CUSTOMER PROFILE
Pfizer’s US Trade Group, responsible for supporting trade customers including pharmacies, health care provider offices, long-term care centers, and wholesalers, wanted to improve customer experience through improved efficiency, better training, and smoother support for growing at-home agent hours. NICE CXone helped Pfizer on this journey.
01 THE BEFORE
Slow adjustments to a hybrid-agent world
Pfizer’s trade-facing contact center helps wholesalers, providers, and long-term care facilities manage everything from vaccine deployment to routine shipments. Although Pfizer had experimented with hybrid agent models, until recently agents spent 90% or more of their time in-office. As a result, most of the company’s onboarding, training, and evaluation processes assumed that agents would be available onsite at almost any time. Workforce engagement strategies similarly were built entirely around the assumption of face-to-face contact.
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
Becoming a true hybrid contact center
When most of Pfizer’s agents shifted to a work-from- home model in 2020, the limitations of the on-premise assumptions were clear. At the time, onboarding assumed that agents would sit next to a seasoned agent, plug in to an auxiliary jack, and listen to live calls to learn the ropes. “Onboarding became a big challenge,” says Lou Castagna, Pfizer operations support coordinator.
Pfizer also recognized that customer experience was being eroded in subtle, difficult-to-identify ways during periods of high work-from-home volume, but lacked a specific metric to identify and correct the issue.
03 THE SOLUTION
A modern approach to quality and experience
Pfizer started applying more of the capability and potential of its NICE CXone solution to modernize quality management and onboarding processes, with an eye toward improving overall customer experiences over the long haul. Specialists created curated lists of recorded calls, complete with screen capture playback, and deployed those to both new hires and existing agents. To ease the onboarding process for new hires, Pfizer created a special agent- in-training profile with limited options in the NICE CXone interface, making it easier to focus on quality lessons before getting up to speed with the full CXone solution.
This process was extended to experienced agents, as well. They had previously lacked closed-loop visibility into their work evaluations. They would receive evaluation forms from supervisors, but not have a clear path to replay the call while reading over the evaluation report. Agents had to manually request links to their calls from an analyst if they wanted to review the recording to better parse the results of an evaluation.
04 THE RESULTS
Consistent, connected access to experience insights
Agents new and old reported positive experiences with call review on demand through CXone. New hires can be onboarded from any location. Experienced agents have on-demand access to recorded calls and evaluations. Since switching to self-service call reviews in CXone, the need for reminder emails to take follow-up action on completed evaluations has dropped significantly. “I used to have to constantly send those reminders. Now, any time agents have free time, they can go right in and look at evaluations, instead of scrolling through their emails for reminders,” says Jay Soria, Pfizer customer service support analyst.
Experienced agents learn from supervisor evaluations, as the score sheets are now linked to and shown side-by-side with the associated calls. Caller sentiment analysis via NICE CXone helps agents at all levels of tenure better understand how their handling affects customer experience. Improved call categorization also makes it easier to identify and share examples of standout calls—a process that had taken as long as one day per categorized call in the past.
Pfizer specialists also created a new monitoring statistic to evaluate agent performance and track customer experience. This new working rate metric combined time spent in available, inbound, and outbound call states, and helped improve identification of high-productivity agents. The metric also exposed a customer experience gap. At- home agents frequently neglected to toggle their state to unavailable for short bathroom or water breaks, which caused a spike in calls ringing for longer than 20 seconds (Pfizer’s target service level) or being refused. “Tracking this on a month-by-month basis is directly increasing our service levels and customer experience, because we have fewer callers waiting for representatives to pick up the phone,” Castagna says.
Pfizer also credits NICE CXone’s flexibility with helping cushion the dual impact of COVID’s workforce disruption and heavy call volume due to vaccine- related calls to the company’s injectables service center. Call volume to the injectables center climbed in 2020 and 2021 and service levels dipped from 2019 levels. Even as call volumes remain high, service levels have been increasing for partial-year 2022. At all times, service levels stayed in Pfizer’s accepted range.
05 THE FUTURE
Maintained focus on performance, greater work flexibility
Pfizer will build on these new customer experience protections by expanding its hybrid workforce model in the years to come. Most agents will work three days remote and two days in-office. The company expects to delve into more CXone functionality to promote greater employee engagement via gamification in this long-term hybrid model, and to maintain high levels of schedule adherence. Customer surveys will also play a greater role in employee evaluation and closed-loop understanding of customer experience.
