How Four Contact Centers Did It Successfully
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How Four Contact Centers Did It Successfully
Transforming the Customer Experience:
Table of Contents
Introduction...3
Activision: Meet growing caller demand...4
Extra Space Storage: Nearly doubled their reservations...6
Atlantic Automotive: Integrate multiple technologies...8
AAA Auto Club: Gain insight into customers’ experience...10
Can the cloud help you do smarter business?...12
Meet growing caller demand
Nearly doubled their reservations
Integrate multiple technologies
Gain insight into customers’ experience
As a call center, business is a lot different than it used to be. Once upon a time, you only had to worry about the competition down the street. These days, you not only have to worry about them, but you have to worry about being better than businesses in the next city, in the next state and, thanks to economic globalization, you also have to worry about competition on other continents. Competition is only part of the problem. Not only are they competing against you, but they are commoditizing your products and your brand.
Things aren’t any easier for your customers either. When looking for products and services, they are flooded with options. When they do a simple online search, they’re given thousands of options to sort through and then have to take on the daunting task of separating the legitimate businesses and potential candidates from the scammers and the spammers. Then, once they’ve made their list, they are faced with having to contact their prospect companies through layers of inefficient and painstaking communication channels. Whoever said spending money was fun didn’t shop in this decade.
So, as a business, how are you supposed to compete? How can you set yourself apart, win customers and keep them? If you are in it to win— to build a brand and make money despite all the imposters— you simply have to do business smarter and better than they can.
One way of doing this is to use more agile cloud-based contact center technologies that can save you money while also giving you a plethora of tools to delight your customers, build your brand and make the competition a distant memory.
Want to know how it’s done? Read through the following few pages and discover how companies just like yours leveraged the power of the cloud to delight their customers and do business smarter than their competitors.
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Aging premise system
•Seasonal call volumes
•Multiple call center locations
•No performance metrics
•Needed cost-effective solution
Best known for Guitar Hero and Call of Duty, interactive entertainment company Activision had a rapidly expanding customer base and a dwindling premise phone system, making it impossible to handle call volumes and provide the level of customer service they needed to build and grow their business.
Their Story
The 2008-2009 Christmas season really rocked for Activision. During that three-month holiday period, their call volumes set off an 85,000 call explosion. Good news, right? Unfortunately, they were operating on a ten-year old phone switch that could only handle 24 concurrent calls. They could have just upgraded their premise system, but that was a significant capital expense -- one that didn’t make much sense when the equipment would only be fully utilized a few months out of the year.
Their rapid growth also necessitated the addition of a second contact center— a center that could handle all of their technical support calls. To accomplish that, they had to overcome a big roadblock in the form of money, time and technical ability.
Their other big challenge was assessing their contact centers’ performance. They wanted to delight their customers, but had no way of measuring how their customers even really felt about them. If they wanted to create a differentiated customer interaction, they needed some visibility into their customers’ experience.
Meet Growing Caller Demand and Add a Contact Center
“It made no sense to purchase an installed switch to
accommodate 50 agents for three months of the year and
then only use ten of the ports for the other nine months.”
Kirk McNesby,
Technical Operations, Activision
Meet Growing Caller Demand and Add a Contact Center
Activision did not have a system robust enough to help them with their seasonal call volumes. Fortunately, inContact’s skills-based ACD is in the cloud. That meant that Activision didn’t have to buy a lot of equipment as they feared, but simply had to request agent ports as needed. This gave them the ability to scale up and down on demand and only pay for what they actually used. All in all, they saved a lot of money and were able to help their customers when they called, no matter what time of year it was.
To better serve their customers, Activision decided to use an outsourcer to handle their technical support calls. Good idea, but it left them with the problem of connecting two geographically challenged centers with different infrastructures, the problematic possibility of serving up two completely different customer experiences, and no visibility into their new center. With inContact, it was no sweat. inContact transformed the two centers into one virtual department. With inContact’s cloud-based ACD and IVR, Activision customers could call and then be instantly sent to the relevant contact center for their needs, regardless of where they were located.
The last problem Activision faced was around performance metrics. inContact’s workforce optimization tools gave Activision the ability to log and analyze things like answer speed, abandon rates, duration of lunch breaks and hear actual feedback from their customers. This gave them the insights they needed for quality control and to create a positive and brand-building customer experience for their customers.
•
Robust cloud-based ACD and
IVR that handles call volumes
and routes intelligently
•
On-demand scalability
•
Seamless connectivity between
both call centers
•
Full visibility into operations at
both call centers
•
No additional capital expense
“inContact solved our holiday call overload problem with its
on-demand scalability, but it has done so much more. With
integrated support for our outsourced contact center and
comprehensive agent performance metrics and reporting, we
have the tools to be much more efficient than ever before.”
