Contact centres are a rich source of customer experience data, created constantly by every interaction across every channel. Actually realising the insights within that data, however, is a complicated prospect that requires a comprehensive, intuitive analytics solution.
At the recent Calabrio Customer Connect (C3) 2021 event, the real-world use of interaction analytics was presented by a number of award-winning Calabrio customers. Calabrio offers a workforce engagement management suite encompassing speech, text, and desktop analytics, supercharged with predictive capabilities, all geared towards developing insights across different parts of a contact centre’s operations.
Unlocking Process and Technology Opportunities
AAA Northeast detailed how it was using Calabrio’s speech analytics functionality to identify the different call types within its call centre. “In partnership with Calabrio we learned early on that we were able to target specific call types,” said Helen Cox, Quality Assurance Manager, speaking at the event. “We conducted an analysis of all the different calls within our contact centre and we learned that there were four common types these were members located at home, on highways, in any location or in priority situations.” Types were identified via the use of keyword speech analytics, for example, in the instance of a highway call, words such as “highway”, “breakdown” or “exit number” were used. This led the organisation to realise certain interactions were taking longer. “Being able to narrow the focus to keywords and key phrases meant we were able to identify the top call types. Then listen and learn from them,’” said Cox. “And we started to recognise that our highway interactions took a lot longer.”
The organisation also uses Calabrio desktop analytics which helps to understand what agents are doing on their computers at any given moment and the different resources they use when helping customers. For AAA Northeast, this identified the lack of uptake of the GPS locator tool by agents. Therefore the company provided additional GPS training and then set up an analytics dashboard to monitor the situation and benchmark improvement. For all call types, the analytics deployment resulted in a decrease in average handle time by 14 seconds. For highway calls, in particular, there was a reduction of 53 seconds as more agents used the GPS locator rather than asking questions to establish where members who needed help were on the highway.
Increasing First Call Resolution
Dental benefits provider Delta Dental of Minnesota, meanwhile, is using speech analytics to solve for low first call resolution. Having built a new customer service centre, the organisation partnered with Calabrio in 2019, initially for its workforce management and quality management tools. Adopting a policy of continuous improvement, the company put speech and sentiment analytics to work to identify areas for improvement. “It’s like a funnel at the top where you start with all calls,” said Rich DeMarco, Vice President, Operations & Customer Experience Officer at Delta Dental. “We developed 171 phrases, and we had about 1400 hits. In the 117 confirmed calls at the bottom of the funnel, we identified 29 opportunities to improve. These are typically the tough calls for agents and the tough calls for customers that result in lower first call resolution.”
The end result was an initial first call resolution improvement of 20%. “That’s customers answering yes to the question: ‘Did you get everything you need on one call?’ So we’re very, very happy about that,” said DeMarco. At the same time, the 29 process improvement opportunities analytics identified led to four new implementation solutions. “We’re implementing solutions for those by year-end and expect to further decrease our problem calls by about 40%.”
Informing Action Across the Enterprise
It was a similar story with GreenPath Financial Wellness, a non-profit housing and credit counselling organisation, which is dedicated to boosting financial health. It first partnered with Calabrio in 2018, rolling out its workforce management, call recording and quality management tools with Calabrio analytics added in 2020. The aim is to support an expanded marketing initiative to let underserved communities know how GreenPath could help them face COVID-19 related financial stresses. The initiative’s goal was to increase the number of black, indigenous people and people of colour contacting the organisation. At the same time, the goal was to make sure that staff could meet their needs and produce a positive experience. Interaction analytics proved to be a key piece of the puzzle.
As David Flores, Director of Client Services and Program Performance explained at C3, the company leveraged Calabrio’s Phrase and Task Manager features to enable this goal: “We worked with our marketing department to identify key phrases that speech analytics could look for during the client’s initial phone call so that we could understand where clients had heard about us. We felt this was a perfect place to unleash the tools. For this, we used Phrase Manager and entered key phrases such as: ‘I saw your ad on a billboard.’ Then in Task Manager, we created ad hoc tasks for the marketing category and ran them on specific phone lines being used for those marketing campaigns. This allowed us to be very targeted in our approach.”
GreenPath used the same tools to identify key topics where counsellors were not meeting callers’ needs, while also using Calabrio sentiment analysis to deliver near real-time insights into the client experience. After correlating phrases to campaigns, the organisation was able to see where it was the best performing – leading to a 152% increase in the number of VIP clients it was serving every day. “As a non-profit organisation with very limited resources, we have to ensure that we’re using all of our dollars wisely, especially our marketing dollars. This data lets us know where we should be pointing those resources.”
For its innovative use of Calabrio Analytics, GreenPath was awarded the Analytics Competition 2021 grand prize of $50,000 USD for contact centre initiatives, with AAA Northeast and Delta Dental coming in as joint runners-up receiving $25,000 USD each. The judges hailed GreenPath’s commitment to building a connected enterprise where contact centre findings are distributed throughout the whole business, the award highlighted the true power of contact centre analytics. Rather than insights being confined to the contact centre itself, its role as the focal point of customer interactions means findings from the contact centre can flow out and be applied across the organisation.
To find out more about the analytics journeys detailed at the C3 event, visit the on-demand customer videos on the Calabrio website.
