Foundever and U.S. Telecom Provider Case Study

Foundever, formerly Sitel Group, is one of the largest customer experience companies in the world. The company delivers more than 9 million customer experiences daily across 45 countries, with more than 170,000 global representatives. Together with CallMiner, Foundever and its client, a private U.S. telecom provider, leveraged conversation intelligence to provide real-time guidance for agents, improving collections outcomes.

Challenges

On behalf of the major U.S. telecom provider, the Foundever CX analytics team conducted a preliminary analysis of the contact center team’s performance to understand where improvements could be made in terms of process and performance. What was found was the telecom provider’s agents were navigating complex and challenging collections conversations, and in many cases, would benefit from guidance deployed in real time.

In fact, the preliminary analysis revealed that more than half of collections calls (58%) did not have an attempt to collect an outstanding debt, and 80% of the calls were missing the trained call flow. In addition to these areas for improvement, the Foundever team discovered several new opportunities to show empathy on calls, where agents could potentially use different language to more effectively demonstrate care for customers and drive improved outcomes.

Solution

Implementing real-time guidance with CallMiner

The Foundever team selected CallMiner RealTime to pilot a new real-time analytics program, assisting the telecom provider within its collections department. Real-time guidance within conversation intelligence leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver in-call alerts to recommend the next best action for agents, while a conversation is still in progress.

“CallMiner’s real-time capabilities stand apart from the competition because they provide agents with true real-time guidance to drive specific outcomes or alert management,” said Diluckshnie Jayawardena, Head of Customer Success, Analytics, Foundever. “Its ease of setup and open APIs enabled us to get up and running quickly and integrate with other technologies in our analytics stack.”

Using the Agent Assistant feature within CallMiner RealTime, the Foundever CX analytics team built in-call alerts for agents based on challenging situations that impacted collections outcomes, including $/Productive Hour, Average Balance Collected, Average Full Balance Collected, Return Rate, and Average % Same-Day Payment.

The real-time alert deployment focused on the following areas:

• Script Compliance: Hints included account verification steps and informing customers of their remaining balance following payment
• Showing Customer Care: Agents were encouraged to demonstrate certain empathy statements and a willingness to assist frustrated customers (especially when they were unable to make payments)
• Collection Best Practices: After verification, agents received hints to go directly to the collections process
• Knowledge Article Use: This alert reminded agents to follow the correct payment hierarchy
• Customer Experience: Agents were prompted to remind customers of potential late payment fees
• Suggestions for Future Success: Alerts helped agents to remind customers of online payment options to avoid late payments in the future

The agents in the collections division were divided into a control group and a pilot group to compare the performance improvements over four collections KPIs, over a two-month span.

After collecting baseline performance data and training users, real-time alerts were deployed in the pilot group. Weekly utilization and performance reporting helped ensure the necessary agent adoption of the Agent Assistant feature, and provided operations leaders with a weekly comparison of KPI performance between the two groups. This has since been expanded to a second location of agents who support this telecom client.

Results

Improving collections outcomes through real-time alerts

After implementing the two-month pilot program, the CallMiner and Foundever teams delivered significant results across five major collections KPIs compared to baseline for the U.S. telecom provider, including:

• 1.96% increase in dollars collected per productive hour
• 3.12% increase in average balance collected
• 1.90% increase in average full balance collected
• 2.20% increase in return rate
• 0.62% increase in average same-day payment rate

By helping agents in real-time, Foundever increased confidence in their agents’ abilities to navigate challenging situations. According to the site manager on the team, “All of our collections KPIs showed better performance for the agent assistant group as compared to the control group.”

Together, CallMiner and Foundever are showing how real-time guidance for agents, including those that are both compliance and business process oriented, as well as aimed at developing agents’ soft skills, can drive better business and customer outcomes.