The challenge

A large digital payments and financial services company prided itself on its excellent customer experience, however, its in-house sales and customer support teams were quickly being outpaced by customer needs.

A the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many clients failed to apply for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and were at risk of defaulting on their loans, which would impact their ability to do business with the company. The customer support team, though, was spread too thin and unable to follow up with the clients.

At the same time, its overwhelmed sales team missed numerous sales opportunities due to inefficient processes. The company needed an experienced and knowledgeable partner to help it solve simplify processes and increase productivity and efficiency.

Our solution

After being engaged by the client, TTEC associates quickly noticed a low volume of inbound calls regarding the PPP application. We proactively reviewed the client’s process for informing merchants of the PPP and discovered that the emails landed in spam folders or the merchants needed assistance navigating their client dashboard and filling out the online application.

TTEC associates followed up with unresponsive merchants via outbound calls and assisted customers with managing their dashboard and filling out applications.

The client also engaged TTEC to assist with lead generation for the internal sales team. It quickly became apparent, however, that most inbound calls were for customer support and unrelated to sales. Sales associates spent too much time directing callers to other departments instead of fielding and qualifying sales leads.

We deployed an IVR to screen calls and direct non-sales related calls to the appropriate channel. We also implemented a quality assurance layer by appointing an associate to review the leads and confirm the information before forwarding to the sales team, saving the company even more time.

The results

The proactive process improvements and best practices that TTEC deployed had a significant impact. We increased the PPP application participation rate by 20% (15,600 new PPP applications) and the average loan was worth $10K. This had a positive impact on the customer retention rate, since an outstanding debt would have impacted the merchants’ ability to obtain future loans from the company.

Our sales associates delivered a 32% increase in MQL conversions to SQLs year-over-year. The reporting that we provided also gave the client insights into the customer journey, such as the percentage of callers who were ready to buy versus needing additional sales touches, etc.

And finally, the process improvements that we implemented not only increased sales productivity and efficiency for the client, it reduced customer effort—callers no longer interacted with the wrong department—which ultimately improved the customer experience.