The challenge

A food service delivery company with a national footprint was committed to delivering the highest level of food to its customers while aligning the organization around the common goals of excellence in routing and operations, and customer and employee experience. Mindful of changing customer expectations and the ongoing evolution of the organization, the company sought improvements to the customer and employee experience.

Our solution

The company engaged TTEC’s learning and development team to help its advocates (or customer support associates) encourage more callers to become new customers. After listening to new customer calls and reviewing KPIs, the corporate leaders felt that advocates needed to be better equipped with the right tools, training, and information to effectively convert callers into new customers.

After conducting an audit, TTEC’s Learning and Development (L&D) team implemented up-training to reinforce sales and soft skills techniques. Additionally, to speed up knowledge article load times, the team suggested redesigning the new customer knowledge articles as well as removing unnecessary and repetitive steps, which streamlined and condensed the content.

For the skilled advocates who regularly handle new customer calls, the team created a three-hour virtual instructor-led course that revisited the new customer standards and processes. This up-training included fundamental building blocks on gaining new customers and how new customers affect Schwan’s Home Delivery business.

Role-play practice aligned to significant call drivers was also included in the up-training. This provided advocates real-world practice before conducting actual new customer calls. Additionally, the TTEC L&D team developed a condensed version of up-training for advocates who do not routinely handle new customer calls. Their up-training included a microlearning video and a review of the revised knowledge article to reinforce the new customer call flow process. The microlearning video was added to the knowledge base if advocates needed a refresher.

Lastly, the L&D team added clarity to the sales process. This included creating a Delivery Needs Assessment in which advocates were trained to identify a caller’s food preference by asking open-ended and close-ended questions. The team also reviewed basic sales and soft skills principles with advocates, such as product excitement, effectively recommending products, and building rapport.

The results

Typically, clients want to bring down a high average handle time (AHT); however, the client had a unique perspective. It desired to increase caller engagement by advocates spending more time with callers. The client considered a higher AHT exceptional.

As a result of the implemented learning and development solutions, there was a 10% rise in AHT, indicating advocates took the necessary time to apply the skills and steps trained. Also, there was a 16% increase in new customer sign-ups, the knowledge article load time decreased by 16 seconds, and all advocates received 100% on their training assessment.