How Qualfon decreased average handle time by 16 seconds

This article was originally published in Destination CRM.

Qualfon, a provider of call center, back office, and business process outsourcing services, has about 15,000 employees across six countries. The company’s success depends on its people, according to Chris Serafini, director of customer experience transformation.

“Having happy employees make happy customers; that’s been our mantra from the day Qualfon was founded,” says Prashant Cherukuri, its chief information officer. “To complement that, we’ve invested in what we call the innovation center that brings about a lot of these technologies to help our customers.”

Quality assurance is an essential element of Qualfon’s offerings, “Quality assurance ensures that we are adhering to our customers’ quality standards and to the compliance requirements that we are supposed to be following.”

The company had recognized that its quality assurance process was very manual, which was insufficient for the growing company, says Cherukuri. “We started looking for solutions that would help our quality teams get better at what they do, and more importantly, provide insights about the thousands of interactions that we have every day.”

The Search

The search started in the second half of 2020.

Qualfon looked at a number of solutions, but the one that stood out the most was Observe.AI’s offering, according to Cherukuri. “The number one reason was that their transcription accuracy is absolutely by far the best I’ve seen when we actually did apples-to-apples comparisons. Number two was the fast implementation.… Their solution came together very, very easily.”

Other advantages Serafani cited were price competitiveness and the partnership atmosphere that Observe.AI provided. “As we engaged with Observe.AI, they were on a lot of our internal calls and were like an extension of our business. They’re not so much like a vendor. I talk to them at least once or twice a week, and they’re always very responsive.”

Qualfon signed with Observe.AI at the beginning of the fourth quarter of last year and went live in December.

Use Cases

The integration was very straightforward, Cherukuri says. It was just a matter of sending the call audio and the metadata via an XML file, which took a couple of days.

“We’re using a couple of different programs with them now,” Serafani says. “We’re able to measure the metrics that are critically important to a particular client. It’s not just a matter of saying that the metric is going up or down. We’re able to actually look at the specific behaviors that Observe.AI has defined and then measure the success of that.”

Observe.AI has a built-in coaching component that enables Qualfon to understand particular agent behaviors and review current coaching methods used to address them. One analysis compared people who received high-quality coaching versus people who did not.

For the people who did not receive high-quality coaching through Observe.AI, average handle time increased by 51 seconds. The average handle time of people who received high-quality coaching decreased by 16 seconds. Additionally, 61 percent of the people who received high-quality coaching through Observe.AI achieved a better average handle time: among the people who didn’t, only 19 percent had a better handle time. Customer complaints dropped 20 percent during this test as well.

“The average handle time has a direct impact on our ability to receive more calls,” Serafani adds. “For example, if I reduce my handling time by 30 percent, that means I can handle that many more calls.”

High-quality coaching sessions improved as well. When Observe.AI went live, about 65 percent of agents received a high-quality coaching session each week. That figure has grown to 85 percent, Serafani said. “We’ve seen a very large increase both in the quantity of coaching that we’re doing and how widely spread out it is.”

Qualfon worked with Observe.AI to provide call performance information to agents as well as coaches, a capability that rolled out recently.

In the future, Qualfon is looking to work with Observe.AI for chat analytics as well as voice analytics.

Results

With Observe.AI, Qualfon has achieved the following results:

• decreased specific call type by 20 percent;
• increased percentage of agents who received quality coaching from about 65 percent to 85 percent;
• decreased average handling time by 16 seconds; and
• reduced time spent on compliance monitoring.