The UK savings organisation has simplified its back-office customer support processes with help from EvaluAgent.
NS&I is a savings organisation based in the UK, offering a number of financial products and services to over 25 million customers.
Its contact centres and back-office customer support centres are outsourced to international digital services provider Atos, with four sites housing over 300 front-line agents and over 600 back-office staff, in Blackpool, Durham, Glasgow and Chennai.
Front-line staff primarily handle inbound service enquiries via phone and email, but also manage outbound sales. In the back office, staff process paper and email requests from customers, as well as proactively resolving customer issues.
The challenge
To achieve its customer-centric vision, the company needed to integrate the back-office more tightly with the contact centre and simplify back-office customer support processes to make them less prone to mistakes.
While the management team was aware of volumes of rework and repeat contacts – defined as contacts resulting from the failure of earlier processes to satisfy the customer’s needs – the spreadsheet-based management information offered limited insight into the scope and scale of the problem.
Within the back office, there was a tendency towards fire-fighting and reacting to “one-off” customer issues that weren’t being grouped together and analysed to understand the bigger picture.
With only a basic quality assurance programme in place, it was difficult to identify mistakes unless they resulted in a complaint.
At the same time, with limited formalised feedback and coaching procedures in place, it was almost impossible to ensure that errors were being fed back to agents in order to avoid repeat contacts from dissatisfied customers.
As with any organisation where work is processed in multiple locations, lines of communication were not always as effective as they could be. The outcome for some customers was errors and long lead times in order to have their query resolved.
Meanwhile, agents were struggling to deal with significant levels of difficult and complex queries resulting from a business still very dependent upon the use of paper-based customer-contact forms. All of this was inevitably having an impact upon agent morale and customer satisfaction.
The solution
Atos rolled out the EvaluAgent’s cloud-based back-office suite across all three UK centres.
The back-office suite enables back-offices to manage, support and engage employees using customer-focused metrics such as quality, rework metrics, and real-time customer feedback.
The deployment has given agents, team leaders and contact centre managers the ability to:
- Monitor back-office performance indicators (PIs), including customer-focused elements of emails and letters and adherence to back-office processes and policies
- Capture and report real-time feedback from customer contacts and deliver this direct to the agent’s desktop
- Manage and track repeat contacts and identify the root cause of rework
- Schedule, manage and record collaborative agent coaching
- Close the loop by tracking and reporting on subsequent improvement via that coaching
- Introduce gamification into the back office by assigning agents points and rewards for showing improvement and consistent performance
- Semi-automate the collation and reporting of contractual back-office PIs and make results much more visible across multiple sites and geographies to enable increased co-operation and collaboration.
The results
- Improvements in efficiency – The amount of work items being received by the back office has fallen by 21%. A third of that result has been driven by a reduction in rework based on root-cause analysis and enhanced agent coaching.
- Reduction in complaints – By addressing agents’ behaviour as well as skills gaps, the software produced improvements, with service-based complaint volumes dropping by 10% over the last twelve months.
- Agent performance improvement – Agents have shown consistent improvement in their performance as a result of more visible quality results and the resulting coaching and feedback; over 10,000 coaching and feedback sessions have been completed and documented since the system went live.
- Increased collaboration across sites – For agents and team leaders, one of the biggest improvements is the positive impact on the general culture in the back-office centres. With clearer and more concise performance data, operational managers across sites are better placed to understand the root cause of issues and work together to deliver a better experience for the customer.
“EvaluAgent has enabled us to implement a systematic approach to quality assurance that is also tailored to our existing back-office processes. As a result, we have reduced customer complaints and rework requests, but perhaps the most significant success indicator is the impact this has had driving performance conversations between Team Leaders and their team members,” said Andreana Carrigan, Head of Operations at NS&I. “They now have much more meaningful conversations based on fact rather than gut instinct. This has resulted in a more trusting relationship between the agent and their line manager and the development and commitment to real value-adding actions that improve performance and where success can be measured.”
“I really enjoy having more regular coaching and feedback. It has helped me to understand what I need to do to improve my performance as well as highlighting areas where I am doing well,” said a Team Leader at NS&I. “This enables me to take an active role in my own development and gives me more confidence when dealing with customers.”
For more information about EvaluAgent, visit their website.
Author: Megan Jones
Published On: 8th Apr 2015 - Last modified: 18th Dec 2018
Read more about - Archived Content, Case Studies, EvaluAgent
