Metrica Case Study – An Emerging Telco

 

This emerging telco customer of Metrica is part of US$ 4.5 billion global business house with interests in various consumer oriented businesses. The telecom business has been growing at break-neck speed and competing with very large established GSM  players. They have successfully launched their voice and value added services in nearly 10 different service areas in a very short span of time and have plans to cover many additional service areas. 

One of the cornerstones of their telecom business strategy is to differentiate themselves by providing unparalleled customer contact experience to retain existing subscribers and acquire new subscribers. They are currently providing customer service through Contact center, IVR, SMS, Customer service portal and Retail channels. 

Business Challenges 

• Multiple channels of customer contact resulted in inconsistent customer contact experience
• Difficulties in implementing a cohesive customer experience strategy without enterprise-wide unified view of customer experience
• Too many (75+)  back-end systems (ACD, IVR, Autodialer, CRM and other systems) reduced the  speed and effectiveness of strategic programs to drive up customer satisfaction level
• Lack of  a robust partner (outsourced contact centers) performance management system to monitor SLAs
• Inability to add new service areas quickly due to slow addition of new systems / data sources for performance management 

Solution Offered 

Metrica provided an end-to-end customer experience management solution to monitor customer touch points. More than 75  touch point data sources including one Avaya ACD, 22 IVRs, 15 Auto Dialers, 10 Outbound dialers, 5 CSAT survey managers, 1 Multi-media system, 1 Call Recording system and 1 CRM were integrated for unified customer experience and performance management.

Metrica’s solution is also used for monitoring the performance of their 4 Contact Center/BPO outsourced partners to whom the customer service delivery is outsourced.

In this implementation, large-scale performance management challenges that involve managing 1000s of agents and IVR channels have been addressed effectively. Metrica solution is helping this customer monitor 100s of metrics and 50+ KPIs related to the customer service for ensuring very smooth experience for millions of their mobile subscribers across the touch points. The solution was customized extensively to meet their business requirements.

The users of  the system here include Sr.management team, IVR Customer Experience Analysts, Supervisors, Agents, Marketing, Sales and Technology teams and 4 Outsourcing Business Partners.

Business Benefits

Metrica’s solution implementation has resulted in both tangible and intangible benefits to various stakeholders of the Telco. It helped their teams to drive customer experience strategy in a holistic and cohesive manner.

The key benefits are:

• Quicker identification of bottlenecks that affect customer experience across channels
• More rigorous management of outsourcing partner performance
• Improvement in agent productivity by around 5%
• Improvement in IVR self-service effectiveness by around 3%
• Reduction in MIS costs by around 80%
• Quicker expansion to new service areas without worrying about back-end data issues
• Overall improvement in operational efficiency

Metrica Case Study – A Mobile Service Provider

This Telco customer of Metrica is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. They operate in 18 countries across Asia, the Middle East and Africa and serve over 100 million subscribers out of a total population of approximately 1.9 billion people.  

They are expanding at a rapid pace by offering services at very competitive rates and unmatched customer service. Metrica helped them launch their services in new markets.

They are providing customer service through Contact center, IVR, SMS, Customer service portal and Retail channels. 

Business Challenges 

• Multiple channels of customer contact resulted in inconsistent customer contact experience
• Difficulties in implementing a cohesive customer experience strategy without enterprise-wide unified view of customer experiences
• Too many (50+)  back-end systems (ACD, IVR, Autodialer, CRM etc) reduced the  speed and effectiveness of strategic programs to drive up customer satisfaction level
• Lack of  a robust partner (outsourced contact centers) performance management system to monitor SLAs 

Solution Offered 

Metrica provided an end-to-end customer experience management solution to monitor customer touch points. Customer touch point data sources integrated include ACD,  several IVRs, Auto Dialers, Outbound dialers, CSAT survey managers, Multi-media system, and CRM.

Metrica platform was customized extensively to provide a cradle-to-grave reporting platform for unified view of their customer experience across contact channels. The solution was also customized to provide IVR effectiveness monitoring in a very detailed manner with nearly 10 different views of caller experience and several dozen metrics.

Business Benefits

Metrica’s solution implementation has resulted in both tangible and intangible benefits to various stakeholders of the Telco. It helped their teams to drive customer experience strategy in a holistic and cohesive manner.

• End to end view of customer experience across channels
• Improvement in agent productivity ( 5% to 8%)
• Reduction in MIS costs ( 70% to 90%)

Action Points to Boost Your Customer Experience

Needless to say that it is very challenging to manage a multi-channel, multi-site, multi-shift , multi-business and multi-partner customer service delivery to provide consistently high quality customer experience during each and every contact by the customer. 

