When one of the fastest growing nationwide wireless service providers wanted to improve customer satisfaction, it was Knowlagent who answered their call for help with customer agent training.
Customer Overview
This wireless provider recognized that with the passing of legislation for wireless local number portability in 2003, the company was being offered a great opportunity to attract new customers.
However, while the company was known as a low cost leader, its customer service was not as highly recognized. In fact, the company ranked fifth out of five in the J.D. Power Awards in customer satisfaction, as compared to the other leading wireless companies.
This wake up call inspired the company to increase their customer satisfaction ratings and improve customer retention.
Key Initiative
As call quality drives customer satisfaction, which ultimately increases revenues, Knowlagent focused on improving the company’s overall call quality during a 60 day pilot, paying close attention to resolving customer issues with the first call.
Knowlagent Solution
While improving call quality was the end goal, the company had to overcome several operational challenges in order to get there. It had a high attrition rate with agents and was struggling on several levels in providing the needed customer agent training. For instance:
- There were not enough customer agent training rooms in their facilities.
- Sharing of new communications was inconsistent, with one team creating a newsletter and another team being directed to the Internet, and another team handling it in yet another manner.
- Customer agent training “herding” time took valuable time away from the phone.
The company selected its lowest performing (and newest) center in the nation for the Knowlagent pilot. The pilot included four groups of four supervisors and their agents as the Treatment Group, with the rest of the call center considered the Control Group.
After taking their baseline quality scores and baseline first call resolution scores, Knowlagent compared them to the rest of the center and built a performance strategy which included the delivery of customized content directly to the agent desktops targeted at improving quality and first call resolution scores.
Impact
After completing the pilot, quality scores improved on the whole, with first call resolutions scores achieving an uplift of 5.29 percent. Overall quality scores improved as well, as compared to the control group.
Also, as validation to their quality improvement in customer satisfaction, the wireless provider received several industry recognitions in 1994 for providing excellent customer service, including from J.D. Power and Associates, the 2004 Customer Care Performance Study, and the 2004 U.S. Wireless Regional Customer Satisfaction Index Study.
Key Facts
Objective: Improve the company’s customer satisfaction scores by improving overall call quality, with specific attention to first-call resolution.
Solution: Knowlagent delivered customized content directly to the agent desktops targeted at improving quality and first-call resolution scores.
Results: Overall quality scores rose 1.02 % as compared to the control group, with first-call resolution scores improving by more than 5%.
Ongoing Benefits:
- Was recognized by J.D. Power and Associates, and several others, as providing excellent customer service only one year later.
- The collections group implemented Knowlagent and improved the average collections per hour per CSR by 17%.
