Case Study: 1st Central Drops Planning Time by 95% With Evaluagent

Challenge

With millions of customer interactions each year across phone, WhatsApp, social media, and email, 1st Central saw an opportunity to evolve its Quality Assurance (QA) approach. At the time, QA processes were manual, varied across channels, and time-consuming to manage.

Without a single, unified system, it was harder to align QA activity with operational goals, creating inefficiencies and limiting the ability to quickly act on customer insights.

Solution

Andrew Smith, Customer Director at 1st Central, explains how the difference in approach was clear right from the start of the partnership.

“With evaluagent, we were able to take our decentralized, manual QA activity and centralize it into a platform that was harmonious, that people understood, had a really clear user interface, a very good back end and aligned our methodologies and frameworks with how we operated on a day-to-day basis.”

Using the full array of products – Auto-QA, Real-Time QA and conversation intelligence – along with robust planning and reporting tools, the team now operates with much greater clarity and consistency.

“Some of the bigger, more interesting efficiencies have come from the findings out of the speech analytics platform,” said Andrew.

“We did a study which identified areas where we were missing simple opportunities to resolve calls first time. This moved our first contact resolution up a couple of percentage points, which at the scale we are with millions of calls a year, makes a real difference.”

Auto-QA has become a core part of 1st Central’s quality strategy, increasing both coverage and efficiency.

“Planning QA activity for a given month would take a number of individuals well over a day. That’s now reduced to less than an hour, which is a huge saving for us,” said Andrew.

Holly Doyle, Quality Assurance Technical Manager, also added:

“Auto-QA not only increases our QA coverage, but frees up the QA team’s time for higher-value work. It gives us a much fuller view of what our customers are experiencing whilst also making our QA process more efficient.”

The team has been able to automate key areas such as mandatory scripting, fraud flags, complaint and escalation detection – all well-suited for automation.

For 1st Central, Real-Time QA represents the next step in both delivering greater operational efficiency and further improving customer outcomes.

Rather than identifying issues after the fact, the team is now focused on empowering agents in the moment, providing guidance that supports compliance, consistency, and customer care.

“With Real-Time QA, we can bring out the best in our agents by giving them structured guidance and nudging them towards things that they may have otherwise missed,” said Andrew.

He added:

“Real-Time QA isn’t just going to make us more efficient, it’s going to give us better customer outcomes, and provide us with an enhanced oversight of what’s happening in the operation there and then, as opposed to having to capture it after the fact.”

Armed with Real-Time QA, 1st Central is positioning itself to respond faster, reduce risk, and build greater trust with customers – all while supporting agents.

Results

Savings of 4% each month
95% drop in planning time
Increase in full coverage

“Through our FCR call review, we gained about a 1.3 percentage point increase. So, over the year, we have saved hundreds of thousands of pounds just by identifying some practices in our operation that were ripe for improvement, that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to identify were it not for evaluagent,” said Andrew Smith.

Using evaluagent’s automation, 1st Central has been able to reduce the time spent manually planning QA schedules – from more than a day to less than an hour.

The team is now able to use the time to focus on coaching and more strategic insight activity.

With Auto-QA moving towards 100% of all interactions, 1st Central has improved its QA coverage substantially. Now it is able to identify key issues and rectify them to improve the customer experience.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of evaluagent – View the Original Article

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