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A primary factor in the success of a leading electricity and natural gas company is the energy the company puts into its customer service operations - particularly its customer care and credit contact centers. When residential customers call the energy company, they expect to talk to knowledgeable and resourceful people who can answer their questions and solve their problems. It’s not always easy, yet the approximately 600 center representatives are trained to maintain grace under fire, while they field tough questions or deal with the occasionally disgruntled consumer.
In order to maintain its high level of contact center quality, the company has also put substantial energy and resources into its call monitoring efforts. It’s a proven concept: by listening in on selected calls, the performance of agents can be evaluated and, ultimately, improved.
However, there was a slight short circuit in the company’s call monitoring program, as team leaders were monitoring residential customer calls themselves. This time-consuming task not only interfered with their primary duties of coaching and helping agents improve their performance, it also raised the potential conflict of interest. There was some thought given to the idea of using the company’s internal Quality Assurance group to implement a new solution, but that was quickly dismissed due to an undermanned staff.
Consequently, company executives decided to maintain the QA function internally but to outsource the actual call monitoring and evaluation function. The Quality Assurance Team rolled out the program in three phases:
First, it developed a new evaluation form that identified and weighted various attributes; agents would be evaluated on interaction and relationship with customers; whether they properly applied company policies, processes and procedures; and how they handled the actual calls.
Next, the team selected HyperQuality to perform the actual evaluations. The Seattle-based quality assurance evaluation company is one of the leading providers of quality services and solutions.
In the final phase of the effort, team leaders received training on using HyperQuality’s HyperQuality's performance and workflow management SaaS solution, a Web-based reporting system that provides an array of call-evaluation details, current scores and historical data.
Ultimately, the partnership with HyperQuality was expected to have a significiant ROI. Other companies had achieved a 6-12x ROI when working with HyperQuality, and the energy company wanted similar results. Besides freeing up team leaders to perform their primary responsibilities, it was expected that the quality monitoring and evaluation initiative would boost agent productivity, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce errors, as well as provide a deeper understanding of performance through advanced transactional analysis. The program was also intended to enable real-time analysis of performance and functions as a key metric for strategic planning, increasing training effectiveness, and reducing operational cost.
Making Complaints Disappear
Perhaps the most desirable program outcome was to “get it right” the first time. According to one of the company’s representatives, “We wanted to help our representatives eliminate errors and move towards improving key performance indicators. In the long run, we hoped to increase customer satisfaction, and reduce errors and the need for customers to call back a second time. This would also contribute toward our larger goal of reducing complaints.” Reducing errors would go a long way toward improving operating costs, a critical objective of this program.
The first step in the program implementation was to contact HyperQuality and review all of the financials, as well as build the actual system. HyperQuality had a toolbox of different HyperQuality's performance and workflow management SaaS solution reports, so HyperQuality designed a system tailored to its customer’s unique business needs. Connectivity issues then had to be addressed to ensure that both companies would be able to tap into each other’s systems.
The energy company also reevaluated its quality guidelines and what would be expected from its agents both from the perspective of customer service and satisfaction as well as business requirements (as a utility, the company must follow a variety of regulated policies and procedures). Soon after, a pilot program was kicked off to ensure that the program was close to calibration; a few weeks later, it was determined that the calibration was very close to what the company had expected.
HyperQuality began monitoring and evaluating between 150-200 residential customer calls benchmarking against the new monitoring form with five categories totaling 23 attributes. The first results were returned through HyperQuality's performance and workflow management SaaS solution to 30 team leaders and three site managers within 24 hours. The monitoring scores were subsequently used in measuring an agent’s performance, providing management with attribute-by-attribute scores at the agent level.
One of the goals of the project was to eliminate complexity, making it easy for the customer’s executives and agents alike to gain the benefits of the system. Key personnel received training on HyperQuality's performance and workflow management SaaS solution, the Web-based reporting system that would serve as the foundation of the solution, but because of the user-friendliness of the system, not much training was required. With the company’s standard quality expectations already in place, it was simply a matter of reapplying them in a different fashion.
To ensure that the program would be as effective as possible, HyperQuality personnel took the unusual step of “walking a mile” in the agents’ shoes. In fact, HyperQuality personnel were brought to the company’s site and received the standard contact center training course that the company’s own agents attend. This way, HyperQuality not only understood the standard customer service expectations, but also gained an appreciation for the company’s changing business needs. After training, HyperQuality personnel returned and trained additional people to participate in the program.
Generating Myriad Benefits
The benefits realized from the program have been significant, not only in terms of improved customer service but actual measureable ROI. To begin with, had the company used internal resources to enact this program, it would have cost over twice as much as its solution with HyperQuality.
A tremendous benefit was realized in the area of training cycle time reductions, which translates to real dollars in agent availability and actually being qualified - and available - to take a call. Here’s how:
The company has a four-step training process. In Step 1, the new agent handles two primary call types - payments and power outages - for about eight weeks before moving on to Step 2, which involves billing and marketing calls. The eight-week interval between uptraining continued for Step 3. After Step 4 training, the representative would be considered fully trained.
Following the implementation of the new system, the company determined through week-to-week monitoring performance that agents were achieving performance expectations much sooner than expected. Instead of working for eight weeks at the lower skill set, the company’s monitoring data showed that new agents were reaching proficiency in just five weeks. What’s more, they were reaching proficiency at Steps 2 and 3 one week earlier (for each step). This resulted in a total of five weeks shaved from the training program, which translated into about $90,000 in savings annually.
The company then pared another four weeks from Steps 1 through 3, generating $70,000 in additional savings. And, all of this was achieved while actually improving agent performance or customer satisfaction. This improved utilization contributed to a cost avoidance estimated at $200,000 for the program’s first year. The trending provided by this initiative also provided training and contact center managers with the data they need to identify errant processes and take steps to correct them. Training and QA personnel used monthly customer survey data to set scorecard goals for the year. The agent attribute of “Being Knowledgeable” was met with an overall satisfaction rating of 87%. The overall transactional satisfaction exceeded the annual target of 80%, with a year-end result of 83%.
Analysis provided by the program also allowed the training department to capture the exact impact of sustainment training. Later in the year, specific call attribute gaps were identified using the monitoring system and training was designed to reduce those performance gaps specifically.
The end result was a considerable gain in scoring for each of those attributes and an overall performance gain of 5.58% measured post training.
After just one month of using HyperQuality for call evaluations, the overall scores have exceeded 90 percent (including an average score of 91.67%), with agents sharing in the achievement with improved individual performance ratings based on monitoring scores. Individual agents can easily view their own results and review feedback to help them improve their performance. Regular calibration sessions with HyperQuality help ensure that six monitorings per representative per month are completed and that evaluators consistently apply quality-assurance guidelines, policies, procedures and processes.
The credit contract center was added to the Quality Assurance program a few months later, and it too realized impressive ROI and performance improvements. The overall performance gain was 2.88% with an average score of 90.49% - a major gain in a short time.
The company continues to use HyperQuality for call monitoring and evaluations, and regularly identifies operational efficiencies, driving lowered operating costs.
Clearly, a great deal of energy has been put into this company’s call monitoring program. But just as clearly, it is energy - and money - well-spent.
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