Kirk McNesby,
Technical Operations, Activision
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Poor communications process
between their outsourcer and
storage facilities
•
Disjointed customer experience
•Needed to build an in-house
call center from scratch in
eight weeks
Extra Space Storage is the second largest storage company in the U.S. In 2008, they had a goal of doubling their storage footprint in five years. The problem was that their outsourcer gave them no visibility into their customer contacts, making it difficult to leverage their interactions to convert storage prospects into storage customers. If they were going to achieve their goal, they needed to rethink their call-handling strategy.
Their Story
When customers called the outsourcer used by Extra Space Storage, the company had no way of knowing whether a caller had phoned before or was already a customer. When the outsourcer made prospect appointments, they often didn’t get retrieved by local retail personnel before the prospect showed up to see a unit. This created a disjointed customer experience that definitely didn’t help drive sales.
In order to reach their goals, Extra Space Storage knew they had to do something about this communication gap. This meant taking on the task of creating a centralized in-house contact center from the ground up. While it was the right solution for them, this strategy posed a number of challenges— one of which was an expiring contract with their outsourcer that would necessitate a short eight-week turnaround.
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“Our service had no way of knowing whether the caller
had phoned before or was already a customer, outsourcer
appointments sent by email sometimes didn’t get retrieved
before the customer showed up to see a unit and so on. We
really wanted to improve the customer experience as well as
our ability to track all customer contacts.”
Chris Spear,
Director of Program Management, Extra Space Storage
Challenges
With inContact’s fast cloud-enabled integration capabilities, Extra Space Storage was able to meet their goal of building a 50-seat contact center from scratch in their aggressive eight-week time-frame. Further facilitating this was the user-friendly platform that made it possible for agents to get up and running in no time.
To close their communication and service gap, in addition to the inContact platform, Extra Space Storage chose to implement a CRM system. The inContact platform and the new CRM system worked hand in glove to create an informed and hassle-free customer experience. The result of all these efforts? Extra Space Storage was able to nearly DOUBLE their storage reservation rates.
•
Connected new in-house
call center to their 740
storage facilities
•
With inContact and addition
of a CRM, they were able
to create a better customer
experience that nearly doubled
phone reservation rates
•
inContact outfitted 50 agents
and integrated with their new
CRM by their eight-week
deadline
•
Were able to accomplish goals
without additonal capital
expense
“With inContact and Salesforce CRM, we have been able
to buy a service instead of an asset. They do all the heavy
lifting in terms of the technology, and that allows us to focus
on using both platforms to help provide our customers with
superior sales and service.”
Chris Spear,
Director of Program Management, Extra Space Storage
Cloud-Enabled Solutions
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Multiple CRMs and back
office systems
•
Had critical information
gap that threatened the
customer experience
•
Wanted integrated channels
of communication
•
Seasonal call volumes
•
Needed to be able to quickly
change call flows to meet
demand
Atlantic Automotive is a group of multi-franchise auto dealerships. While having multiple dealerships is great for a growing company, each dealership operated with their own CRM and back-office systems. This made it extremely difficult to reap the benefits of their multiple locations, especially when it came to communicating with their customers.
Their Story
Atlantic Automotive’s challenges were complex. They were running on multiple CRM systems at multiple locations and their contact center agents lacked the technology to synthesize information. This often resulted in uninformed service and customers receiving multiple (and annoying) phone calls from multiple people.
In addition to their customer and information gap, Atlantic Automotive wanted to give their customers as many points of contact as possible, this meant utilizing the internet and text. Unfortunately, their disconnected systems didn’t support this kind of communication.
Like Activision, Atlantic Automotive’s business was also seasonal. They got busier in the summer and slowed down during the winter months. They needed to be able to scale up and down and also wanted the ability to change call routing on-the-fly to meet changing demand.
“However a customer wants to communicate with us, we
want to be available to them.”
Corran Ashby,
Call Center Manager, Mile One Automotive
Challenges
With inContact’s cloud-based solutions, Atlantic Automotive was able to connect their multiple CRMs and back-office systems. This put all the information in one place, enabling them to piece together a full customer story— things like how many visits specific customers made and what kinds of cars they were looking at. And, instead of annoying the customer with multiple phone calls, they were able to provide a single informed follow-up.
