example of Impact - OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY / EFFECTIVENESS
Strengthening a call center operationdetails
Client background and situation:
Contact center for mortgage division
Contact center for mortgage division
Struggling to achieve performance excellence across three critical areas - customer experience, revenue maximization and cost optimization while not increasing agent count
Struggling to achieve performance excellence across three critical areas - customer experience, cost optimization and revenue maximization while not increasing agent count
THe past
Prior approach & challenges:
Both employee and customer satisfaction were declining and division was not meeting its targets for new applications
Top agents were leaving and overall attrition was higher than expected which was problematic since training a new agent cost around $12-15K when factoring in recruiting costs, lost productivity before fully standalone and direct training fees
Both employee and customer satisfaction were declining and division was not meeting its targets for new applications
Top agents were leaving and overall attrition was higher than expected which was problematic since training a new agent cost around $12-15K when factoring in recruiting costs, lost productivity before fully standalone and direct training fees
solutions
Coppertree Partners approach:
developed end-to-end current view
Led effort to map all key interaction points of customers with the contact center – brought together disparate groups within the organization and conducted interviews and surveys. Analyzed call logs and other data to determine reasons for customer calls and level of resolution achieved especially on the first call
made the case for change
Improved framing and messaging around importance of contact center work and impact on people’s lives if they can secure a mortgage
strengthend internal capabilities and sense of purpose
Refined training to be more targeted around handling inquiries driving repeat calls and low satisfaction; identified most productive and satisfied agents and included them in working groups on initiatives to improve morale with more celebrations of success and streamlined huddles that shared best practices; clarified career path within the contact center for progression from agent to manager
improved customer Experience
Improved self-help options on website and used email and agent interactions to increase awareness
Impact:
- 20% increase in sales
- 15% drop in employee attrition rate
- 15% drop in call volume across targeted call types where more self-help was developed
Additional insights and takeaways
Contact center agents must believe in the mission and purpose. If they don’t it will be reflected in how they interact with customers. Once they are bought-in, there are many tools and resources to help them be more effective. Digital-care capabilities have proliferated and help enhance the customer experience such as interactive voice response (IVR) which is fueled by natural language processing (NLP), behavioral routing, robotics to handle simple requests, and web/mobile options. Successful companies will steer more customers towards self-service and digital channels freeing up agents to tackle more complex and challenging calls. These complex interactions have high potential value with opportunities to cross-sell/up-sell. Artificial intelligence can provide a competitive advantage by segmenting customers and providing individualized insights and recommendations to agents at the time of interaction. This requires properly aggregating large amounts of data from various channels and then developing actions based on the analytical insights. Data lakes have become more common to house all data (agents, customers, etc.). The human element will remain critical including proper coaching, feedback and training of teams with a relentless focus on keeping motivation high.
Get In Touch
917-727-6345