Closing the Quality Gap

During her first three years as general manager of customer experience for Service Net Solutions, in Jeffersonville, IN, Jennifer Holland knew that her employees were not getting proper training and development. "Because we were monitoring their phone calls manually with tape recorders, we could only record one call at a time. Agents were evaluated once a month on only three calls." Service Net, an affiliate of the Kemper Insurance Companies, creates, markets, and administers warranties and service contracts for blue-chip companies like Office Depot and Maytag. Holland's group, which handles everything related to claims administration, needs to stay informed on dozens of different products for about 50 clients. "We hoped that everyone was doing the right thing, but we knew there was a big gap in quality," Holland admits. The process needed an overhaul. Holland's team chose Envision Telephony's Click2Coach to help resolve its service concerns. "Before we even had a letter of intent, Envision sent over a sales representative and two engineers who spent three days listening to calls and learning our procedures," Holland says. "It was very much a partnership from the start." Now that Click2Coach has been in place for close to two years, Holland's attrition rate has dropped and she reduced head count in her training department by one. Every one of her 150 employees receives four times as many evaluations as before. As a result, her agents' performance quality scores have improved by 33 percent. Department trainers can focus on what they were hired for--creating instructional manuals and providing one-on-one guidance--instead of on the mechanics of tape recorders. They use Click2Coach's video-training feature to create and deliver training videos to each agent's desktop. "In the old days we'd waste 45 minutes pulling everyone into a classroom for a 10-minute demo," Holland says. "Now they check their Envision inbox at the start of their shift." Click2Coach has had a positive impact on quality as well as productivity: The number of mishandled calls dropped from 30 to one or two per week, and the number of calls that come back for rework has dropped from 7 percent to 1 percent. Holland earned her ROI on Click2Coach four months earlier than she'd forecasted. "I wish that all the other items I purchased and installed went as smoothly as this one. It has become our benchmark."