Agent evaluations held back by inconsistency and opacity
Realtor.com’s high-volume, high-value contact center had carefully orchestrated scripting and workflow, but the call review process was an entirely different story. Quality reviews were an extremely manual process, with a limited number of calls per agent reviewed by Quality Specialists who received limited automation support. The resulting call review data was siloed, requiring special merges to produce any meaningful reporting. In all less than 5% of calls were ever reviewed, and it was very difficult for agents to gain insights from the process outside a formal coaching session.
Each contact center leader operated with their own spreadsheet and note-taking system. “We had a subjective approach to measuring soft skills, and each leader was responsible for recording and tracking their own coaching notes,” said Dustin Emmerich, senior manager of revenue enablement at Realtor.com. “And obviously, that is just not ideal.”
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
Toward a culture of voice intelligence
Over time the organization recognized the limitations of this approach. Management struggled to understand even the raw number of coaching sessions and coaching reports being generated. “We knew we needed to be smarter, to be able to look at our interactions and gain insights to empower the business from them,” Emmerich said.
The organization recognized the need to be more structured and consistent in its approach to quality and customer experience. Reimagining the quality team as the Voice Intelligence team was an important early step and reflected the new initiative’s needs. “We know our people are mostly on process. But we needed to understand the customer experience more in depth," said Brent Albarado, Director of Voice Intelligence at Realtor.com.
03 THE SOLUTION
Consistency and transparency with NICE Interaction Analytics
Realtor.com implemented NICE solutions including NICE Interaction Analytics in November 2023 to gain insights from every call, and to add both automation and objectivity to call quality scoring. Interaction Analytics' evaluation portal provides clean and consistent evaluation templates and clear metrics about coaching activity across the contact center. Supervisors are aided by autosuggestions for several fields of the call review form based on results from Interaction Analytics' analysis, and leadership has better visibility into an agent’s quality history throughout their tenure with the organization, which in the past could be obscured when agents changed teams. “This mindset shift to Voice Intelligence automates compliance, allows our team to broaden scope to analyze revenue-generating behaviors, and draw consumer experience insights at scale from our consumer interactions,” Emmerich said.
All calls are now automatically analyzed and objectively scored on a variety of compliance metrics including soft skills. Agents gain insights into their performance over time and senior leadership receives dossier reports with overall insights that were previously difficult to obtain.
Quality professionals were brought on board first in the staggered rollout, followed by front-line leaders who were given a month to familiarize themselves with the tools before agents were added. Realtor.com paired the rollout with clear communication around the motivations and intended outcomes of the change to agents and leaders alike. “It’s changed the conversations around our compliance evaluations. Now we can show them that when people follow our advice they’re super-successful 75% of the time, instead of following their path and succeeding just 20% of the time,” Albarado said. “It’s a more productive conversation and it drives the business in the right direction.”
04 THE RESULTS
Lean, results-oriented insights
With the transformation in both technology and process, Realtor.com has already banked several tangible victories. Automation frees quality professionals to spend more time listening to and analyzing calls and interactions at scale. At an organizational level, reporting on legal compliance steps have improved, becoming even more competent, and agents can better understand their contributions and potential shortcomings. “With NICE, there’s one place to click and see all of your scores and listen to all of your interactions,” Emmerich said. “It’s giving our agents a new way to think about performance and new insights into how they perform.”
The call evaluation auto-suggest has been verified as being 95% correct over time, redeploying the quality team to drive business and revenue. “It’s a stair-step on the way to full automation, and we feel confident that we’re moving in the right direction,” Albarado said.
05 THE FUTURE
Deeper automation and more revenue opportunities
As automated voice insights prove their worth in the contact center, Realtor.com is exploring other ways to apply NICE Interaction Analytics and Enlighten AI, including other departments. “We’re looking at everything that will enable our Voice Intelligence team to focus on the behaviors driving revenue,” Albarado said.
Realtor.com is planning to explore the effects and revenue potential of encouraging more open-ended conversations with callers to further improve the customer experience. The company is engaging with NICE on a large language model (LLM) AI opportunity, Enlighten Gen-Insights, which leverages industryspecific Enlighten models and best-fit LLMs to instantly generate new actionable data in response to complex brand-specific prompts.
“NICE Interaction Analytics gives us more consistency and better insights from a bigger volume of calls. It’s a windfall of information unlike any I’ve had in my eight years with the company.”
DIRECTOR OF VOICE INTELLIGENCE REALTOR.COM
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BRENT ALBARADO
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Realtor.com is one of the most-visited real estate sites in the US. It's mission is to make buying, selling, and living in homes easier and more rewarding for everyone. Realtor.com serves consumers looking to inquire about buying or selling a property by connecting them with a real estate professional in their market and serves real estate agents by connecting them with consumers looking to transact real estate: to buy, sell, or rent.
