Executive Summary
When a company is busy providing quality customer service day in and day out, it can be difficult to find the manpower for a special project within the contact center. A 54-year old direct marketing catalog company wanted to learn more about the time its agents spent on specific portions of customer calls. When calls were evaluated and timed by an objective, third party team, the company was able to judge the success of its upsell and cross-sell programs, as well as determine the profitability of special promotions and offers. This in turn led to a revamped upsell program and improvements in talk times. The company received powerful proof that with the right partner, special projects can be completed – and superior customer service can be maintained – with little additional cost or effort.
Call Monitoring is one of the best - and least expensive - ways to improve any contact center, and a great way to check each calls’ details
In the pursuit of better customer service which helps retain and acquire customers, driving business growth, contact center managers agree that call monitoring is a vital part of a quality assurance program. Using a third party resource to objectively
monitor those calls allows center managers to focus on training and coaching, and enables more calls to be monitored and
evaluated. In addition to the usual quality issues, call monitoring can be broken down to evaluate the different parts of
each phone call.
A leading national catalog and online retailer contracted with Seattle-based HyperQuality, Inc., to conduct agent evaluations in its contact centers. Since HyperQuality was already monitoring and evaluating calls, it was cost effective to use the
HyperQuality monitoring service to track individual call components. In addition to reports and follow-up, the company also
received clear data on specific portions of calls, in order to better understand the ROI on various promotions.
Company Background
This national catalog and online retailer’s operations include 100-150 full and part-time phone agents year round. During its peak time - the holiday season from before Halloween through the end of January - the call center staff spikes to 1,000-1,500 agents. The company outsources approximately 30% of its call volume to a third-party vendor with staff overseas and in the United States. Most of the calls to the company’s 800-number are to place orders or to check on the status of previously placed orders. On average, the calls run in length from 7 to 10 minutes.
The challenge: find out how much time was being spent on the different segments of each phone call—in order to determine ROI.
As a matter of policy, a portion of every phone call to the company’s contact center is devoted to offering promotions or upsells to customers. Some of these offers are for company products or services, but periodically the company partners with a third party and offers that company’s product or service to its customers. For example, one of the company’s partners offers magazine subscriptions. Rightfully so, the catalog company’s management wanted to know how much time was being spent on these offers and whether the arrangement was profitable. In addition, management wanted to gauge customer attitudes toward these offers, and subsequently address any customer dissatisfaction.
In order to assess the contact center’s investment in offers and promotions, managers wanted to track the portion of each call devoted to upsells and promotions. The existing call management system tracked the total time of each call, but it could not track the duration of specific portions of each call. Specifically, management wanted to track the duration of:
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Call Opening (the time needed to locate a customer’s account/order) |
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Main Presentation |
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Promotions/Offers |
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Order Confirmation (including the time needed to personalize a product, if necessary) |
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Upsell Offers |
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Once the times were calculated, the time needed to make various offers and/or personalize an order was converted into labor costs and compared to the revenue generated from these efforts. The ultimate goal was to better understand the ROI, if any, from making additional offers.
In addition, company managers wanted to get feedback on customers that seemed irritated by additional offers. While there is no tangible data to measure the irritation factor, the company wanted feedback in order to make a judgment on the relative worth of the additional offers. Since the success of the company’s business depends on return customers - as virtually all businesses do - the company felt it was important to ensure they were not annoying customers with third-party offers. What they needed was someone objective to be an unbiased observers for these transactions and to escalate negative situations for successful resolution.
The company tests HyperQuality - and quickly gets the information it needs.
The company considered attempting to measure the duration of call portions internally, but it was quickly apparent that this would be cost-prohibitive. They simply did not have the manpower nor the technology to capture this information on a regular basis. It was clear that to achieve ROI for the this audit, the retailer would need HyperQuality.
HyperQuality quickly and easily built the time measurement function into the call monitoring and evaluations it was already performing for the company. In the first test, HyperQuality’s consultants took a sample of 200 calls and captured the time taken by agents on every call portion.
Detailed results right away…delivered by HyperQuality.
HyperQuality’s survey of phone calls revealed that for the in-house contact center, 14% of each phone call’s time was spent offering internal promotions and upsells, while 6% of each phone call’s time was devoted to third party offers. The detailed time study analysis is shown below:
With HyperQuality, the company was able to pose a question and get the data it needed quickly and easily. This allowed the company to use real facts and evidence to perform ROI analysis and evaluate the success of offers and promotions.
Based on the information it received, the company implemented a variety of changes in its upsell programs, including reducing some of its upsell offers and eliminating all of its third party offers. In addition, the company tightened up its scripting by revising the scripts for delivery times and call closings. With these changes, the company was able to realize a savings of 30-45 seconds on average talk time, a significant cost-savings.
The power of call center monitoring
This direct marketing/catalog company understands the importance of customer service in today’s competitive marketplace, and has partnered with HyperQuality to monitor its customer service and provide feedback to agents and managers. In addition, HyperQuality’s consultants are able to respond to additional requests for data or research to help address specific needs as they arise. Together, they use the power of contact center monitoring on a daily basis to keep customers happy — and keep an eye on the bottom line.
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