The following tips may help you deliver, monitor, measure and boost the customer contact experience which will in turn accelerate the business benefits. 

Agent Interactions 

• Train the agents on conversational skills. Agents well  trained on conversational skills give greater satisfaction to the customers, who often criticize scripted interaction with agents. 
• Take feedback from Agents to identify the gaps in their knowledge and further train them on their weaker area. Getting the agents’ feedback also makes them feel important in the organization.
• Ensure uniformity of the quality of Agents and their knowledge level. Inconsistency in the quality of response can be a huge dampener on a positive Customer Experience, especially when multiple contacts are made.  Contacts should be escalated if the problem cannot be resolved soon.
• Measure Agent, Supervisor and Manager performance through fundamental customer centric metrics such as CSAT score, First Call Resolution (FCR), Average Speed to Answers (ASA), Number of Transfers and Hold Time  which affect customer experience directly. 

IVR Interactions 

• Publish your IVR menu tree in your website and keep the changes updated always. Email the IVR tree to the frequent callers whenever there is a change
• Provide adequate time to enter details like credit card number to avoid time-outs
• Use tools to know how your customers are using your IVR and what their pain points are in using your menu tree design
• Along with screen pop-up, include ‘IVR menu pop-up’ as well to tell the agents what menu path the callers had traversed before reaching them. This will help the agents empathize with the callers if they had been through long, painful menu traversals within the IVR.
• Keep IVR prompts short and simple. Avoid complex words. Most frequently accessed options should be in the front.
• Provide adequate exits to talk to an agent 

Multi-channel Tools and Systems 

• Use tools to see how your customers are using your web, IVR and contact center channels and for what purposes
• Make information like previous interaction with the company or purchase history available to the Agent to enable them give the customer more personalized attention.
• Don’t let your supervisors search for MIS / performance data; free-up their time to coach agents better. Empower them with tools to assess the agents’ performance in a comprehensive way and not in a superficial manner.
• Provide desktop tools to the agents for them to access information easily and in real time. Monitor how Agents use these tools to train them further
• Show the agents in real-time how they are performing. Provide them feedback within few days of the call, if not few hours.
• Monitor customer experience (queues etc) in real-time, as historical data can be deceptive.
• Use multi-dimensional root-cause analysis tools to fix performance bottle-necks
• Use to tools to re-build customer experience across channels.  

Customer Feedback Channels 

• Take customer feedback soon after the call. Conduct periodic surveys with free form text feedback section.
• Capture customer sentiments not only through contact center channel, but also through Internet forums, blogs and social media channels.

Metrica Case Study – Fortune 50 Global Corporation

This client of Metrica is a global powerhouse in engineering and electronics space. This company is active in the areas of Information and Communications, Automation and Control, Power, Transportation, Medical, and Lighting.They provide innovative technologies and comprehensive know-how to benefit customers in 190 countries.The contact center and back office outsourcing arm of this global major chose Metrica’s CenterWorks suite of solutions for addressing productivity and efficiency issues in their service delivery centers across multiple locations.

Business Challenges 

They were facing several challenges in improving the productivity of their staff and overall efficiency of their contact center.

Their primary issues were:

• Inability to distribute detailed  performance data directly to the agents on time
• Low supervisor effectiveness who typically spends 2 to 3 hours per day in collating data from multiple systems for management reporting in MS Excel sheets
• Lack of collaborative tools to share and discuss performance data
• The senior management had no visibility of historical performance data for trend analysis
• Lack of a method to transfer agents across teams without hampering their past performance data
• Use of paper based method to track sales details
• Lack of a formal training effectiveness evaluation system
• Complaints about monthly incentive calculation and performance appraisal
• Lack of a formal attendance tracking system for calculating staff shrinkage 

Solution Offered 

After conducting a study of their pain areas and existing systems, Metrica implemented KPIAnalyzer, MyReflector, HR Workflow, Custom Reports Engine (CRE) and Training Workflow modules of CenterWorks suite. Several new drill-down reports were developed to capture data from ACD, excel sheets and papers.

A portal was set up to share performance data and knowledge base to improve communication and collaboration among various teams.

Metrica’s professional services team worked with the client’s operations team to understand their pain areas and customize CenterWorks modules to address those pain areas. Customization work involved development of several workflows, reports and dashboards at site. 

