The Connection® works with a State Government Agency that was being brutalized by their prior vendor. The client knew they needed a competent contact center team to right the ship. What they ended up with was a partner that waded into the morass, made sense of a senseless situation, and created competency from chaos.
Client's Goal for Outsourcing
During the transition, the Client provided The Connection with data from their old vendor. When the program launched, we discovered that the old vendor was hiding and disguising vast amounts of information related to call volume and Average Handle Time (AHT). Consequently, that call volume was triple what the Client thought it was because the previous vendor had been hiding and blocking calls!
The Client's goals for The Connection:
- Receive guidance on what their customers needed from their customer service department
- Correctly handle massive unreported abandons
- Reduce the long hold times caused by the Client’s misunderstanding of headcount (due to incomplete data)
- Determine what a legitimate AHT needs to be to provide first-call resolution
Key to Success
Both the Client and The Connection realized that we had inherited an unworkable disaster. Together, we dedicated ourselves to developing a comprehensive solution to create a gold standard customer care team.
Tasks to Accomplish Success:
- The Connection provided transparent call reporting revealing two key factors:
- Actual call volume was 2.5x what had been reported by the prior vendor
- AHT necessary to successfully complete a transaction was double what was being reported
- The Connection Supervisors met daily with Client personnel discussing missing content and missing FAQs necessary to handle call types that were not expected and previously had not been properly handled.
Based on the data from the reports, The Connection was quickly able to develop a comprehensive solution to address the issues the previous vendor struggled with. Solution included:
- Immediately began to right-size the team based on actual call volume and AHT
- Onboarded and trained a Tier II team to handle complex call types that the client didn't know existed
- Reduced the IVR routing that had 98 options (no kidding!) that the caller had to sort through to 4 options
Summary
Within just a few weeks, The Connection turned around an unsustainable mess that the Client didn’t even know they had. Our team became Subject Matter Experts and provided comprehensive feedback and suggestions multiple times a day, every day until order was created. This clarity led to reduced calls from the general public to State offices from over 1,000/day to zero within two weeks. Said the Client, “The chaos stopped the moment The Connection took over!”
