CUSTOMER PROFILE
In late 2019, ScS began a customer service centralization project for its nearly 100 home furnishing stores. Soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, dramatically accelerating the need of those efforts. By the end of 2021, the company recognized that it was necessary to improve both tools and processes in order to properly and efficiently handle a wide variety of customer inquiries. To better meet customer needs and reduce overall contact volume, ScS implemented NICE CXone.
01 THE BEFORE
A bumpy beginning for centralized service
To streamline the customer service experience and take customer service, support, and issue resolution out of its dozens of retail showrooms, ScS centralized all service inquiries across its three contact centers in late 2019. The operation handles pre-purchase inquiries, pre-delivery and delivery- related inquiries, post-purchase support, and direct sales. The contact centers also dispatch ScS’ team of upholstery and furniture repair technicians. Within a week, the 200 ScS representatives speak with up to 10,000 customers. “At first we just put a phone on everyone’s desk. No planning, no analytics, no quality management. We thought it would be easy: ‘when the phone rings, just answer it’!” said Dan Bennett, ScS director of customer experience.
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
Overwhelmed
The COVID-driven rapid shift to at-home work in early 2020 further strained the ScS contact operation. The shocking contact volume added extra pressure. Between inaccurate projections and heavy consumer emphasis on improving living spaces during pandemic restrictions, ScS’s agents were simply overwhelmed. “We thought we would probably handle around 500,000 calls per year. In actual fact, we handled 1.1 million customer contacts in our first year, and we were not equipped for that,” Bennett said. “It was quite an eye-opener.”
With demand only increasing throughout 2020 and 2021, ScS’s backlog was getting worse. Digital channels including chat and email surged in popularity and agents were under-prepared to handle the higher volume.
“We realized we were going to have to do things differently and bring in more technology to focus on the right channels and help us provide service to customers,” Bennett said.
03 THE SOLUTION
A fresh start with CXone
Bennett came over from heading ScS’s online sales to lead the reorganization of the struggling contact center. Consultants recommended stand-alone solutions in quality management, workforce planning, and analytics. Bennett wanted to find a leading-edge solution with tight integration, strong soft phone capabilities, and an architecture prepared for future growth. “Once we did a little benchmarking against NICE’s competitors it became apparent that we had a good opportunity with CXone, especially with our telesales contact center platform reaching the end of its contract,” Bennett said. “The time was right to do something big and use the full CXone suite.”
ScS, NICE, and consulting partner SVL collaborated to make the transition fast and smooth, and the first live call on CXone rang September 1, 2022. ScS relies on CXone for far more than live customer contacts. The company developed workflows to connect and organize 257 discrete back-office processes on CXone. “Their work is automatically deployed through the CXone platform, and we can control who gets that work and how frequently through skills-based routing,” Bennett said.
In addition to skills-based routing, features such as centralized multi-skill scheduling, an automated voice dialer, enhanced customer IVR, and quality analytics provide ScS with the depth of features and functionality lacking from the initial consolidation of customer service in 2019. With stronger remote worker capabilities, ScS has been able to expand the labor pool outside the typical radius around its Sunderland headquarters, improving prospects to maintain optimal staffing levels. “In this part of the UK there are a lot of contact centers and churn is high as people jump from one company to another,” Bennett said.
04 THE RESULTS
Better outcomes and fewer repeat contacts
With a fully integrated contact center solution in place, ScS has a much better understanding of how each contact is resolved at an individual level, not simply aggregate views of volume and hold times. “Previously, we measured the contact center by how many conversations we had in a day. Now our focus is on quality, outcomes, and first-call resolution,” Bennett said.
NICE WFM improved forecast accuracy to ensure proper coverage during times of high-demand. All told, ScS has cut more than four minutes from the average speed of answer on voice calls and reduced 26% of the wait for web chat answer. Call abandon rates are down 50% and there has been a nearly 30% drop in overall customer contacts, owing to better self-service options and improved first-call resolution. “There’s a reason NICE Workforce Management has stood the test of time: it’s a quality product and people understand how it works,” Bennett said.
ScS is also finding big wins in subtle changes, such as the introduction of soft phones (eliminating the need for a fixed handset) and hiring professional voice talent to record IVR messages. The IVR also now takes customers to a wider range of endpoints, speeding them on their journey to first- call resolution. Contact review is both easier to initiate and draws from a much more representative pool of customer interactions. “With CXone Quality Management, we’ve taken cherry-picking out of the evaluation process,” Bennett said.
The move to multi-skilled agents and skills-based routing has had a wide-ranging impact in hiring, training, and retention. Skills-based routing makes it easier to put new hires in live queues, as they can be trained on a specific skill and given experience with customers while learning other skills. The expanded understanding of skills development also promotes better work flexibility and career pathing, including the tools to expose agents to multiple types of contacts in a day to avoid getting stuck in a rut. “The only way to tackle churn efficiently is through better job variation, because variety is the spice of life,” Bennett said.
05 THE FUTURE
Positioned for the digital future
ScS continues to revise processes to guide better first-call resolution to further reduce contact volumes while focusing on building up both synchronous and asynchronous online channels for the ongoing shift away from voice. Both SMS and Whatsapp are being considered and trialed, as are improvements in the customer payment gateway to simplify the purchase process online. “Customers want to engage with us more in digital channels than they have before,” Bennett said.
Improving the depth and accuracy of forecasting with long-term data is another priority, which will allow ScS to publish schedules with more lead time for agents. And as the company learns more about the analytics capabilities of CXone, it will focus on generating more voice-of-the- customer insights. Less than six months after taking the first live call on CXone, ScS has enjoyed being on firmer footing with customers. “We kick off far fewer inbound customer service calls from a negative position: one where we’re just apologizing before we even understand what the customer is calling for,” Bennett said. “That’s a fundamental difference for our business, and with the level of automation we’re working on in our pipeline, the most exciting parts are still to come.”