Business Benefits

CenterWorks solution provided the people in the contact center an entirely new work environment. It empowered them with data that enabled self-correction and helped the management to streamline people related processes.

The following were the results observed after 4 weeks of implementation of CenterWorks suite:

• For the first time the agents were able to see their performance on time which otherwise took several days. They were also able to see their own rank in the center which motivated them to move up in the ranking. The AHT for the center went down by 7% and sales increased by 3%
• Since the MIS reports were automated, the supervisors were able to spend more time in coaching the agents on the floor. The same number of supervisors was able to manage a larger workforce with a lot of ease.
• The senior management was empowered with critical data to identify performance bottlenecks
• The effectiveness of the training became measurable for the first time through quizzes and other tools in CenterWorks
• The following people related processes were automated which increased overall satisfaction level of staff

–      Team transfers

–      Incentive calculation

–      Quarterly performance appraisal

–      Attendance tracking

–      Maintenance of agent’s personal file and track record.

Unified Customer Experience Management: Solution to Achieve Service Excellence (Part-II)

 

A typical Unified Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) solution collects data from various customer service support systems such as ACD ,Dialer, IVR, WFM, CRM and Website. It interprets the same to provide unprecedented insight into the customer interactions; it helps organizations drive their strategic initiatives such as lowering operational costs, improving customer experience and revenues more rigorously in a holistic and cost efficient manner that was not possible before. 

The following are the strategic initiatives that can be driven using Unified CEA to acheive service excellence and operational efficiency.

Customer Experience Improvement 

•    Align performance goals with strategic objectives

Tighter monitoring of KPIs such as ASA, Hold time, Service Level, CSAT and   Customer experience replay analysis make customer experience very consistent and pleasant. 

•   Improve First Call Resolution

Repeat call analysis, Root cause analysis, real-time feedback, action plan to correct and agent training need identification improve FCR. Unique program improvement tools like 4-Quadrant Report help drive the FCR very effectively. 

•   Enhance Self-service experience

Identification and elimination of IVR pain points, monitoring of IVR AHT, monitoring of end to end service level from IVR to ACD to Agent using cradle to grave analysis improve self-service effectiveness. 

•      Real-time performance management ensures quick remedies for service level impacting issues like poor staffing, high call volume etc 

Operational Costs Reduction 

•   Increase Workforce Productivity

Historical and real-time performance feedback to agents to monitor AHT, FCR, Quality and other key metrics improves productivity by up to 10% and enables self-correction quickly. Analysis of agent desktop application usage (Desktop Analytics) help track productive and unproductive activities of agents. 

•   Improve Supervisor Effectiveness

Supervisors can spend more time with agents and coach them better instead of searching for data to prepare routine performance reports. Apart from saving up to 2 hours a day per supervisor, the span of control can be increased by 50%. 

•   Reduce calls to live agents

Better IVR effectiveness can improve self-service and reduce the number of call transfers to expensive live agents significantly. 

•   Reduce  MIS costs

Routine reports are automated and hence in-house MIS system development, MIS team costs can be reduced by up to 60%.

•   Enhance Management control  

 Executive dashboards and alerts highlight problem situations and help top managers track trends & take decisions to put performance back on track quickly 

Revenues Improvement

•   Tighter monitoring of sales KPIs

Correlation of call and sales related metrics help identify the revenue drivers. Modeling the call data from telephony system , sales data from CRM and Quality data from call recording system together help in root cause analysis for non-performance. 

•   Incentive management

Automated incentive calculation improves accuracy and timely payment of incentive to employees which in turn drives employee satisfaction and performance. 

•   CRM analytics

Slicing & dicing and multi-dimensional analysis of revenue data by team,  geography, product etc will help discover the sales trend and improvement areas. Data can further be cleansed and prepared for targeted marketing using external data mining tools. 

•   Sales Coaching

Nearly 2 hrs per day of supervisor’s time can be saved by automating routine performance reports preparation tasks. The saved time can be used by them to coach agents better and improve their selling skills.

Enabling Collaborative Work Culture for Operational Excellence

 •   Web 2.0 Collaboration Tools

Publishing scorecards, charts, tips; discussing performance in forums; providing tools like Agent-supervisor chat, wikis, blogs for knowledge management and training;  personalized dashboards etc using widgets based, iGoogle style Web 2.0  Intranet portal provide interactive work environment and better employee engagement. 

•   Quick adoption

Easy to use, user experience centric portal drives quick adoption of tools and hence performance oriented culture. 

