Inizio Engage Case Study

Inizio Engage is a global strategic, commercial and creative engagement partner that specializes in healthcare. The company works with both healthcare providers and patients to support pharmaceutical companies as they roll out new products. As a part of the company’s effort to improve the frontline agent experience and streamline quality assurance (QA), Inizio Engage selected CallMiner as its conversation intelligence platform. Today, the company has established a consistent and positive approach to QA, which prioritizes agent well-being and rewards success. As a result, both patient and employee experience outcomes have improved.

Challenges

Manual QA reviews couldn’t scale

Before adopting conversation intelligence, the Inizio Engage quality monitoring team was reviewing customer interactions manually. Because of the time it took to execute manual reviews, the team was only able to listen to 4-6 calls per agent per month, which was less than 2-3% of the overall call volume.

“Our QA analysis had low statistical relevance, so we started to think, ‘What are we missing?’,” said Jim Halloran, speech analytics solutions architect for Inizio Engage. “When you’re only listening to 4-6 calls per month, you don’t really know if there has been an improvement or if randomness is working in the agent’s favor. There were so many more insights out there that we could have been tapping into.”

Fully manual QA was not meeting their goals, yet automated QA was too risky for their organization. Since healthcare is a highly regulated industry, no one felt comfortable having a bot record sensitive information. For example, if a patient talked about medication side effects, these events needed to be reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The team decided to focus first on using conversation intelligence on customer service quality monitoring, honing in on the things that could be automated (e.g. call structure, the agent’s use of empathy, and more) – while keeping a human in the loop to handle the more high-risk tasks. The goal was to bring consistency to the contact center quality process.

Inconsistent quality scores created unnecessary debate

Another challenge in the previous QA process was the objectiveness of call monitoring. If agents didn’t like a score a certain supervisor gave them, they would challenge it. Scores were inconsistent across supervisors and agents. Going back and reviewing calls again consumed too much time and resources.

“Arguing about a score doesn’t have much benefit,” said Halloran. “It doesn’t improve the customer experience and it doesn’t help the agent. That’s why we thought conversation intelligence could give us a much more objective approach.”

Solution

Analyzing 100% of customer insights with CallMiner

The Inizio Engage team selected CallMiner to analyze 100% of customer interactions coming into the contact center, which helped them embrace a data-driven approach to quality monitoring and improvement.

“The advantages of conversation intelligence were clear — a consistent approach with no judgement,” said Halloran, “We can now address parts of the process that require more consistency, such as opening and closing calls the correct way, demonstrating ownership and empathy, and more.”

To help contact center supervisors and frontline agents adapt to conversation intelligence, the Inizio Engage team included the employees using the system in the implementation process. For example, they showed agents a comparison between their scorecards in a manual QA process vs. an automated process. The scores were consistent or better with conversation intelligence analyzing 100% of interactions.

“We emphasized to agents and supervisors that conversation intelligence won’t change their day-to-day lives,” said Halloran. “They don’t have to adjust their language or approach. We adapted the tool to their style, instead of the other way around. Our goal is for our agents to have free-flowing and natural conversations with patients; we don’t want them to use key phrases as a checklist.”

To gain employee buy-in, the Inizio Engage team polled the contact center agents on their typical approaches to issues like demonstrating empathy and ownership. They used that information to develop the categorization system for CallMiner. For example, if a patient calls in and says they aren’t feeling well or doing well with their prescribed medication, the agent needs to demonstrate empathy. The team focused on continual improvement for this initiative – for example, the initial empathy triggers the Inizio Engage team measured weren’t working, so they collected feedback from the agents to adjust the triggers, and the system is now working much better.

“With this approach, the agents dictate the rules, not the technology,” said Halloran. “Agents like being assessed on all of their calls, rather than random scoring, which makes them uneasy. They can self-coach by going into the CallMiner tool. Many agents didn’t realize that they were handling calls a certain way and have adapted their approach. They’ve embraced objective scoring.”

Results

Improving frontline agent well-being through effective coaching

Beyond quality monitoring alone, the Inizio Engage team uses CallMiner’s conversation intelligence platform to improve frontline agent well-being. They have built agent health metrics into their scorecards and use them to regularly assess how their agents are doing from a mental health and quality of life perspective.

“Everyone in our contact center is a registered nurse or has a healthcare background,” said Halloran. “These are highly qualified, skilled professionals who have plenty of options to move to a different job. We want them to be happy and fulfilled at work. Employee well-being is a top priority for the organization, starting from the CEO down.”

Because they work in a remote environment and can’t passively check in on agents by seeing them in the hallways, the team created metrics rating the stress level of each call. To measure stress, they look at factors such as:

• Call length
• Patient dissatisfaction
• Escalations
• Use of profanity, insulting or inappropriate language

If agents get a high number of stress points, supervisors immediately check in with them to see if they need breaks, support, or coaching to reduce stress levels for the employee and patient alike.

“Recognizing and acknowledging stress goes a long way to help agents understand they’re appreciated,” said Halloran. “It builds a lot of goodwill. Contact center agents want to be supported and know that their supervisors are looking out for them. If coaching is focused on quality alone, that can wear on an agent quickly.”

Recognizing kudos and turnaround situations with customers

Inizio Engage supervisors also look for scenarios where agents handle customer interactions exceptionally well. For example, they measure customers’ complements to recognize agents with exceptional service, and to learn from agents with an excellent track record.

In addition, they recognize experience improvement calls, which start out negative but end positive. These are scenarios where patients start out in a bad mood or with complaints about costs, insurance processes, or medication issues. Patients end these calls understanding what to do and feeling better about the whole process. The conversation intelligence system sends notifications to supervisors to reach out to agents with experience improvement calls to recognize a job well done. They share these insights across the team so others can emulate top agents’ success.

Scaling across the organization

As a next step, the Inizio Engage team is scaling the use of conversation intelligence across the organization. To do so, they are standardizing scorecards and categories to leverage with other programs. Standardization makes the technology much easier to roll out to other departments and get up and running quickly. The team allows for adjustments to branding and other key factors to make scorecards and categories work for each group.

In the future, the team will leverage conversation intelligence across new lines of business, such as commercial groups in sales or medical information. In addition, they’re looking to expand to countries outside the U.S.

“In the longer term, we want to look at whether there are deeper insights we can gain from conversation intelligence,” said Halloran. “For example, can we correlate stress scores or kudos to employees’ personality traits to further improve agent satisfaction and coaching effectiveness?” A rising tide lifts all boats: As frontline agents’ experience trends upward, customer experience improves in the process.