Growing a Customer Care Team for Greater Education
The Connection has partnered with an Education Payment Solutions company to help connect hundreds of thousands of students with an exceptional education.
The Client’s goal is to help students and their families better access to affordable education financing. The Connection® provides the Client with a number of tenured dedicated and shared agents to assist during peak volume times of June to October, as well as off-peak and unexpected volume increases.
Company Goal for Outsourcing
- Reduce their cost per lead
- Provide flexible staffing solutions to deal with twice-a-year seasonal peaks
- Achieve all AHT, Quality, Service Level goals
Key to Success
Our Client has customers who are stressed over the prospect of finding viable and affordable financing for the secondary and post-secondary school choices. A key goal is to NOT heighten that stress by causing customers to hold for an extended time period during the seasonal peaks when access to information and solutions is most critical.
The Client has been regularly impressed with the ability of The Connection® to adapt to changing market conditions, changes in associated processes and customer needs, all while meeting KPI requirements.
Accomplishments that Lead to Success
- Reduced cost-per-call by reducing average call time by over 10% with no decrease in the quality of the customer experience.
- Provided dynamic staffing that flexes with call volumes
- Created process improvements resulted in cost savings and efficiencies that the client had not experienced before.
- Identified a number of procedural changes that lead to shorter average call times while maintaining Quality goals and meeting CSAT scores.
- Partnered with the client to build a dynamic staffing model, utilizing both dedicated and shared agents, and out-of-the-box scheduling to significantly improve agent utilization resulting in $1MM in revenue saved annually.
- Created a customized, real-time reporting structure that provided Supervisors and Managers immediate access to agent level data as well as queue level data.
- Implemented historical reporting to enhance call volume forecasts, allowing for us to provide more dynamic scheduling. This increased agent utilization by 10%.
Summary
Quality personnel, in depth work by the Workforce Team, and total buy-in from all levels of the Client’s organization allowed us to create new ideas for the client. Those ideas led to successful KPI’s and a stable and productive operation month over month and year over year.
Client Statement
Our client’s Vice President stated: “Since I’ve been working with The Connection®, they have been able to meet and exceed our quality expectations in all operational areas. In addition to being able to successfully scale to meet our seasonal needs, their agents are extremely well trained and well prepared to handle calls that are critical to our business.”
