Overview
A leading organisation within the home care products industry had outgrown its previous on-premises contact centre technology. "It was a challenging and inflexible product," says the manager. It was time for a major change to elevate the customer experience.
"Reporting was difficult, configurations were challenging for IT, and there was no integration with other systems. Scripting IVRs was challenging and we couldn't route calls like we wanted. The innovation really wasn't there. And we had experienced several service disruptions that would take us out for ours. We couldn't grow with it."
A partner to grow with as complexity increases
The organisation spent more than a year planning its move to the cloud and evaluated multiple vendors. Five9 came out on top. The company underwent a major digital transformation of its contact centre technology, moving its four outsourced contact centres to the cloud and introducing additional capabilities.
"We made a complete digital pivot," recalls the manager. "Five9 excelled in terms of simplicity and coming to the table with immediate solutions we could put into action. It had features that we could take advantage of on day one including CTI, agent whisper, queue callback, hot seating and multi-desk sharing, and redundancy and native integration to our CRM. That was all very attractive.
Proven integrations
The home-care business supports retailers and direct consumers with product, shipping and e-commerce, so integrations were required, not nice-to-haves. It's integration enables its IVR to detect when a customer is known to the system, pull up the record in the Oracle CRM, and, if the customer owns one of the mobile-connected products, automatically routes the call to the team that handles those products.
"This reduces the number of transfers a customer must undergo and makes for a better customer experience. We were excited to be able to stand this up quickly with Five9. Five9 has been able to grow with us as the complexity in our business increases.
If there is a wait, the IVR provides the predicted wait time and gives the customer the option to receive a callback. The outbound dialing capabilities have been helpful in reducing the agent workload and callback queues.
Five9 Quality Management records the agent screens on customer calls, which has saved the organisation two or three full-time employees thanks to the multi-desk sharing capability. The company doesn't have to worry about each agent's physical cubicle location like it did with its previous solution; now recordings are hosted in the cloud.
"Five9 has helped us save over 5% of FTE costs. Between the queue callback and Five9 QM, I'm estimating that I would need at least seven more FTEs than what I have now if we weren't on the Five9 platform" recalls the manager.
Since moving to the cloud with Five9, the organisation has experienced a 9% increase in customer satisfaction scores, measured over thousands of consumer interactions. Consumer feedback around its products is critical to the brand and their service is no exception. The company has found additional benefits by easily sharing customer feedback about its mobile app with its developers. Developers could hear how consumers were reacting through the call and screen recordings, which was a source of input the business didn't previously have.
Moving forward
"Before the pandemic, we ruled out having remote agents as a part of our service staffing strategy. Then the shelter-in-place orders happened and we temporarily lost 85% of our agents worldwide in literally one day," says the manager. "Five9 doubled our licenses overnight so we could open a new call centre while we transitioned our agents to working from home".
With over a million interactions a year, the company also wanted to provide customers with self-service options handled by AI technology. Customers can use Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent to check order status, cancel an order, or register their product. This not only frees agents to handle more complex inquiries, but has increased containment rates by 15%.
“Five9 has made AI and automation our North Star,” the manager says. “Our customers are receiving answers in a natural, conversational way without speaking to a live agent. It’s allowed us to scale our service without compromising quality.”
“With Five9, the trust is there and the technology is there. We are constantly looking at how we can innovate and I’m excited that we can grow with Five9.
