How three top brands innovate customer experience by gathering key CX insights from complex contact center data.

The Calabrio Analytics Competition

The second annual Calabrio Analytics Competition recognized three companies for the incredible work accomplished using Calabrio Analytics to improve and advance their contact center operations.

Take a look at how Calabrio’s 2020 competition winners—announced at Calabrio Customer Connect 2020 (C3)—used Analytics to dig into voice-of-the-customer (VoC) intelligence in order to reveal key organizational insights, grow customer satisfaction and drive ROI.

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Case #1: Findings revealed by Calabrio Desktop Analytics help contact center leaders shorten hold times while increasing agent engagement.

Goal

A leading provider of business information services, Thomson Reuters products include highly specialized, information-enabled software and tools for legal, tax, accounting, and compliance professionals combined with the world’s most global news service—Reuters.

Contact center leaders wanted to understand how the introduction of remote agent onboarding and training, due to COVID-19, was affecting their business. Using Calabrio Analytics, they identified calls with long and multiple hold times, then worked to identify the reasons behind the call holds, with the goal of eliminating them.

Analysis & Key Findings

Leaders started by analyzing a group of new agents participating in onboarding and product training while completely remote.

First, they tapped Calabrio Analytics to identify which of the calls completed by new agents had long and/or multiple holds, then they used Calabrio Desktop Analytics to understand exactly how the agents handled these particular scenarios.

Revealingly, contact center leaders discovered the new agents:

• maintained an average handle time that was significantly above target; and
• relied upon team members—instead of the proper resources—for the assistance they needed to answer customer questions while callers waited on hold.

Solution

To resolve the issues, contact center leaders built a virtual training program focused on troubleshooting and using the proper resources to efficiently find answers.

Results

Thomson Reuters’ new program allows its Tax & Accounting Professionals business unit to potentially save up to 3% of its contact center’s annual operating budget.

In addition, contact center leaders witnessed a significant, measurable increase in the number of times new agents utilized programmer resources and additional critical thinking skills to answer customer questions.

• $$ — Potential savings of up to 3% of budget
• ↓ minutes — Reduced average call time
• ↓ 1.5 — Reduced number of call holds per call
• ↑ 6.4% — Increased customer satisfaction

“We suspected—then proved to be true—that Calabrio’s combination of quality analytics and desktop analytics would give us the important contact center insights we needed.” — Jonathan Schaffer, Contact Center Team Leader

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Case #2: A creative application of Calabrio Speech Analytics and apology training nearly halves call escalations while boosting agent satisfaction.

Goal

By offering the features and benefits of a national provider while maintaining the customer-first mentality of a local business, Bluegrass Cellular maintains the highest customer satisfaction ratings of any carrier in its Central Kentucky locale. It’s this customer-first philosophy that prompts contact center leaders to constantly search for new ways to improve the service Bluegrass Cellular agents deliver to customers.

After attending an illuminating “Art of a Meaningful Apology” session at ICMI, leaders suspected they could foster more genuine customer interactions by improving the quality of apologies given by contact center agents to customers. They wanted to:

• improve customer loyalty and retention, as measured by RSAT (representative satisfaction) survey scores;
• strengthen the emotional intelligence of staff, as measured by quality assurance scores; and
• reduce the number of escalated calls (which, in turn, would improve overall business efficiencies).

Analysis & Key Findings

To measure the current effectiveness of agent apologies, leaders decided to run through Calabrio Speech Analytics the various “sorry” phrases used by agents in order to understand the perceived strength and sincerity of existing agent apologies. Included were phrases like:

• “I’m sorry about that”
• “I’m sorry”
• “Sorry about that”
• “Sorry”

The results were startling. Instead of delivering “I’m sorry” as a sincere apology, well-intended representatives repeatedly used the phrase simply as a way to pause the conversation.

