Case Study: Tbaytel

CUSTOMER PROFILE

ABOUT TBAYTEL

Tbaytel provides telecommunications solutions, including TV, internet, phone, security and mobility services, to residential and business customers in Northern Ontario.

Over its 110-year history, Tbaytel (formerly Thunder Bay Telephone) has become the largest independently owned telecommunications provider in Canada.

Its 57 Customer Care agents located in Thunder Bay handle an annual contact volume of 506,400 interactions, which include inbound and out- bound calls, chats and emails.

THE CHALLENGE

Tbaytel is dedicated to providing exceptional customer service to differentiate itself from competitors. However, its previous on-premises ACD system made it difficult to fulfill that goal.

“We are committed to delivering an outstanding customer experience,” explains Brenda Di Franco, Director, Customer Care at Tbaytel. “Our Customer Care team uses CXone as a core tool to manage multiple customer access channels while ensuring operational efficiencies and capturing customer feedback through customized post-call surveys.”

Tbaytel uses post-call surveys to gather voice of the customer data, but its surveying software was a separate entity. It wasn’t integrated with the previous ACD system and lacked basic customization functionality. Agents had to remember to manually transfer customers to the survey platform, which contributed to very low completion rates.

With such a limited pool of customer data, Tbaytel lacked insights into agent performance and customer satisfaction. “We didn’t have a large enough sample size from the surveys to assess agent performance or get direction on improving the customer experience,” says Cosimo Valente, Manager, Customer Care Center at Tbaytel.

Additionally, the on-premises system had high maintenance and management costs. “We wanted to reduce our equipment and maintenance expenses,” says Cosimo. “We also needed to evolve our business to stay competitive, which meant providing customers with the additional chat and email options they expect.”

THE SOLUTION

Tbaytel formed a cross-functional selection com- mittee to search for a new cloud solution that would enhance the overall customer experience and continue to drive operational efficiencies.

“Integrated post-call surveys and callback functionality were at the top of our list,” says Cosimo. “We wanted support for additional channels and the ability to change the IVR ourselves without IT support. Call recording and real-time reporting were also must-haves.”

For Tbaytel, NICE CXone checked all the boxes. “We compared multiple solutions, and CXone had all the functionality we wanted,” says Cosimo.

Before finalizing its decision, the team contacted several existing NICE CXone customers as references. “Their feedback confirmed we were making the right choice,” says Cosimo.

OPPORTUNITIES IDENTIFIED

Dramatic increases in NPS and FCR

With CXone Feedback Management, an integrated post-call survey solution, Tbaytel agents no longer need to manually transfer customers to complete post-call surveys. “With CXone, before reaching a live agent, the customer is presented with the choice of ‘opting in’ to complete a survey,” says Cosimo.

“The process doesn’t rely on agent influence at all.” As a result, Tbaytel has continued to experience a healthy survey take rate—an increase of 2%.

Tbaytel uses this rich data to gain insights into the customer experience and provide feedback to agents and Tbaytel’s executive team. “Data is captured on our corporate and agent scorecards, and we visually display the team’s Post Call Survey (PcS) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to all our frontline agents in near real-time,” says Cosimo.

“We use CXone Feedback Management for PcS and NPS trigger indicators to identify opportunities for coaching, training, customer relationship management and process improvements,” says Cosimo. “For example, if a customer is not likely to recommend Tbaytel based on the NPS, we listen to the call and assign an agent to contact the customer to gain more insight, attempt to address any outstanding concerns and rebuild the relationship whenever possible.”

This follow up revealed a customer input problem with the survey process Tbaytel was using with CXone. “When customers wanted to rate us a 10 for highly recommending Tbaytel, they would inadvertently give us a 1 instead. Our old version of the sur- vey would time out before they could press 0 to give us a score of 10,” says Cosimo. “It was the exact opposite of what the customer intended to select.”

Since CXone Feedback Management’s survey ques- tions are easily customized, Tbaytel corrected these errors by adding a confirmation question to validate the customer’s selections. “Using CXone functionality to fix this input problem helped increase our NPS by 79%,” says Cosimo.

Identifying these errors wouldn’t have been possible without CXone’s real-time reporting. “CXone Reporting helps us make better business decisions, such as monitoring the survey process and improving scheduling and skills-based routing,” says Cosimo. Tbaytel also started using CXone Reporting to track first-call resolution (FCR). “We have an FCR of 93%, which is a key contributor to our overall customer satisfaction metrics,” Brenda says proudly.

Real-time visibility and reporting

Using CXone’s real-time reporting, Tbaytel makes analytical decisions to optimize scheduling. “With CXone Reporting, we found that customer demand was higher in the morning than in the after- noon,” Cosimo says. “This has allowed for scheduling enhancements that reduce idle time and provide opportunities to assign deferrable work,” says Cosimo.

Tbaytel Customer Care strives for operational excellence through a balanced scorecard that measures quality and efficiency, both at the team and agent level. “We have extended our average speed-of-answer targets while exceeding customer satisfaction metrics and maintaining operational efficiencies,” says Brenda. “We continue to evolve our scheduling practices and strategies while maximizing agent utilization, which has resulted in significant cost savings without com- promising customer experience.”

An important factor in maintaining this careful balance is CXone’s callback functionality, which al- lows customers to have an agent call them back rather than waiting in queue. “With callback, we can extend our average speed-of-answer target,” says Brenda. “Our customer satisfaction metrics are still improving year over year, and callback is a key contributing factor.”

Tbaytel has also increased operational efficiency by offering self-service options via the CXone IVR. “Eight percent of inbound calls previously handled by agents are now handled through the self-serve IVR,” says Cosimo. “This has provided an opportunity for Tbaytel agents to focus on higher-value interactions, such as retention and outbound sales initiatives.”

Today, Tbaytel has evolved the voice of the customer feedback by enhancing its ability to measure, monitor and report on the customer experience in near real time. With CXone’s multichannel capabilities, real-time reporting, callback functionality and IVR self-service, Tbaytel can continue building on its legacy of providing outstand- ing customer service.

“CXone has the functionality we need to enhance the operational performance of our Customer Care Center,” says Cosimo. “It can enhance the operational function of other contact centers, too.”