OVERVIEW:
ServiceFirst is a world-class call center and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) organization with a global presence, providing an elevated customer experience to serve the needs of their client portfolio.
ServiceFirst’s mission is to be a client’s trusted advisor and preferred business partner, guiding clients through business improvements to reduce operational costs and improve business processes. This elevated level of service comes with high expectations and standards for customer service.
CHALLENGE:
ServiceFirst had been performing manual QA operations for years before realizing something needed to change. Their QA process was nowhere near where they wanted to be. An average call lasted 30-45 minutes, so QA managers were able to evaluate only two calls per month per agent.
Needless to say, this extremely limited number of evaluations yielded little to no business insights. The ServiceFirst speech analytics department—which includes Macky Cruz, Senior Manager for Quality Assurance and Speech Analytics, JC Baun, Speech Analytics Business Analys, and Sofia Pent as Sr. Manager for Lending Services—realized that this lack of visibility into their customer conversations was hindering business growth. They were struggling to understand how to improve sales parameters and long-term business goals as a whole.
As a result of missed revenue goals and gaps in customer service, ServiceFirst management decided to dive deep into their speech analytics and focus on finding a solution that would provide them with conversation insights.
Macky Cruz spearheads the speech analytics department and, as a two-time Observe.AI customer, recommended Observe.AI as the solution that would provide them with 100% visibility into their customer interactions.
“I’ve seen how Observe.AI paves the way for us to understand our business better,” says Cruz. “The operational insights are invaluable, and the 100% visibility into our customer interactions allows us to see so much that we weren’t seeing before.”
Upon diving into their conversation insights in Observe.AI, the ServiceFirst Speech Analytics team identified a glaring issue that required immediate action: voicemail camping.
Agents were staying on an idle line or calling into a voicemail—a behavior referred to as “camping”—for anywhere from 37 seconds to 3 minutes without saying anything. This behavioral issue was leading to major operational inefficiencies among agents, poor customer service, and missed revenue opportunities.
“We were only able to identify this core issue at scale through the conversation insights gleaned from Observe.AI,” Baun says. “Something that was negatively impacting our revenue was going completely missed before we had full visibility of our customer interactions. With Observe.AI, we’ve pinpointed this huge area of opportunity to drastically improve our business.”
SOLUTIONS:
The speech analytics team was able to make revisions to their operations to speed up the QA process with the help of Observe.AI. The goal was to scale their QA operations in order to catch both voicemail camping instances andother gaps in customer experience. They removed their own evaluation form and opted instead to use the Observe.AI platform.
Within Observe.AI, ServiceFirst’s speech analytics team was able to gain visibility across their entire contact center: which agents were voicemail camping, for how long, and other revenue-inhibiting trends across their organization.
Anything that displayed a downward or negative trend at scale would get reported to supervisors and immediately factored into targeted coaching sessions. As a result, team supervisors now develop tailored coaching sessions for agents displaying behavioral issues and provide them with the tools and assets they need to become more efficient and responsible.
The ServiceFirst team has since made massive strides forward after identifying areas of improvement across sales, compliance, and operational efficiencies.
Over the course of three months, there was a 43% decrease in voicemail camping instances, which has led to massive business improvements and revenue gains.
The speech analytics team also identified areas of opportunity. By using Observe.AI’s Moments feature toautomatically highlight compliance in customer interactions, including around verification, recorded disclosures, and potential UDAAP breaches (Unfair, Deceptive, or Abusive Acts or Practices), ServiceFirst has realized a 44% improvement in compliance.
Moments: the key instances throughout an agent’s interaction with a customer that, when measured across all agents, can reveal insights and trends at scale across the contact center.s
Conversation insights regularly allow the team to identify areas of opportunity. For example, when supervisors are alerted to compliance issues through agent evaluations, they are able to create and provide targeted coaching catered to the specific compliance risks in agent performance. Agents then learn how to tackle scenarios better, getting ahead of compliance risks and saving the company from potential breaches.
“Gone are the days where our team leaders are listening to one call and coaching a single agent based on that call,” Cruz says. “Now, we’re able to evaluate and provide targeted coaching at scale to have a much more resounding impact across our contact center organization.”
ServiceFirst contact center supervisors are using Observe.AI to study behaviors and trends across the organization, and to customize training programs and personalize the tools agents need, right when they need them.
“Because everything is integrated seamlessly within the Observe.AI platform, we’re able to send out evaluations to team leaders and they use them to coach their agents accordingly,” Cruz says. “We’re able to see it all happen quickly, and this level of transparency has increased trust across the organization.”
In addition, ServiceFirst’s speech analytics team has built Moments around tracking agent rebuttals to customer objections. Previously, when customers would present objections, agents were not providing the proper rebuttal statements and this would lead to a non-sale.
With the help of Observe.AI, the team has developed trainings and coaching targeted around rebuttals for common customer objections. Putting targeted training in place to address this specific gap in performance has yielded a 36% improvement in objection handling within just a 7-month period. Agents' improved performance is resulting in increased sales. Agents are becoming more confident in their positions, responding to objections with a consultative approach, and, as a result, driving more positive business outcomes.
BIGGEST BENEFIT?
The ServiceFirst team is excited to see continued growth and business improvements with the help of conversation insights from Observe.AI. They’re thrilled about the results seen so far and are eager to continue scaling on this upward trend.
When asked how Observe.AI has impacted their day-to-day operations, Cruz kept it short and sweet: “Observe.AI has made our contact center operations easier, faster, and better.”
Baun adds, “Observe.AI makes my job as a speech and business analyst easier. We’re now able to pinpoint and identify positive and negative behavior across our agents, making it easier for contact center leaders to address that behavior and make a strong impact.”
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