For years, Utilities companies have struggled to respond effectively to changing customer expectations. Many of these brands have earned a reputation for putting customer service and experience second, leading to frustration and churn among their target audience.
Fortunately, the rise of innovative CX solutions has allowed modern brands to become more customer-centric, with valuable insights into the consumer journey, flexible communication tools, and a range of service options. Superior Propane, for instance, one of the leaders in the Canadian Propane market, believes customer service is the key to staying one step ahead of its competitors.
As consumers have grown more demanding, requiring better levels of speed, convenience, and personalisation from their utilities brands, Superior Propane has turned to innovators like Calabrio and Avaya for support. Today, the CX solution leveraged by the brand has allowed it to not only develop an effective hybrid work model, but also reduce average handling times by around 30 seconds per call. Here’s what happened when Superior Propane transformed with Calabrio and Avaya.
Creating a Phenomenal Customer Experience
Superior Propane has long focused on delivering the most amazing experiences possible for its target audience. However, as the consumer landscape has continued to evolve, the company found itself looking for ways to update and enhance its customer experience. Avaya emerged as the ultimate choice for a powerful digital experience for today’s consumers.
With Avaya OneCloud, Superior Propane was able to gain access to a custom environment for app development, hybrid work solutions, and strategic partner alliances. This unlocked opportunities for AI and cloud enhancements without replacing the entire communication environment.
Avaya OneCloud’s subscription-based service provides Superior Propane with the freedom to add new cloud services at a pace suitable for its team. The company can pay only for the services it uses, while continuing to operate tools on-premises. The Subscription also ensures the company can flexibly access up to 20% more than the subscribed users on its plan, which is ideal for peak winter months when requests can increase.
Using Data-Driven Insights to Boost CX
With customer expectations changing so rapidly, Superior Propane needed a way to gain a better understanding of how processes were impacting both employee and customer experience. Avaya’s partner alliances were perfectly positioned to help speed time to value by offering access to a host of leading tech vendors which could seamlessly integrate with the existing solution.
Avaya’s partner, Calabrio, delivered a phenomenal opportunity to bring speech analytics and capabilities into the into the customer experience journey. The Calabrio desktop provide a complete picture of which areas the company could improve. For instance, the solution showed icy roads were a key source of customer frustration, as they prevented deliveries.
The company also learned customers prefer real-time communications about changes to their scheduled delivery. What’s more, the technology gave agents a real-time insight into customer conversations, which often meant clients needed to repeat themselves every time they spoke to someone new from the contact centre.
The Calabrio analytics desktop also revealed some valuable potential areas for improvements. For example, log templates intended to be completed during a live call were too complex to be completed in real-time. Additionally, some agents were using tools and systems which damaged their productivity. Using these data-driven insights, Superior Propane was able to reduce average handling time by 30 seconds per call, allowing for around 150 more customer inquiries per day, without the need to scale the team. This also improved overall quality of service, and prompted improvements to the onboarding and training process for teams.
Custom Integrations and Solutions
According to Superior Propane, Avaya challenged the team to think outside of the box when dealing with high volumes of delivery-related calls. The technology offered a solution to schedule delivery through automated systems and create self-service opportunities.
Avaya designed a custom integration for Superior Propane which allowed customers calling about deliveries to serve themselves. If a customer got to the point in the menu where they were able to schedule a delivery, the system would automatically dip into the integrated CRM and search for matching ANI information. Customers are also able to connect with representatives at any point in the client journey if necessary.
The Avaya Proactive Outreach Manager also further streamlines service by sending customers automated emails or calls to confirm delivery orders. Up to 800 emails are now automated each day, reducing the delivery-related calls agents need to handle. Screen pops available throughout the agent conversation can further provide agents dealing with a customer query with more relevant information, reducing the number of times customers need to repeat themselves.
As an added bonus, the Avaya OneCloud environment forms the perfect foundation for the Superior Propane hybrid work model introduced during the pandemic. The cloud environment allows the team to seamlessly monitor and manage hybrid workers, regardless of where they are. The implemented reporting solution even sends real-time data about performance and instant messages to the workstations of teams, individuals, or the entire contact centre.
Scrolling dashboards and marquees also display dynamic information collected from multiple sources, including integrated reporting and analytics systems, and third-party tools. This ensures employees can view summaries from multiple sites in the same dashboard.
Exploring the Future with Superior Propane
According to Superior Propane, the level of support the team received from Avaya was fantastic from start to finish. The technology has helped to elevate the company’s mindset, and change the way they address various problems. Avaya even rose to the occasion when Superior Propane had a serious outage, to get the team up and running as quickly as possible.
The brand is currently thinking of new ways to circumvent potential challenges using Avaya partner alliances. Superior Propane is also looking into innovative new solutions from Avaya, such as AI and natural language processing to increase quality of service.
Avaya OneCloud provided Superior Propane with everything they needed to innovate and evolve without disruption, pushing the envelope for transformation in the industry.