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Unified Customer Experience Management ( Part I)

Unified Customer Experience Management: The Next Battleground

Part-I 

CEOs across the industries have just begun focusing on the critical role that customer experience plays in keeping their companies competitive and profitable. There has been a tremendous pressure on the companies to move beyond CRM (an operations/marketing centric, transactional, inside-out approach) to Customer Experience Management (CEM), which is a customer centric, holistic, outside-in approach to drive customer advocacy. The purpose of CEM is to provide pleasant experience to all the customers every time across all channels of contact. In the last 5 years, a new role called ‘Chief Experience Officer (CXO)’ has been created in hundreds of organizations. While CRM tools are highly leveraged by CMOs, CEM tools are heavily leveraged by CXOs. Better CEM is a strategic differentiator    since it   can not be copied by the competitors. Hence, the CXO ensures that the board room pays enough attention to the CEM programs. 

A Google search for the term ‘Chief Experience Officer’ will reveal the growing importance of CXOs across the industries. 

Analyst Views 

The following comments by the leading analyst and consulting companies further underscore the growing importance managing customer interactions. 

“………………as momentum behind customer experience builds, companies will soon be fighting to prove the superiority of the experience they provide. Companies must look “beyond the browser” and invest in the quality of improving cross-channel interactions, something 78 percent of respondents claim is a higher priority” - “Obstacles To Customer Experience Success”, a Forrester Report 

“Most firms today struggle to measure the quality of their customer experience. To establish a framework for measuring customer experience quality, firms should identify key customers, the most important moments of truth in the customer experience continuum, the criteria customers use to evaluate those critical interactions, and metrics — both subjective and objective — that capture how well the organization met customer expectations in each area” - The Customer Experience Quality Framework” , a Forrester Report       

• 81 percent of organizations agree that the customer experience impacts loyalty and advocacy; 73 percent concur that it impacts satisfaction and spend.
• Less than one third of organizations use analytics to understand what is happening in customer interactions; most rely on subjective, irregular, and delayed feedback from agents and customers.
• Less than two thirds have documented processes to govern the customer experiences they deliver; and less than a third has processes for handling multi-channel interactions.    “Measuring and Managing Customer Experience” Survey Results by Vedanta Research 

Impediments to Superior Customer Experience Management 

There are several challenges in ensuring a well differentiated and consistently superior customer experience all the time.

Some of these challenges are:

A. Ignorance, Assumptions & Complacency 

These three are the most important impediments. The management believes that they are providing superior customer experience. As per a study by Bain & Co, 80% of the companies believe that they provide superior customer experience whereas only 8% of their customers agree to that! This 80/8 customer service delivery gap is still common among several large B2C companies. 

Moreover, many companies assume that Quality Monitoring (QM) is the ultimate step in monitoring customer satisfaction. In fact, QM indicates only how well the customer was handled rather than if the customer was really satisfied or not. QM as well as speech analytics techniques can show only less than 50% of the true customer experience story. 

B. Operational complexity 

It is a big operational challenge to manage a multi-channel, multi-site, multi-time zone, multi-lingual, multi-business and multi-partner customer service delivery operations. Ensuring consistency in customer experience in such environments is a daunting task. 

Lack of appropriate systems, processes and standards can further complicate the service delivery. 

C. Technological Complexity 

Customer service delivery is technology intensive. It requires more complex and expensive IT infrastructure and systems. Typical IT systems required are: ACD, IVR, Dialer, Quality Monitoring system, CTI server, SMS server, Workforce Management system, CRM, Website, MIS / BI and other support systems. These systems generate huge amount of raw customer interactions data every hour. In fact, the same copy of raw data is generated by many of these systems which make the data volume growth exponential. Almost all of this data is trapped in disparate systems which makes it very difficult for managers to discover how the customers are treated in the Contact Center, IVR, Website, and Back-office channels. 

The MIS data that is presented to the managers is very superficial and tell only a fraction of the truth. The managers have no access to deeper actionable intelligence to manage and improve customer experience holistically across all the customer touch points. 

D. Inadequate Budget 

Customer service delivery requires substantial budgets as the cost of technology infrastructure and people resources is very high. Often managers are left with managing conflicting goals like improving CSAT and reducing the cost of operations. Many times, a perfect balance between these two goals is practically not possible to achieve. 

In Part-II, several techniques that are available to tackle various customer experiences related strategic issues will be discussed.

The author is the CTO & Co-Founder of  Metrica Systems ( www.metricasystems.com ).