Solution

By applying the “Meaningful Apology” skills they learned at ICMI, contact center leaders quickly built and delivered to the entire contact center team a custom training program featuring tangible examples of appropriate apologies. The new program teaches contact center agents and employees to:

• acknowledge the issue or concern experienced by the customer;
• briefly explain what caused it; and
• deliver a genuine expression of remorse.

Agents requiring additional guidance also receive individualized training sessions that address their specific needs.

Results

The new program immediately shrank the number of insincere apologies delivered by agents by a whopping 40%. By reassuring customers their concerns have been heard and understood—and clearly communicating how Bluegrass Cellular will resolve them quickly and completely—call escalations decreased by 45%, formal customer complaints decreased by 43% and rep satisfaction grew by 26%.

In fact, the meaningful apology training program developed by contact center leaders proved itself so beneficial, it became required curriculum for all new hires at Bluegrass Cellular.

“It’s a lost opportunity if you have half a million recorded calls within your grasp and don’t have a tool enabling you to use it to achieve actionable improvements.” — Robin Fentress, Director of Customer Support

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Case #3: Predictive analytics helps increase NPS by nearly 20% in only two months despite unexpected call spikes during COVID-19.

Goal

With more than $4 billion in assets and a consistent 20% annual growth rate, Idaho Central Credit Union is the state’s premier credit union, serving the needs of over 340,000 employees, students, retirees and family members of eligible members of a large variety of business entities within most Idaho counties.

While growth is vital to its success, the credit union remains focused on its mission—“Helping Members Achieve Financial Success”—by providing exceptional service and diverse products to membership. That’s why—despite an already-impressive contact center Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 65-75%—Idaho Central contact center leaders set three aggressive goals for its organization for 2020:

• Grow NPS to 80-90%
• Improve quality assurance scores by half a percentage point
• Increase overall sentiment by 10%

Analysis & Key Findings

Contact center leaders quickly discovered the weekly, Excel-based “scorecard” email sent to agents wasn’t read by or motivating to most of them.

Leaders knew they needed a better way to make real-time quality and sentiment scores—as well as predictive NPS—available on demand to all contact center agents and supervisors in order to hit their 2020 goals.

Solution

First, leaders used Calabrio’s predictive analytics to analyze metadata captured from more than 1,000 calls possessing NPS feedback in order to determine predictive NPS scores for each agent.

Then—to replace the outdated, ineffective scorecard delivered via email—Idaho Central built a new, online dashboard easily accessible by any agent or supervisor at any time. User-friendly and highly visual, the dashboard graphically presents critical, specific information regarding each agent’s real-time quality scores, overall sentiment data and predictive NPS.

Results

With actionable data and real-time analytics at their fingertips, Idaho Central contact center agents now can self-assess their customer interactions at any time, then autonomously improve their quality and service as needed, on their own.

As a result of its predictive NPS and real-time dashboard deployment, Idaho Central grew positive NPS by 19%, to 92%. This achievement exceeded 2020’s set goal of 80-90% and increased by 104,000 the number of Idaho Central members who are NPS promoters—a particularly impressive feat considering the unexpected and above-average call volumes caused by COVID-19.

• ↑ 19% — NPS
• < 90% — Exceeded set NPS goal of 80-90%
• ↑ 104K — New NPS promoters

“We’re projected to receive more than a million phone calls this year, so predictive analytics tells us an NPS of 91% means 910,000 of those total calls will result in positive promoter scores.” — Brian Bunderson, Member Contact Center Manager

Learn more about driving success in your contact center with The Top 10 Use Cases for Contact Center Analytics.

Calabrio is the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organizations to enrich human interactions. The scalability of our cloud platform allows for quick deployment of remote work models—and it gives our customers precise control over both operating costs and customer satisfaction levels. Our AI-driven analytics tools make it easy for contact centers to uncover customer sentiment and share compelling insights with other parts of the organization. Customers choose Calabrio because we understand their needs and provide a best-in-class experience, from implementation to ongoing support. www.calabrio.com