FCT Case Study

Since 1991, FCT has transformed from pioneering title insurance in Canada to leading in property intelligence, real estate solutions, lending, and asset recovery. The company selected the CallMiner conversation intelligence platform to gain a deeper and more data-driven understanding of nuanced customer perspectives, removing some of the biases that come from manual analysis and moment-in-time agent feedback. Today, the company uses comprehensive Voice of the Customer (VoC) insights to fuel continuous innovation and growth — not only improving their quality of customer service, but also changing the way they develop and bring products to market.

Challenges

Limited insights made it difficult to understand VoC

Before implementing conversation intelligence, FCT relied on quarterly surveys to understand what was happening with their customers, and did not have a formal VoC program in place. Since the company serves a B2B market (including financial institutions and legal professionals), stakeholders and perspectives on what delivers value can vary dramatically. With quarterly surveys, the company gained infrequent, broad insights that lacked real-time relevance, preventing a clear understanding of customer needs, evolving sentiments, and the true ROI of their products.

“The industry benchmark for B2B is 4-6% response rate for surveys, so how do you prove ROI based on such a small sample of your customer base? It’s very intangible,” said Tanya Fowler, Head of Customer Experience and Complaints Officer, FCT. “Surveys are very subjective. You’re missing the tone and sentiment of what the customer is trying to imply. People naturally have our own biases when it comes to data, and will use it to fit our hypothesis rather than acting on what customer data is telling us.”

The customer experience (CX) team was contending with data quality issues stemming from limited survey responses. It took them a lot of time and effort to manually analyze and correlate the data. As a result, they wanted to move away from quarterly, point-in-time surveys to a more holistic and always-on approach to collecting and analyzing customer feedback.

Solution

Analyzing 100% of customer insights with CallMiner

FCT selected CallMiner to analyze 100% of omnichannel customer interactions. The goal was to understand this rich and nuanced data to drive strategic business decisions across the organization. Equipped with this data, the company could develop and expand a VoC program to improve CX and remove friction from the customer journey.

“We developed a strategy before looking for a tool. Exceptional customer service is table stakes; we wanted the ability to take action on customer feedback to drive continuous innovation in our company,” said Fowler. “This feedback loop continuum helps us give customers the support they need, and in turn develop better products and bring them to market more effectively.”

The company incorporates CallMiner insights alongside more traditional VoC metrics they gained from surveys. FCT now analyzes vast amounts of unstructured data from multiple sources, offering a broader view of overall CX. With a more holistic picture of customer feedback, they gain an honest and realistic view of what customers are saying, incorporating factors such as sentiment and emotion into their analysis.

Today, they are using customer feedback analysis to inform strategies to improve customer service delivery, marketing campaign effectiveness, and product development. Starting by proving conversation intelligence success and ROI with contact center improvements, the company has gradually expanded the use of the technology to other departments.

FCT was recognized for their innovative, expanded VoC program by the North American Customer Centricity Awards, winning in both the Best Measurement in Customer Experience and Customer Insight & Feedback VoC categories. FCT’s inclusion of mined phone and chat interactions into their VoC strategy was a differentiator among other nominees.

Results

Translating customer feedback into actionable insights

One of the first departments to see measurable success from conversation intelligence was the customer success team. Connecting both solicited surveys and unsolicited feedback in the CallMiner conversation intelligence platform, customer success managers and supervisors can provide targeted, data-driven coaching to agents to improve service delivery.

In addition, FCT uses CallMiner’s AI capabilities to gain a deeper understanding of what their customers are saying – beyond anecdotal feedback provided with agents’ wrap codes and call summaries. What previously took weeks to understand now takes hours or minutes.

“In the past, agents selected from a limited number of wrap codes to bucket customer interactions. Agents couldn’t choose more than one code, and all too often codes were inaccurate,” said Fowler. “AI helps us keep track of themes happening within our customer interactions. For example, when we bring a new product to market, we can track the top three highest friction points for customers and deliver that feedback to the product team.”

The team relies on AI-based insights to gather feedback on products, which makes agent coaching and training more effective, and delivers messaging back to marketing and product teams for continuous improvement. By shifting agent scripts on one of their recent new product initiatives, the team saw a 73% drop in calls, saving $21,000. The team is now solving the root cause of issues with contact center training and coaching, so agents can more effectively overcome objections and prevent customer dissatisfaction.

Leveraging customer insights across departments

The FCT team takes cross-departmental feedback sharing seriously. In 2023, a media story featured an individual who lost their home due to fraud from a lack of title insurance. The story went viral. Despite the story and fraud being unrelated to FCT as a company, they had no idea about the influx of calls they were about to receive.

The contact center was flooded with calls from consumers inquiring about title insurance, mostly from senior citizens, a high-risk demographic for fraud. Agents were spending 45 minutes on calls with consumers, when the target audience for their products is other businesses such as legal and financial services firms. Instead of continuing to lose productivity, the team leveraged conversation intelligence to understand the nature of these calls.

“We used CallMiner to find out the top five questions people were asking, and acted quickly to pull together a marketing campaign about title insurance for the website,” said Fowler. “We also used this data to inform a new sales campaign for our target B2B audience, along with PR and media training support for our President who was invited to do dozens of interviews.”

As a result, the team saw a huge decrease in calls. Their contact center and marketing efforts effectively redirected consumers to legal professionals, driving business back to their target customer segment.

Leveraging AI to drive future VoC expansion

In the future, the FCT team will dive deeper into conversation intelligence AI features, creating dashboards for stakeholders to quickly access the information they need to make critical decisions. The company hopes to establish cross-departmental AI advisory councils, so more teams can understand the impact of customer-driven decisions. Using predictive analytics, their goal is to understand potential customer pain points before bringing products to market, addressing customer concerns throughout the entire lifecycle.

The CX team is also planning to execute more intelligent surveys at certain touchpoints in the customer journey where response rates and insights would be most effective. This approach will allow FCT to identify potential gaps in unsolicited customer data and fill them with solicited surveys – creating a more targeted, personalized approach to collecting VoC insights.