initiative, particularly CDM. They get far more [positive] feedback from customers than a supervisor would have time to provide for their entire team on a daily basis. This provides encouragement and motivation [for agents] to continue doing things well, and makes them more willing to accept suggestions for improvement.”
It also apparently makes them want to stick around longer.
“As a result of consistent positive feedback from customers, our attrition rate is 12% annually, which by contact center standards is very low.”
NTTA – the Big Picture:
Location: Plano, TX
Hours of operation: Mon-Fri 7am-7pm; Sat 9am-5:30pm
Number of agents: 152
Products/services provided/supported: Account maintenance, toll tag acquisition and general customer service
Channels handled: Phone, IVR, email, web self-service, and store front
What’s so great about them? They’ve vastly improved agent performance, the customer experience and the bottom line via a highly dynamic “Voice of the Customer” initiative.
While waiting for a live agent, callers on hold can become easily frustrated. At FirstEnergy, callers on hold simply get on with their lives.
Thanks to its strategic use of “virtual queuing”, which enables customers to request a callback without losing their place in the phone queue during the call center’s busy periods, FirstEnergy has managed to enhance service levels and the customer experience while lowering operational costs and improving agent morale.
“We implemented Virtual Hold in our multiple locations back in mid-2008,” says John Falvy, FirstEnergy’s Director of Contact Center Operations. “We just felt that at times, especially during peak periods like Monday mornings, some of our customers were waiting in queue way too long. Increasing customer satisfaction was our primary goal.”
Soon after implementing the virtual queuing solution, FirstEnergy followed up with customers to gauge their opinion of the new service option. A sampling of the results included:
· The vast majority of customers surveyed believed that FirstEnergy should continue to offer the virtual queuing solution. Moreover, 75% of customers who used it had a more favorable opinion of FirstEnergy because of the virtual queuing.
· Customers who used the virtual queuing option were more satisfied with their contact experience than those who waited on hold.
· The median wait time virtual queuing users found “unacceptable” was 20 minutes, compared to just 10 minutes for those staying on hold.
Virtual Queuing Success Driven by Solid Planning & Processes
FirstEnergy’s success with the Virtual Hold solution required careful planning, proper implementation, daily testing/monitoring of the system, and a solid understanding of the art and science of call center workforce management, says Falvy.
“It’s just one tool among many in the call management toolkit. It’s a vital tool, but you also have to have good forecasting and scheduling systems [and processes] in place, as well as some other enabling technologies in order to augment what Virtual Hold offers.”
In other words, call centers that invest in virtual queuing expecting it to automatically solve all their call-handling and on-hold headaches are going to be disappointed – as will their customers.
But for companies like FirstEnergy that already do an impressive job of calculating call volume and staffing accordingly to ensure that service level objectives are met, virtual queuing can be a helpful solution.
One of the keys, according to Falvy, is to not become overly reliant on the system. “Generally speaking, we offer Virtual Hold if the wait time for the customer is greater than 120 seconds. It doesn’t make sense to offer [callbacks] if you are already achieving a 30-second average speed of answer.”
Falvy adds that it doesn’t make sense to use virtual queuing at all in the midst of a particularly dramatic spike in call volume, such as during a widespread power outage. “We don’t offer it on outage- or emergency-related calls. During a very large outage, we can get 30,000 calls in a half hour. We just don’t have the port capacity for that.” Instead, the center provides information about power outages (including areas affected, estimated time to recovery, etc.) via its IVR system. Such proactive messaging keeps affected customers in the loop and virtually eliminates their need to speak to a live rep.
On average, a little over 50% of FirstEnergy callers who are offered the option of being called back rather than waiting on hold accept the offer. “We’re generally in the 52%-54% range, and we’re seeing it get more accepted,” says Falvy.
Enamored Agents and a Bolstered Bottom Line
Because of its ability to reduce the number of customer complaints, the call center agents have grown to appreciate virtual queuing.
“Customers can become irate if they have to hold for a significant amount of time,” Falvy explains. “The agent must then diffuse the customer right off the bat.”
That can take a big toll on agent motivation and morale. But now that far fewer FirstEnergy customers enter a call feeling like they’ve just had precious minutes taken from their lives, agents receive far fewer verbal complaints.
“Customers [who opt for a callback] are not nearly as annoyed or angry,” says Erin Badger, an agent at FirstEnergy’s call center in Akron, Ohio. “They have had time to focus on something other than waiting.”
Of course, cutting down on customer rants also helps to reduce call handle times. That’s not a bad combination – higher customer satisfaction AND lower costs.
"We used to hear complaints on how long people had to wait on hold,” says Megan Engleman, Senior Customer Service Associate at FirstEnergy’s call center in, Reading, Pa. “Now we hear compliments on how nice it is to have the service."
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FirstEnergy – the Big Picture:
Location: Akron, Ohio; Toledo, Ohio; Reading, Pennsylvania; Fairmont, West Virginia
Hours of operation: 24/7 for emergency and 911; 8 am to 6 pm for all other customer service contacts
Number of agents: Over 600
Products/services provided/supported: Start/end electric service, outage reports/questions, emergency/911, billing/payments, credit, and new construction
Channels handled: Phone, IVR, email, web self-service
What’s so great about them? The call center has greatly enhanced the customer (and agent) experience while reducing operational costs via virtual queuing.
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