Case Study: How Asurion Boosted Contact Centre Efficiency

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This case study tells how Aspect Software provided Asurion with the capability to improve contact centre efficiency and performance.

The Organisation

For more than 20 years, Asurion’s innovation and dedication to delighting customers has made it the preferred provider of technology protection to wireless carriers, retailers and device manufacturers. Asurion’s 17,000 global employees support its 280 million consumers.

The company’s solutions include premier support which enables consumers to fully utilise their digital devices and products; applications to protect privacy and provide security; and rapid replacement of lost, stolen, damaged, or malfunctioning devices.

When a product is missing or simply doesn’t work properly, Asurion solves the problem with people and processes at work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, speaking six languages, across any device, platform, or provider.

Motivation for Change

Asurion was finding a good balance between providing exceptional customer experiences and achieving their strategic business goals. However, traditional methods of communicating with agents about administrative matters were consuming too much time and actually causing agent satisfaction to decline.

Agents were missing opportunities for voluntary time-off (VTO) and overtime (OT) because they were receiving the notifications too late to take advantage of them. Further, the contact centre was spending significant amounts of time receiving and approving requests for schedule changes from agents.

This was largely due to Asurion having no effective way to communicate with agents in real-time, using agents’ preferred contact channels.

Desired Solution

Asurion began to look for technology solutions that could keep their contact centre staffed to match call volumes, easily respond to agents’ requests for schedule changes, and communicate to agents in real-time using their channel of choice.

The major considerations in evaluating workforce solutions were ease of use, anytime access for agents and the ability to issue proactive notifications.

Why Aspect

Asurion was using the Aspect EQ Workforce Management (WFM) solution to ensure they had the right agents in the rights places at the right time.

When Asurion began talking with Aspect about Aspect EQ Inform, they were thrilled to learn that Inform could meet and even exceed all their needs around pro-active notifications initiated by key workforce management events.

After deploying Inform, Asurion could send out proactive push and desktop notifications via SMS and email, and Asurion contact centre management and their agents alike began benefitting from having control over notification preferences.

The agents then started using Aspect EQ Workforce Mobile and Aspect EQ Virtual Schedule Attendant (VSA) to respond to these notifications. Workforce Mobile is an easy-to use smartphone app that empowers agents to self-manage their schedules remotely from smart phones and tablet devices while they are “on the go”.

Virtual Schedule Attendant is an IVR application that allows agents without smartphones to easily manage their schedules remotely.

Jon Malinowski, Senior Director Workforce Management, Asurion, commented: “Every time we threw a curveball at the Aspect team and asked about custom capabilities for Inform, the answer was always Yes, we can do that.”

The Results

Asurion and Aspect’s Professional Services team (APS) worked together to build out the solution to meet Asurion’s specific needs: agents do not receive notifications when they are in the contact centre, agents are in control of their preferences and can select the type and time of notifications they want to receive, and the contact centre can also set business-rules to determine which agents receive the notifications.

The combination of Aspect Inform, Workforce Mobile and VSA gives contact centre agents more freedom and flexibility with their schedules – and at the same time helps Asurion meet the needs of their customers by having a fully staffed contact centre.

Asurion has seen great success in their roll-out of the Aspect solution. To educate agents and encourage them to use the system, Asurion hosted training roadshows on-site, incorporated training into onboarding, and utilised the resources of the marketing team to help communicate the value of the Aspect solution to agents.

These Initiatives Have Resulted in:

  • 62% of agent population engaged in mobile, email and/or SMS
  • 23% of workforce schedule segments are being entered via VSA
  • Reduction of 2,500 administration man-hours annually
  • Increasing weekly toward their goal of 80%+ of agents engaged in mobile/email/SMS
  • One unit is already seeing 84% engagement with 2,500+ agents
  • VSA covering Voluntary time off (VTO), Overtime (OT), Absent, Leave of absence (LOA) Average of 35,000 notifications a week with a posted weekly high of 47,000

Jon Malinowski added: “Proactive notifications and the ability to respond via mobile devices help each agent achieve a better work-life balance by understanding individual agent preferences, facilitating their mobile lifestyles, and saving them time. The result is better agent engagement, higher morale and lower turnover.”

Since implementing the Aspect solution, Asurion has experienced increased agent satisfaction, lower absenteeism, increased OT and VTO fill rates, reduced administration workload from dialling agents, decreased administration time from WFM teams entering exceptions, and gained the ability to quickly communicate to the agent population during emergencies.

Author: Robyn Coppell

Published On: 6th Oct 2017 - Last modified: 5th Mar 2020
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