Member Article

How to Increase Customer Satisfaction with Smarter Use of Data

Business Systems UK’s Will Davenport explains how one of the UK’s biggest outsourcers of financial and administration services has improved contact centre performance through technology

The performance of a contact centre is a critical benchmark for both customers and prospects – which is why any insight you can uncover for improved delivery is critical for improving sales, enhancing customer loyalty, maintaining compliance and reducing costs. This may sound complex, but the good news is that there is some practical technology available that can provide you with applied results that will help drive your business forward.

One UK organisation that has found this to be the case is FTSE 250 member Equiniti Group plc, a provider of sophisticated technology, administration, processing and payments services, delivered by over 5,000 employees worldwide and whose mission is making complex processes simple for organisations and individuals alike.

Equiniti provide share registration services and associated investor schemes, and also offers administration services for employee share plans, pensions and employee benefits schemes to a number of well-known high street brands. Every year the Equiniti contact centre assists over 2.6 million customers, while its 400-strong workforce handles nearly 90 million documents and processes £90bn in payments.

To achieve a consistently high level of service, continuous advancements are essential. To this end the company deployed NICE Nexidia Speech Analytics from Business Systems (UK) Ltd to provide them with the power and functionality of discovery, analytics, reporting and performance management which now plays a central role in pinpointing processes that need refining.

When Business Systems delivered the solution, its consultants first looked at processes that needed immediate attention and discovered that the share dealing service was not delivering the level of customer experience expected. Users were perplexed by the process and the information they were required to provide: and using its new Business Systems-delivered software, Equiniti was able to quickly find out why some calls were not being completed end-to-end.

Problem causes identified – and resolved

Based on this truly helpful insight, managers were able to search voice datasets using leading-edge AI and sentiment analysis software to gain valuable intelligence, and the findings were used to track down the problems in the process and create a new script for agents. This practical improvement step has a very immediate effect; as a direct result of tightening the dialogue, its Customer Experience Centre saw the average call length fall from 5 minutes to 3 minutes, a performance boost magnified with an increase in first point resolution times and an enhanced customer experience.

The system soon helped pinpoint another gap. Equiniti also offers a share dealing account where a yearly fee is taken from customers via a direct debit. If the direct debit instruction had not been used for a 13 month period, these instructions automatically lapse requiring the customer to provide Equiniti with their direct debit details again. Through the use of the Discovery Word Cloud function in Nexidia, Equiniti were able to identify this as a potential problem.

Deploying a deep dive process, Business Systems and Equiniti found this issue to also be generating unnecessary call volumes, increasing customer dissatisfaction and an increased effort required by the customer to undertake a simple transaction. With the data analytics gathered, Equiniti arranged for the lapse period to increase to a period of 3 years instead of 13 months, ensuring the maintenance and customer effort required for this service is kept to a helpful bare minimum.

In addition to identifying processes to improve, Speech Analytics has also given Equiniti greater insight into the customer experience, customer behaviours and the productivity of their agents, alongside the effectiveness of compliance monitoring. Overall Equiniti have seen a 2% increase in Customer Satisfaction scores – and a jump in its Net Promoter Score from 48 to 51 – as a result of applying this intelligence to the business.

’A positive, memorable customer experience’

Along with the rebrand of the ‘Contact Centre’ to the ‘Customer Experience Centre’, Equiniti is now able to place greater importance on improving the customer experience going forward by analysing communications to gain an even better understanding of the interactions between agents and customers.

Summing up the impact of using data to better track what his contact agents are achieving, the company’s customer experience (CX) leader Gareth Wallis comments “Using the Speech Analytics system has really helped us gain insight into the way our customers interact with us – and enabled us to really listen to our customers, gain feedback from their calls and enhance our ability to deliver a positive, memorable customer experience all round.”

*The author is a Director at Business Systems (UK) Ltd, a specialist for 30 years in providing call recording and workforce optimisation solutions for investment banks, city trading floors *

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Will Davenport .