RDI Corporation Conversation Analytics Case Study

RDI Corporation, founded in 1978 in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a family-owned and operated business process outsourcer committed to providing the ultimate customer experience. The company has over 3,500 in-house and work-from-home employees in 11 locations. Unified under one brand, RDI operates four divisions including call center outsourcing – both inbound and outbound customer care and sales, full-service market research, strategic digital strategy and technical support services. 

Challenges

In its continual pursuit to deliver superior customer experiences, RDI wanted to tap into the rich insights that the company knew were in all the recordings of interactions between its agents and customers. It believed that these insights could be shared with its clients as a value-add. But RDI lacked an effective way to access them.

“We were sure that our call recordings were filled with insights that we could share with our clients. By doing so, we could elevate our agents from call makers and takers to true business insight contributors. To achieve this goal, we determined that we needed to implement speech analytics” says Stacy Dye, SVP/GM Quantitative Insights at RDI.

To bring value to its clients and improve its own sales conversions and contact center efficiency, the company implemented CallMiner for its advanced conversation analytics capabilities.

Solution & Results

“Our first area of focus was to use CallMiner to extract insights that our customers could share with their marketing, product development and engineering departments to make substantial improvements to their business,” Dye says.

Retain clients by demonstrating the value of conversation analytics

RDI was able to use conversation analytics insights to save its relationship with a current client and also help improve the client’s business. 

One of RDI’s clients expressed concern about conversion rates. The company met with the client to discuss its pain points. It conducted focus groups with agents working the campaign and processed and analyzed 13,000 calls to uncover the root cause of the problem. Analysts also listened to calls on their own to identify trends and additional call drivers.  

The findings from this deep dive into the data revealed:

• 60% of the calls RDI fielded were not eligible for conversion
• RDI agents did not have the same access to customer information as the client’s sales team  
• Some agents needed additional training
• Many callers asked questions that were answered in the FAQs posted on the client’s website

As a result of the CallMiner findings, RDI recommended the following:

• Reexamine the process for calculating conversions
• Grant RDI access to the same data as the client’s employees
• Display FAQs more prominently on the website to make it easier to self-service
• Provide additional training and modify undefined

“The bottom line is that RDI was able to identify and solve problems the client didn’t even know they had. We also validated that RDI performed at a higher level than the client. As a result, we not only retained the client, we are now automating their QA process so that they can derive even more benefit. We couldn’t have accomplished this without CallMiner,” says Josh Jones, Speech Analyst at RDI.

Attract new customers with conversation analytics insights

RDI also started using CallMiner to give the company an edge over its competition. As part of its sales process, RDI leverages CallMiner to provide insights into its prospects processes to identify pain points and uncover campaign inefficiencies.

“Any contact center can provide anecdotal information about issues and call drivers, but only those with conversation analytics can a provide a deep dive into root causes and other actionable insights for business improvement. CallMiner really gave us a leg up,” says Chris Albert, Senior Director of Insights & Analytics at RDI.

To prove this, RDI asked a large banking prospect to send 1,200 hours (approximately 14,000 calls) of its more recent conversation recordings. It used CallMiner to analyze calls and take a deeper dive into each contact driver in the hopes of finding additional insights.

RDI crossed various call types with CallMiner and identified that the calls with the longest duration mapped to just a few call drivers – password reset, charge disputes, and account inquiries.

Password reset calls took 50% longer than the average call duration. Repeat call volume was driven most often by charge disputes which required double the time of an average call. In addition, RDI was able to show that many calls were about basic account questions such as balance inquiries and deposit status. These calls were 35% longer than the average.

“We recommended proactive updates to bank customers regarding the status of their dispute. This had the potential to save up to 20 hours of inbound calls every day. We also recommended developing a more robust self-service capability through IVR to reduce call volume for basic questions to save the company another 20-25 hours each day.”

“As a result of showing the bank the value of conversation analytics insights, they signed on with RDI. The senior executives said that analytics capabilities factored heavily into their decision,” Albert says.

Streamline contact center processes for improved efficiency

The next major project for RDI was to improve its own contact center efficiency. It began by identifying its most resource-intensive processes and then streamlining and automating them wherever possible. RDI first automated its scorecard.

The company used CallMiner APIs to ingest previously graded calls into CallMiner Analyze. Then it compared the automated scoring with the manual scoring and determined that they trended very closely. RDI also analyzed all stages of the QA process to uncover additional opportunities for improvement.

“We saw good parity between the automated and manual scoring. We also identified specific sections of the scorecard that still required human review to ensure accuracy. For these sections we built category indicators enabling QA analysts to quickly jump to those sections of a call to complete their scoring quicker,” says Carlos Ayala, Speech Analyst at RDI.

“We also found that QA analysts were spending up to 30 minutes to find each viable call to score. So, we captured all attributes of a viable call and excluded hang-ups and dropped calls to quickly guide analysts to the best calls for scoring. This was really exciting because we saw an immediate ROI.”

“QA analysts can now grade up to five calls per hour. That’s over 3 times faster while maintaining the accuracy of human review. CallMiner quickly identifies viable calls for scoring, and guides analysts to the shortest calls to score. This has allowed us to reduce headcount by 40% and still hit all our KPIs,” says Ayala.

Next Steps

The next area of focus for RDI is to maximize usage of conversation analytics. The company is well on its way. RDI has secured buy-in by internal stakeholders and clients, and has begun building a culture of improvement around conversation analytics. It has even established a new revenue stream by offering analytics to smaller companies that don’t have the resources to do it on their own.

“We have fostered a conversation analytics culture by igniting an appetite for speed-to-intelligence. CallMiner has sparked creativity within the company, and with our clients. We’ve opened minds and doors to other projects by showing that through conversation analytics, there is a better, faster way to do things. Once that happens, there’s no looking back,” Ayala says.