The Challenge

An Australian company that offers consumers advice on switching energy and broadband suppliers was not meeting its sales conversion targets. Potential customers were offered alternative energy supplier contract choices based on projected savings calculated by sales agents. The process was complex, involving calculating potential savings for the customer based on information from several different sources. Agents needed access to up to 12 different tools, including Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and websites. This protracted process resulted in rejected calls and missed sales.

The Solution

TTEC’s established presence as the organization’s inbound and outbound call handling service equipped us with a deep understanding of the client’s business. The team applied proactive solutions to help solve the client’s challenges. Weekly business reviews and calibration sessions identified the bottlenecks in the process and prompted us to analyze the tools used by the agents and the associated processes. We designed and implemented a ‘one-stop’ intranet-based platform which incorporated all the necessary data sources and calculation algorithms to enable agents to quickly calculate potential savings for customers. This provided the critical change necessary to increase agents’ confidence in call handling and resultant sales success.

Sophisticated analytics and monitoring systems enabled the client to track the results of the solution, providing up-to-date metrics such as conversions and sales per day as well as the level of rejected calls. Quality scores were also regularly tracked.

Agents also enhanced their skills with a three-week training program covering education about the client’s energy and broadband markets, associated consumer, product, and supplier details, as well as intensive sales training content.

The Results

The solution we delivered significantly reduced handle times, leading to a more than 60% reduction in rejection rates and increased conversions, with cold lead conversions consistently above target at 7% against a target of 5%. Sales per day were running at 6.8 versus the target of 5.7, with a rising trend being maintained. The overall quality score was consistently above the levels set by the client, scoring between 89% and 95% compared to the target of 85%.

TTEC’s expertise serving clients in similar industries and its knowledge of the the Australian market, enabled us to suggest and deploy successful proactive solutions to the client, helping increase performance and grow the business by exceeding revenue and margin targets.

The streamlined process facilitated by the improved technology gave agents more confidence in handling the calls with improved results. Agent retention is high with Employee NPS scores of 67 versus the industry average of 45 in the Philippines.

The client’s CEO was so pleased with the results that he became a TTEC advocate. His commendations include, “TTEC’s dedication to the targets and ease of dealing with have made the difference.”