Radial Omnichannel Analytics Case Study

Radial is a leading outsourced ecommerce technology and services company, focused on improving every point in the omnichannel customer journey. Its offerings span across four primary lines of business: omnichannel solutions, fulfillment and transportation, payments and fraud, and customer care. Radial leveraged the CallMiner conversation analytics platform as a continuous feedback loop for its 2,000-4,000 agents to improve both the customer and employee experience. In addition, CallMiner’s solution replaced surveys, enabling the team to analyze 100% of customer interactions and deliver cross-departmental business improvements.

Challenge

Managing a remote, global workforce

With nine customer care locations around the globe offering 24/7 coverage, Radial was looking for a solution that could help its agents continuously improve based on their interactions with customers. The majority (around 80%) of its global workforce worked remotely, and the team wanted to ensure that every agent received a consistent level of feedback from supervisors – regardless of whether they were in-office or working from home.

Beyond providing agent feedback alone, Radial needed a solution that could help its customer care team evaluate trends across a wide variety of channels, while still processing massive amounts of voice interactions. Approximately 70% of customer interactions were voice-based, with other channels quickly growing. For example, in Q3 of 2021, the percentage of voice interactions reduced to 53%, with a higher number of customers turning to self-service options, chat, email and other omnichannel digital interactions.

Surveys reflected just the highs and lows

In the past, Radial relied on feedback from customer surveys to determine how to optimize the customer experience (CX). Having conducted surveys for over a decade, the team was finding diminishing value in the survey results. Typically, the feedback only reflected very positive or very negative interactions, leaving a huge gap of coverage for middle-of-the-road conversations. And in recent years, survey responses were waning.

“One of the biggest reasons for evaluating a conversation analytics solution was getting away from surveying and focusing on utilizing the interactions we already have with customers,” said Robin Gomez, director of customer care innovation at Radial. “With conversations, you can take customer feedback in the moment – using it to improve CX measures, reduce friction points, and drive value props in a more effective and efficient way.”

Sharing feedback across departments

While the Radial team started with a narrower goal of understanding customer feedback to benefit the customer care team, Gomez and his team understood the long-term value of these insights to other departments. “We didn’t want to boil the ocean to start, but we knew that a crawl, walk, run approach would be best for our team,” said Gomez. “We knew we could eventually leverage these customer insights to drive business improvements across departments.”

For example, if a marketing campaign was released that confused customers and led to an influx of contacts, there was no way to relay that feedback in the past. Or, if the fulfillment and transportation departments were facing supply chain issues, the sales and customer care departments would bear the brunt of negative customer interactions, with little insight into when these bottlenecks would be resolved.

Solution

Analyzing 100% of omnichannel insights with CallMiner

The Radial team selected CallMiner in 2019 and started by focusing on targeted opportunities that could quickly demonstrate success or lead to refinements in their processes. Gomez and his team began their journey with voice interactions, aiming to replace surveys as the primary mechanism for customer feedback. The customer care team leveraged these insights to drive performance improvements, with the goal of improving the overall CX.

“We implemented CallMiner to achieve faster time to insights with our analytics,” said Gomez. “With our surveys, it would take weeks to compile insights into PowerPoint presentations. With CallMiner Analyze, we can pull comprehensive, ad-hoc reports for stakeholders on important CX-centric KPIs on the fly.”

Using CallMiner Coach, agents, supervisors and internal operations can get visibility into both individual and team performance – on a granular and higher-level trend basis. Gomez and his team educate their colleagues on the meaning of these statistics, so they’re not just numbers on screens. “It’s important that you know what you’re looking at so you can take action on these insights,” Gomez said.

In addition, Radial is in the process of pulling CallMiner data into its business intelligence platform to enrich the data shared across every department in the business. “CallMiner helps us see our data in the context of the entire customer journey – from pre-purchase, to fulfillment, to post-purchase (and ideally long-term loyalty).”

Results

Accelerating from crawl, to walk, to run

In the past, when Radial evaluated survey data alone, the team would see a decrease in CX KPIs, without any context into why there may be issues or dissatisfaction among customers. In 2021, when mining all interactions across channels, the team has been able to identify opportunities for improvement at the agent level or with overall client programs and promotions. These insights have helped the team gain a much more robust view of CX, and has given them the intelligence needed to act quickly to mitigate potential negative impacts.

Reporting from CallMiner revealed new insights around sentiment analysis and the impacts of new service offerings and promotions. In addition, the team was able to understand the contact drivers behind each customer interaction, and the related impacts (positive or negative) on customer sentiment. By partnering with internal continuous improvement teams, Radial was able to determine the right channels for certain types of customer requests, helping to avoid inefficiencies and improve the overall CX.

According to Gomez, one example was email order cancellations. The asynchronous nature of email was not good for time-sensitive issues such as cancellations, leading to customer dissatisfaction. Using conversation analytics, the team was able to leverage data to share best practices and recommend that clients remove options from online forms that were not best serviced in an email channel. Modifying these form categories helped to improve overall customer satisfaction and reduce friction with existing processes.

Expanding insights outside the contact center

From there, Gomez and his team worked to expand access to customer insights outside of the contact center to exponentially increase the value of the CallMiner conversation analytics platform. Using these insights, they were able to distill targeted, specific and measurable process improvements.

For example, as last mile local delivery has been increasingly adopted by retailers, there was client interest in understanding the CX improvements associated with order delivery service. Radial conducted sentiment analysis through CallMiner and shared key opportunities with the client. These insights enabled the client to engage with their partner to make improvements to the delivery process.      

“These insights created visibility across the customer journey to direct and indirect touchpoints that impact the CX,” said Gomez. “Real, cross-functional insights help us increase sales, grow and retain customers, and bring new products to life.”

Gomez shared some words of advice for other organizations looking to implement conversation analytics programs. “Start local. We kicked off the program with our customer care division, and expanded globally to supply chain, product, marketing and other departments. That way, you can prove the value of the technology and program with hard metrics that tie to financial results.”