The challenge

The maxim that you can’t fix what you can’t measure is particularly true in customer experience. An airline company knew that it needed insight into customer complaints, needs, and expectations to make informed decisions and improve performance. However, it lacked a formalized system and the tools for understanding call trends and producing insights in a timely manner in order to act on them.

Our solution

The airline company turned to TTEC, its trusted partner, to spearhead efforts that would enable the contact center teams to provide actionable insights. We proposed implementing a speech analytics tool that is able to provide a view of call trends, volume, AHT (Talk Time + Non-Talk Time), customer sentiment scores, and driver correlations that can be filtered per enterprise, manager, team lead, and associate level.

We started with an onboarding project in which program-based experts were brought in to build and manage customer queries into the platform and who also knew how to maximize the tool’s other features. We appointed one of our best quality assurance specialists to work with the speech analytics experts on building the queries and define for the team what is needed to create insights and would help the operations team expedite and improve their daily tasks.

The results

The close collaboration between different stakeholders (speech analytics experts and contact center representatives) quickly enabled associates to begin identifying and acting on customer insights. For instance, the tool revealed that more than 57,000 inbound calls and chats were from members seeking assistance in retrieving their frequent flyer number (FFN).

In addition to looking up the number for them, associates made it a point to inform members that they can retrieve their FFN, reset their PIN, and get access to other profile information through the airline’s online portal or its app by using their registered email address or mobile number. This insight ultimately led to an 87% reduction in call volume and $128,000 in annual cost savings.

In another case, associates used the customer sentiment feature to understand the impact of a new promotional campaign. Results from the tracking tool showed a 4% increase in overall campaign-related calls wherein 64% of the callers expressed dissatisfaction with the campaign. A common complaint stemmed from confusion about the personalized bonus offer, such as when members of the same family received different offers. The contact center team shared these results with marketing and within two weeks, changes were made to the campaign that helped increase the NPS by 2.3 points. Many more examples like this exist that were spurred by equipping contact center agents with the right tools and training to track customer insights and take action.