Case Study: Alterra Mountain Company

CUSTOMER PROFILE

When Alterra Mountain Company promotes its ski and snowboard season pass for destinations around the world, the demand for its 14 remote and hybrid contact centers can be overwhelming. CXone Supervisor provides the live monitoring and robust dashboards needed to keep everyone on target, coaching and reskilling agents in real time and enabling more data-driven decisions.

01 THE BEFORE

Contact centers for all seasons

Alterra Mountain Company (“Alterra”) is best known for Ikon Pass, the premier ski and snowboard season pass for access to more than 50 iconic mountain destinations around the world. Support for Ikon Pass customers is offered across the company’s 14 contact centers, with a dedicated team of 28 to 30 full-time agents. The centers, with hybrid or fully remote teams, handle multichannel communications (call, email, chat and social media). While Alterra’s contact centers support year-round activities and adventures, the hospitality industry is highly seasonal and the volume of interactions fluctuates extensively. Each contact center manager determines how many agents are assigned to handle the ebb and flow of customer calls based on changing variables such as promotional timelines, time of the year (in-season or off-season), and SLA goals.

02 DESIRE TO CHANGE

An overwhelming challenge

Alterra contact centers’ staffing plans for handling the seasonal fluctuations in customer communications are generally based on data collected the previous year. Volumes surge exponentially when deadlines related to Ikon Pass promotions approach, with an increase that can reach 220% over normal seasonal levels.

Regardless of the increased pressure on the contact center agents, Alterra customers expect consistently high-quality support and a premium recreation product. The team, dedicated to providing the best possible service, was feeling overwhelmed. Company leadership and supervisors were feeling the strain as well as they navigated the complexity of multichannel contacts across multiple contact centers in multiple locations, hybrid and remote teams, employees with varied skillsets, extreme seasonality, and intense sales deadlines.

03 THE SOLUTION

Proactive and personalized CX

Alterra selected CXone Supervisor with its comprehensive suite of tools, including customized role-specific dashboards, detailed reporting, and real-time desktop and contact monitoring capabilities. The solution centralized all the voice and digital interaction data in one place, simplifying supervisory tasks and providing more sophisticated, actionable insights. Multi-level filtering and sorting features provide aggregated visualizations, with options for high-level snapshot views or more granular analysis by skill, agent or contact.

David Harrison, Senior Contact Center Analyst, said, “We really appreciate the filtering options in Supervisor, which let us see only what we need to see – when we need to see it.” He explained that the solution helps supervisors stay laser-focused on what is most important at all times, which is a critical factor when handling multiple agents under stressful circumstances.

When the pressure is high, CXone Supervisor provides the Alterra leadership with comprehensive contact center overviews and easy access to key information. The solution’s Insights page includes several tools providing a valuable bird’s-eye view of agent activity and contact states. The “Out of SLA” widget, for example, displays the percentage of ACD skills outside the service level agreement threshold, helping supervisors make more targeted decisions about where to direct their resources.

The real-time data collected by CXone Supervisor, available on-demand, allows supervisors to quickly identify specific live interactions with potential CX issues or detected customer frustration. This makes it easy to be proactive, discreetly coaching remote agents during live customer calls or reskilling them as needed in response to fluctuations in demand. While supervisors have increased visibility into their agents’ activities, whether remote or hybrid, agents are empowered by the increased transparency provided by CXone’s personal performance dashboards.

04 THE RESULTS

A culture of data

The impact of CXone Supervisor on Alterra Mountain Company’s contact centers has been rapid and measurable, with all of them consistently maintaining their SLA goals - even during massive increases in call volume.

In large part, this success has been due to CXone Supervisor enabling supervisors to make data-driven decisions, prioritize their tasks more effectively, jump in when their agents need them most, and preempt potential CX issues. Coaching increased overall by 30% with the added option of live feedback during active interactions and the company saw a 2x increase in efficiency when reskilling agents in response to real-time needs. These improvements have led contact center agents to feel more supported by their supervisors and to demonstrate increased confidence.

CXone Dashboard, accessible through the Supervisor workspace, has been instrumental in creating a data-centric culture across Alterra’s network of contact centers. Dashboard provides Alterra’s employees with highly customizable dashboards, with drag-and-drop widgets, so they can tailor the data visualization to their employees’ unique needs. The custom filtering capabilities enabled supervisors to gain business-critical insights, and the ease with which the dashboards can be shared has enhanced visibility at all levels. The dashboards can be easily shared across the company, with role and permission-based accessibility options. These benefits have been especially important in the complex ecosystem of Alterra’s contact center operations.

05 THE FUTURE

Planning to improve even more

CXone Supervisor has streamlined supervisory activities across Alterra’s contact centers, improving their service and efficiency. The insights provided by the NICE CXone solution and its detailed dashboards have also periodically highlighted where teams are underperforming. The company is incorporating NICE Quality Management dashboards into its contact center technology suite as well, which will allow for targeted, proactive planning to address such issues.