Case Study:Avaya, a leading global provider of next-generation business collaboration and communications solutions, prides itself in its award-winning support organization that helps their customers get the most out of their Avaya solutions. Using internal metrics, external feedback and industry benchmarking, Avaya continues to elevate the service and support it provides.
Avaya has long been in the practice of quickly following up with customers who provided lower evaluations of their support experience. This type of intervention has helped to improve and strengthen the relationships with many of their customers over time. However, Avaya knew they could do more. What about those customers who didn’t complete surveys? What were their experiences? How could they take it a step further to not just react to - but prevent - a poor support experience?
After engaging with Walker, Avaya analyzed operational data and transactional support survey feedback were analyzed to identify specific events or patterns of events that were indicators of a less than optimal support experience. Next, Avaya set up an internal process to identify these events/indicators and send alerts to the responsible manager that there was a potential for a poor support experience.
Next, the support case intervention is prioritized around a series of triggers including time for initial response, last time since status update, quality of status update, and multiple internal handoffs. The alerts are in the form of a daily email that identifies active support cases and the reason for the alert trigger. This allows managers to review and prioritize interventions in order to get the support experience back on track. This also serves as an aid to provide targeted coaching for associates within the support organization.
This process resulted in 14 percent of support cases generating a proactive alert on average.
Managers at Avaya have indicated that the proactive alerts provide visibility to potential issues that could have easily been undetected resulting in a poor support experience. Highlighting these support cases provides them an opportunity to both improve the customer experience and improve the performance of their associates.
To understand the impact, cases that triggered proactive alerts were tracked to determine the resulting customer satisfaction. In just the first four months of
implementation the results were clear.
Ratings have now leveled off and are just slightly trailing support cases without alerts. This non-significant difference demonstrates the power of proactive intervention in support recovery.
Of particular note was the impact on Communication ratings from triggered cases. Even though multiple alert triggers identify poor communication practices, transactional survey feedback from alerted cases report the same or even higher communication ratings than those without alerts highlighting the impact of intervention!
The proactive alert process has not only helped to intervene and improve the customer experience during an active support case, but the resulting improvement in customer feedback through the transactional survey has reduced the number of low score/follow-up alerts. The percentage of surveys triggering low score alerts has declined from 7.24% to 6.67%. This represents an annual decline of around 375 customer follow ups! The implementation of proactive alerts has also helped Avaya continue to drive significant year over year improvement in their overall support experience evaluations!
As a result of this pilot, proactive alert triggers continue to be reviewed and refined to improve which support cases Avaya focuses attention and resources. Over time, this has resulted in a significant reduction in the number of alerts generated, but a continued focus on improving in the support experience.
Avaya is a leading global provider of next-generation business collaboration and communications solutions, providing customer and team engagement solutions, unified communications, real-time video collaboration, contact center, networking, and related services to companies of all sizes around the world.
Click the button below to download "Improving Customer Experience With Proactive Alerts."
Download "Improving Customer Experience With Proactive Alerts"