Click! Network Dials Up Better Customer Service

As a player in a highly competitive industry, cable television and telecommunications service provider Click! Network sought to differentiate itself by providing top-notch customer care with highly trained agents. But its rough-edged quality monitoring and evaluating methods needed upgrades, especially for a company that chose not to use an IVR, but to instead have agents answer every call. "I had an ACD-like canvas that would show what status my reps were in, and when I thought that a phone was ringing I would dial into [their extension] to monitor them in silent monitor," says Theres Steiner, customer care manager at Click! Network. To make matters even worse, the company had no recording tool to allow the CSRs to hear where they could improve or for supervisors to use to highlight examples of model behavior. Without a recording application Steiner would have to use elements like the tone of an agent's voice to judge the quality of the call. "It was just really ineffective and really subjective," she says. After evaluating several options Steiner selected Envision's Click2Coach solution, comprising Envision Quality Monitoring and Envision eLearning, which provide training, quality monitoring, and evaluation tools to coach representatives. Equipped with automated quality monitoring, Click! Network supervisors can allot more time to working with agents to further enhance their customer service skills. With the Envision solution the company was able to do away with its basic evaluation methods of pinpointing trouble spots. "As a result of getting the Envision solution, I was able to...gather up all that data, find out where we were having problems, find out where we needed to focus, and go from there," Steiner says. Additionally, Steiner has a three-person team that also does monitoring, which further allows the company to access areas to focus on. It can be that "verifying the customer account is something that we really need to focus on consistently, how are we doing it, what questions we're asking--or maybe it's something as simple as using a name," she says. "Every week we come out with just a little something that we're all going to work on and [agents] can see their scores rise. It's very nice, because they can actually see their growth." Click! Network experienced increases in sales, upsells, and customer satisfaction scores in the first year of implementation. About a year ago the company CSRs averaged a quality score of 72 percent, but with Click2Coach that score has climbed nearly 20 percentage points, to 91.4 percent. Of about 20 agents three consistently score a 100, with the remainder of the team's scores ranging from the mid-80s to mid-90s. And now that agents know that they are being evaluated, they're more consistently seizing sales opportunities. "It used to be more, a customer would call in...and say we want cable services and that's where we got our major bulk of sales," Steiner says, but now when customers call in agents explore possible upsell and cross-sell opportunities. The most effective part of having a quality-monitoring-and-evaluation tool like Click2Coach, according to Steiner, is the level of expectation that it sets. "The wonderful thing about it is, [with] the new people that we've hired in the expectations are so incredibly clear--it stores reports and gives you solid data." Related articles: Market Watch: Making Sense of Workforce Optimization How Can I Monitor for Quality Across Multiple Contact Center Sites? Employee Evaluation and E-learning Join Forces Two applications join to provide a closed-loop solution for evaluating employee skills and providing customized training.