They were also able to create new channels of communication for their customers. Their customers can now contact Atlantic through a wide variety of integrated technologies including phone, e-mail, text, chat, Facebook, Twitter and blogs— all through a single unified cloud-based system. It helps Atlantic drive more sales and makes life easier for their customers.
Atlantic Automotive also found the scalability and ease of functionality they needed. With inContact’s cloud scalability, they can scale up and down on demand. They can also change their call-flows as necessary, making them extremely agile when it comes to adapting to market changes.
•
Integrated technologies that
work as a single, centralized
system
•
Gained visibility into their
customers visits, regardless of
what dealerships they visited
•
Connected to customers
through chat, text, Facebook,
Twitter and more
•
Now have on-demand calability
•Can make on-the-fly
adjustments to their call flows
“We now have the tools available to us to allow us to change
the customer experience…inContact is part of the reason we,
as a company, are better.”
Corran Ashby,
Call Center Manager, Atlantic Automotive
Cloud-Enabled Solutions:
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Difficult and unreliable IVR
survey system
•
Biased customer
feedback system
•
No actionable customer insights
AAA Auto Club South (ACS) serves residents of Florida, Georgia, Western Central Tennessee and Puerto Rico. As a membership-driven company, customers must be their number one priority. Unfortunately, their best customer insights came from an unreliable survey system that could be manipulated by their contact center agents.
Their Story
For a customer feedback system to be effective, it has to be unbiased and reflective of all customers— those happy and those dissatisfied. However, ACS was utilizing a cumbersome feedback system where their agents had control over who took the survey it and who didn’t— skewing results. Further complicating things, the legacy IVR based system was unreliable and hard to use, making it hard to pull information. This meant ACS had no real “voice of the customer” data to drive service improvements.
“Without inContact ECHO, we wouldn’t know where to begin
in getting extra, personalized touches out to members.”
Amy Thornhill,
Quality Assurance Coordinator, AAA Auto Club South
Challenges
•
Installed a flexible, easy to use
cloud-based IVR
•
Implemented a well-rounded
customer survey program
•
Have real feedback enabling
them to make educated
decisions
ACS decided to implement inContact’s ECHO Customer Survey. Because it didn’t have a self-selection feature, they were able to get feedback from happy and disappointed customers alike. They are also able to listen to every single customer comment, which enabled them to self-correct and make things right for their customers based on information rather than subjective interpretation.
With the visibility ECHO Customer Survey has provided them, ACS has improved operations as well. Armed with customer information, they have the ability to identify recurring service issues so they can develop smarter long-term strategies for their customers. They are also able to use actual phone calls for training purposes and positive reinforcement.
“Without ECHO, we wouldn’t know where to begin in getting
extra, personalized touches out to members.”
Amy Thornhill,
Quality Assurance Coordinator, AAA Auto Club South
Cloud-Enabled Solutions
866.965.SaaS (7227) | inContact.com 1586
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And your customers can:
• Communicate with you via chat, email, text, Facebook, Twitter and more
• Enjoy a brand-building customer experience made possible by real business intelligence, CRM integration and inContact’s contact center best practices.
• Get the service they need when they need it with on-demand scalability
• Choose their method of interaction with intelligent self-service
• Have reliable service they can trust with inContact’s 99.9% uptime and security compliance
All four of the companies featured could have tackled their problems a variety of ways. However, after careful consideration, they decided to get with the cloud. As a result, they were able to reach their goals and achieve more success than they could have using more traditional technologies— and they were able to do it fast, painlessly and without a big upfront expense. More importantly, they were able to turn their challenges into opportunities that gave them advantages over their competitors. And in this market,
that’s how you succeed.
You can leverage the cloud to solve your challenges and get ahead too. Benefits like these and others can give you the power to differentiate your contact center, run more cost effectively and do more and earn more than you could any other way. If you are looking for a way to differentiate yourself and stand out to your customers, the cloud is the answer.
Like many businesses, each of these four companies had a unique set of challenges that was holding them back from reaching their goals and full potential. Instead of running scared or giving up, they chose to be proactive about it— earning them a big gold star in the annals of success. So, this brings us to you. Can these same cloud solutions really make that big of a difference? Can they really help your customers find you, love you, continue to use you and recommend you to others?
Consider these benefits. With the cloud you can:
• Improve profitability without a capital expenditure
• Save up to 50% with lower cost of ownership over legacy premise systems
• See a two month ROI on average
• Have at-home workforce flexibility
• Connect multiple locations seamlessly
• Expand fast, easy and inexpensively
• Program scripts on-the-fly
• Scale on-demand
• Integrate with multiple technologies, often becoming the glue that makes everything work together
• Benefit from free, automatic updates all year long
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