Delivering exceptional service in the automotive industry means developing a sense of trust with your target audience. In today’s unpredictable environment, customers want to ensure they have the support they need to keep their vehicles running in any situation. This sometimes means signing up for services which offer immediate repair and recovery when something goes wrong.
The RAC is currently the second largest automotive services brand in the UK. Employing an average of 4,000 people around the country, the brand provides breakdown and vehicle services to more than 8.8 million customers, resulting in 2.3 million rescues per year.
To maintain the loyalty of its customer base, and improve overall credibility, RAC decided it needed to invest in the best possible technology for connecting with and supporting clients. Here’s how RAC leveraged the features of Content Guru storm to achieve its goals.
Delivering Rapid Service in Times of Need
The RAC serves millions of customers on a regular basis throughout the UK, from everyday drivers, to private customers and corporations.
The scale of the RAC’s operations on a daily basis mean its common for the company to see significant levels of unpredictable demand in its contact centres. Calls are frequently exacerbated by adverse weather conditions, leading to a higher number of accidents and delays on the roads. During these events, the contact centres often receive massive volumes of enquiries for general maintenance, and emergency breakdown support.
In the past, the RAC’s premises-based communication systems often struggle to scale according to contact centre volumes. Additionally, agent resources were often distributed inefficiently, with specialist professionals wasting time on callers in need of routine callouts. With endless tasks to complete, including manually creating, cancelling, and relaying the status of repair callout customers, the business wasn’t running at its best.
To overcome the problems the team faced on a daily basis, the RAC decided to integrate a new cloud-based contact centre solution. With Content Guru, RAC was able to integrate the “storm” cloud contact centre platform with its existing infrastructure and frontline communications. This created a new level of scalability to handle changes in requirements on-demand.
The solution can automatically process any number of simultaneous enquiries from customers, reducing the burden on agents, even during periods of high demand.
Creating a More Efficient Workplace
The solution also offered a custom integration with the RAC’s back-end I/CAD (Intergraph Computer-Aided despatch) technology. This automated lookup service identifies customers by Calling Line Identity, or Automated Speech Recognition, using a Vehicle Registration Number.
With the integration, customers can quickly access personalised and automated messages informing them about the status of their callout. Alternatively, they can also use the system to cancel a request. The storm technology instantly updates the I/CAD after interactions, enabling the RAC to reduce costs by eliminating wasted callouts. Field engineers receive an SMS update the moment a request is cancelled.
The service also allows customers to make bookings without speaking to an agent. These automations provide agents with more free time to complete valuable tasks, like dealing with complex vehicle enquiries. Customers simply call the RAC contact centre and have their queries processed by a proprietary cloud communications platform.
For customers making a new call out or enquiry, the technology routes the call to the RAC contact centre. Alternatively, customers enquiring about existing callouts, or cancelling repair requests are routed to an automated environment.
An Intelligent Approach to Customer Service
In the past, RAC’s technology meant it was consistently struggling to deal with rapidly changing volumes of enquiries in the contact centre. These demands increased exponentially during periods of high demand, placing significant strain on agents. The manual processes took up significant employee team, and cancellations had to be managed by contact centre agents. These agents would then have to pass information over to technicians, which wasn’t a streamlined process.
Now, with storm’s effectively unlimited cloud environment, the RAC can manage massive volumes of enquiries at the same time. This means consistent service is offered, even during peaks in demand volume. The integrations with existing technology allowed the RAC to automate a number of repetitive tasks, like identifying cars and feeding information on repair status back to a customer.
What’s more, by automating updates sent to engineers, the storm solution ensures less time is wasted sending specialists out to customers who no longer need assistance. This means team members are distributed more effectively, to give customers the support they need as quickly as possible. The full process runs more smoothly, with minimal strain on the team.
With storm technology from Content Guru, the RAC has been able to effectively improve service and performance levels, minimise turnover, and improve resource allocation. The result is lower costs involved with keeping operations running, as well as happier customers overall.
The Power of Automation
According to the Project Manager of RAC, Alan Gormley, storm has been a powerful tool for the evolution of business operations. For the RAC, enabling rapid repair services to be dispatched to customers as soon as possible is critical to customer loyalty and ongoing success. However, when severe disruptions occurred in the past, the contact centre would often be overwhelmed by demand.
When customers were unable to get through to cancel requests, the team also found they would often waste valuable resources who could have been solving problems elsewhere. Automated contact centre feature ensures more customers can get the services and support they need, even without having to speak to an agent. Now customers can cancel requests in real-time, and agents get updates automatically, the RAC is saving money, while delivering the service customers expect.
Going forward, the RAC plans to continue leveraging the full flexible capabilities of the storm ecosystem. The team wants to continue automating repetitive enquiries and requests, to free up as many agents as possible, so they can do their best work.
