How A Multinational Design and Marketing Firm Transformed Their Contact Center Operations Saving Over $30 Million in under a year
The Challenge
Whether it’s a local restaurant owner who wants to create an eye-catching menu, an arts and crafts maker who needs to set themselves apart with trade show displays, or an entrepreneur building their online presence from scratch, this design and marketing firm is ready to help small businesses with all their marketing needs. With millions of small businesses relying on them and dozens of offices across the world, the firm had a tough challenge on their hands. Their contact centers, spread across the globe, operated like isolated islands, each with its own unique standard of quality and their own reporting tools. This decentralized approach, while initially intended to cater to local nuances, had led to a patchwork of customer experiences, leading to inconsistencies and a lack of corporate visibility into how agents were interacting with customers.
A particularly concerning issue was the issuance of refunds, credits, and replacements, known internally as the Customer Experience Recovery or CXR. Without a centralized system to track and monitor CXR, an internal audit revealed that as many as 30% of refunds and credits issued were unwarranted. This alarming trend stemmed from a prevalent tendency of agents to appease customers without following the de-escalation steps at the cost of the company’s bottom line. Righting this problem required consistency in QA teams across the organization. The leadership realized that they require a consistent quality standard so that all customers, in all locales, for all types of contact interactions, always receive reliable, high-quality service.
To that end, their leadership recognized the need for a transformative solution, one that would bridge the gap between their global contact centers, unify customer experiences, and stem the losses. With a goal to reduce unwarranted refunds and credits to under 10% by 2024, they set out in search of a comprehensive solution.
The Transformation Journey
The firm created a capabilities matrix outlining 158 touchpoints ranging from core quality assurance parameters, text analytics, sentiment analysis, integration capabilities, and translation capabilities to user experience, to name a few. When they set out to find a CCAI provider with these capabilities, they found the differentiation with Level AI came across in most if not all, categories within the capabilities matrix. Level AI had the perfect automated QA and coaching platform.
We chose Level AI because of its uncanny ability to accelerate production, add value, and “transform science fiction into science fact.” – Global Director of Quality
After a proof of concept and evaluation, Level AI rolled out the QA and coaching solution across the company’s global contact centers from Berlin to Manila, handling the different languages with ease.
The firm leveraged Level AI’s powerful Instascore model to set up a “CXR” scorecard that covers all interactions where they process a refund, credit, or replacement. This enabled them to automatically monitor 100% of CXR interactions for unwarranted actions. Once they identified agents and teams that were not following the de-escalation steps to reduce refunds, they utilized the coaching module to set up targeted action plans, select customer conversations for review and coaching, schedule coaching sessions, and track progress.
The Result
The change in processes at the firm was noticeable immediately. There was now a strong focus on improving agent performance, and this was reflected in the QA scores. In just three months, the average QA score shot up from 60% to 88%, corresponding to a wave of happy customers. To top it off, the cost savings from reduced unwarranted refunds came in at over $30M within the first year of the engagement. Their target was to reduce unwarranted credit rate to 10% by FY 2024, but with Level AI’s stellar QA, Coaching, and Reporting modules, they reached 7% by mid 2023!
