Case Study: How Equiniti Improved Operational Insights

Richard Mill of Business Systems explains how Equiniti were able to gather and assess management information for maximum operational insight.

Let’s face it: contact centre managers would really appreciate a simple way to get deeper insight into their contact centre performance.

The reasons are clear. In today’s unforgiving business environment where data compliance needs are ever-stricter, customer expectations are continuing to rise and what organisations are able to offer is an ever-expanding list, any help can be of  benefit. And for contact centre service providers SLA (service level agreements) benchmarks are also getting ever tighter.

The good news is that some really practical technology can help – with customers getting real-world results out of these systems.

“Using This Software Has Really Helped Us Gain Insight”

One such is FTSE 250 firm Equiniti Group plc, a British-based outsourcing business focused on financial and administration services. Founded in 2007, Equiniti is the UK’s leading provider of share registration services and associated investor schemes, and it also provides administration services for employee share plans, pensions and employee benefits schemes to a number of High St British brands.

Each and every year the Equiniti contact centre assists over 2.6 million customers. Its 400-strong workforce handles nearly 90 million documents and processes £90bn in payments.

Continuous improvement is core to achieving the consistently high level of service clients had come to expect from Equiniti. To obtain better customer insight and optimise their processes, the company installed the Nexidia Speech Analytics system, delivered by Business Systems (UK) Ltd in 2016.

The solution now plays a core part in identifying contact centre issues and processes so they can be improved. Indeed, the project has gone so well that Equiniti’s Continuous Improvement and Insight Manager, Gareth Wallis, has commented: “Using this software has really helped us gain insight into the way our customers interact with Equiniti, enabling us to really listen to our customers, gain feedback from their calls and enhance our ability to deliver a positive memorable experience.”

How did this major British organisation arrive at these outcomes? Let’s step back and see. First, Equiniti was able to get its team properly on-boarded and supported through such a big change. In this case, Business Systems provided two consultants on site who delivered bespoke training sessions to help set queries up and talk through the insights and analytics that the system initially generated.

Gareth agrees this helped: “Business Systems has given us excellent support with the product, whether it be answering questions on future developments and enhancements with Nexidia or offering expertise with system usage.”

Next: the firm focused on things that needed addressing first. For example, Equiniti identified its share dealing service as not delivering the level of customer experience needed. Basically, the process wasn’t delivering a first point of resolution, customers were confused with the steps they were required to take and the information they were required to provide.

Using the Speech Analytics tool, Equiniti listened to the customer journey and identified the calls where the trade was not being completed end-to-end. Based on this insight, Equiniti then searched data sets and identified phrases over various periods. Using the findings from this analysis, its internal specialists identified the ‘pinch points’ in the process and implemented a new script for agents to use.

As a direct result of this intervention, the Customer Experience Centre saw the average call length fall from five minutes to three minutes, improvements accompanied by an increase in first point resolution and an enhanced customer experience.

Next up, Equiniti offers a share dealing account where a yearly fee is taken from customers via a direct debit. But if the direct debit instruction had not been used for a 13-month period, these instructions automatically lapse, requiring the customer to provide Equiniti with details again.

This was not an issue Equiniti was aware of, as the occurrences were infrequent and often masked by other call types. However, through the use of a discovery tool in the Business Systems solution, Equiniti was able to identify this as a potential problem and through a deep-dive process found this to be generating unnecessary call volumes and increased customer dissatisfaction.

With the data analytics gathered, Equiniti arranged for the lapsed timeframe to increase to a period of 3 years instead of 13 months, ensuring the maintenance and customer effort required is kept to a minimum. Overall in 2018, thanks to these and other tweaks to processes that the Speech Analytics platform helped highlight as performance problems, Equiniti has delivered around 30,000 improved customer experiences – causing a 2% increase in Customer Satisfaction scores and an increase in Net Promoter Score (from 48 to 51).

As well as helping to identify processes to improve, Speech Analytics from Business Systems has given Equiniti greater insight into the organisation’s customer experience, customer behaviours and the productivity of their agents. With a focus on agent metrics such as non-talk time and wasted time on calls, Equiniti has easily been able to identify how many calls have those particular issues as well as put a cost value against those interactions in terms of total agent time taken.

After identifying the root cause of the issue and implementing the actions that need to be put in place in order to achieve a better customer experience, the system can also be used to demonstrate the cost savings achieved through the change. Such measurable cost savings – identified through root cause analysis with Analytics – can then be re-invested into further deployment of technologies, or towards the natural attrition in the Customer Experience Centre.

Previously, Equiniti was only able to derive this cost savings data from a small sample of calls – but now it can measure more accurately with a 100% sample rate and give more accurate financial return figures.

Compliance Monitoring

As well as using analytics to identify areas where cost savings can be made, the technology has enabled Equiniti to measure how many agents are offering customers the opportunity to complete a customer survey at the end of every call.

With a strong focus on customer experience, Equiniti relies heavily on this feedback to help improve its operations. Being able to measure this for the first time allows Equiniti further insight into its interactions, driving its net promoter scores, customer satisfaction and customer effort scores, allowing it to stay one step ahead of competitors by listening to what the customers are actually asking for.

Understanding how well the organisation’s agents are doing in terms of compliance monitoring and also overall performance has helped Equiniti better understand agent coaching requirements and build up a library of real-life best- and worst-practice scenarios.

Wallis comments: “We can now target our ‘non-average’ performers quickly and easily, ensure high performers are used as best-practice scenarios and flag low performers as areas for concern and targeted coaching requirements.”

The Future

Along with the rebrand of the ‘Contact Centre’ to the ‘Customer Experience Centre’, Equiniti is now placing a greater emphasis on improving the customer experience by analysing interactions, the way that agents converse with its customers and the language/sentiments being used.

In line with this ethos, it has launched a full Quality Monitoring process, integrating it with analytics so as to ensure this process is fully auditable and will drive quality improvements as well as analytics root cause analysis. Equiniti is also looking at generating further client insight for their corporate customers, specifically using the data taken from end users and turning it into valuable insight… think, How many customers tend to call in that specific time period? and What questions are they asking?

Insights derived from such analyses will offer partners invaluable customer feedback, enabling the company to change communications and behaviours in line with the voice of the customer.

All in all, this example of use of great performance tracking software is testament to the valuable customer intelligence and deeper insight the contact centre manager can achieve using smart call centre analytics.