Workhuman and CallMiner Case Study

Workhuman® is the world’s #1 employee recognition provider. With a vision to create a world where every employee feels appreciated and valued, they help hundreds of companies across the globe foster a culture of recognition that boosts employee engagement and retention. Through Workhuman Cloud®, employees can recognize their peers by sending recognition moments, accompanied by personal messages and reward points. These points can be accumulated and redeemed for a variety of products and experiences through Workhuman’s global e-commerce store.

The company’s customer service (CS) team is dedicated to ensuring every Workhuman user has a seamless and satisfying experience when sending or redeeming rewards. Workhuman does not evaluate rep performance based on the number of calls they process, but rather on quality of customer experience. To support their agents in achieving excellence in service quality, the Workhuman team implemented CallMiner’s conversation intelligence platform, which enabled them to transform their quality programme in less than 12 months, improving quality and customer experience (CX). Instead of manual processes, they now have near-real-time and full audit capabilities, with a focus on agent development and CX.

Challenges

Manual QA process resulted in mixed agent feedback

Essential to the Workhuman customer-focused approach is for the CS department to gather valuable feedback on interactions between agents and users. Previously, this feedback was provided by Workhuman’s internal quality team through hands-on, manual quality assurance (QA) audits.

While Workhuman’s customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores consistently remained strong, as the company grew in size, customer expectations were only rising. To continue leading the industry in CS and support ongoing agent performance enhancement, Workhuman recognized the need for enhanced tools and procedures. The company’s initial QA process was manually operated, taking approximately 30-45 mins per audit and sampling five cases per agent per month. This process, which relied on multiple tools, including a custom-built QA tool, occasionally resulted in procedural inefficiencies and made communication between QA and CS teams more complex.

As the organisation scaled, it became clear that the custom-built in-house tool could was unable to fully meet the increasing customer expectations and demands for agent quality feedback. The goal was to find a solution that could solve the following challenges:

• Fractured feedback processes
• Difficult communication between quality and CS departments
• Lack of automation possibilities
• Limited customisability within the in-house QA tool

In addition, the team believed that automating quality evaluations could generate valuable insights for agents and provide closed-loop feedback to customers, even if the number of people on their quality team remained the same.

Solution

Evolving from manual to automated QA

The Workhuman team selected CallMiner’s conversation intelligence platform because the solution addressed each of these challenges. During the initial deployment phase, CallMiner provided full support to ensure Workhuman’s QA specialists enhanced their skills and rethought their manual quality assessments – with an eye toward agent experience and overall customer experience (CX) improvement.

The new competencies allowed for the automation of manual scorecards, reducing the need for human intervention and shifting the focus towards providing detailed feedback and coaching on aspects crucial for agents’ professional growth.

CallMiner successfully integrated quality assessments, trend analysis, and CSAT feedback into a smooth process for both agents and QA specialists. Complicated and previously manual procedures that were distributed across various platforms are now consolidated within CallMiner Coach, an agent performance product, as a unified quality management system saving up to two hours a day in manual work.

Applying data-driven feedback to continuously improve CX

CallMiner addressed the issue of limited communication between the QA and CS departments by simplifying how agents access, review, and apply feedback – encouraging continuous improvement in customer service. CallMiner has enabled more straightforward and direct dialogue between quality analysts and agents, allowing easy exchange of queries and resolutions.

Feedback from Workhuman’s CS team leads shows the CallMiner platform has improved communication between leadership and individual agents and made it easier to deliver data-driven feedback and enhance CX. Because team leads were directly involved in the quality assessment of their own team members, they gained a better understanding of each agent and could use this data to inform one-to-one coaching sessions.

The Workhuman team has also continuously improved its quality audit scorecard, which was once static but now adapts to performance trends and changing customer expectations. Now, the quality scorecard is reviewed, discussed and optimised every six months incorporating stakeholder input, according to changing quality patterns and behaviours that require focus.

This continuous reiteration reinforces Workhuman’s leadership in customer experience and further enables its global customer service team to rise to evolving and increasingly complex customer expectations. The company designed an evergreen framework with the ability to build and evolve two quality scorecards. This agent-led, inclusive programme includes constant calibration, embracing contact centre inputs to focus on the agent’s development — rather than purely on the quality score they achieve.

As a substitute for a numeric quality score, CallMiner enabled the team to create performance categories, removing the stigma associated with pass/fail scores and instead focusing on development opportunities by using positive language and reinforcement.

Results

Elevating agent performance

Driven by its redesigned quality programme, Workhuman has maintained its consistently high CSAT. Today 98% of customer service executives (CSE) are meeting or exceeding quality targets of 85%+ whilst agent perception of the QA process has increased to 93% ensuring a far more positive outcome for both customer and employee.

Since the redesign of the quality programme and implementation of CallMiner, the percentage of agents performing in the ‘phenomenal’ category has increased, even though there are fluctuations in the developing percentage, driven by score card changes and ramping new hires.

Workhuman’s agents also benefited in terms of overall quality performance and increased positive sentiment with the quality programme. Lead time for agents receiving coaching feedback reduced from two weeks to real-time, enabling instant two-way communication between team leads and agents.

Increasing QA efficiency and lowering costs

Through the business case for a new quality tool, it was determined that significant cost savings were possible though purchasing CallMiner rather than developing a tool in-house. With CallMiner, Workhuman’s redesigned quality programme achieved the following benefits in 12 months:

• Avoid self-build at ~€1.4 million minimum, maintaining maintenance and enhancement at the same levels over three years
• Built QA audit automations increasing coverage by 100x without adding headcount saving four FTE or €200K annually
• Surfaced challenges with agents verifying customers, leading to 27% of contacts being automatically verified and saving 13 seconds in AHT – or 400 hours annualised
• Ensured quality checks remain relevant moving from a static non-editable QA scorecard to a fully customisable and configurable scorecard, which is now revised every six months
• Contributed to case duration reducing from 1.8 days to 1.2 days due to quality insights feeding opportunities into the continuous improvement programme

Improving customer satisfaction and trust

An increase in service quality has enabled Workhuman to provide clients with the confidence that the company will not only meet service levels, but continue to deliver the best possible service on a global scale. Despite contact volume increasing 5% year-over-year, and the number of individual contact drivers increasing from 134 to 198, overall customer satisfaction improved by 0.4%.

In addition:

• Customer satisfaction with support agent increased by 0.3%
• Customer satisfaction with their support experience increased by 0.5%
• Dissatisfaction reduced by 0.2% due to integrating the “customer closed loop” process in CallMiner which ensures every customer who signalled they had a bad experience was subsequently re-contacted and their issue resolved

As Workhuman continues to grow and evolve its customer service quality programme, the company is working to implement a tiered system that rewards CSEs for improving their skills, based on performance insights delivered by the CallMiner platform. If a CSE responds to feedback by completing training or reviewing knowledge articles, they can regain points lost from previous errors. This strategy aims to motivate CSEs and help them value the quality of their work.