Traditional quality assurance protocols failed to get the job done. Labour-intensive, weak sample sizes, outdated standards, and incomplete data ultimately produced scores that were suspect at best. At its worst, QA failed at its primary objective: to detect problems that could be resolved easily.

An innovative nutrition supplement company wanted to strengthen its ability to use customer interaction data to improve associate performance and customer engagement. The company worked with TTEC to implement our AI-enhanced next generation quality intelligence solution to analyse and act on all customer interactions, not a misrepresentative subset of interaction data.

The challenge

Existing QA processes consumed 30 to 40 minutes of prep time for team leaders getting ready to coach an associate. Team leads manually pulled reports and performance metrics like average handle time (AHT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) from multiple, disparate systems. With limited, aggregated information to guide coaching, a team leader was unable to focus coaching on the performance aspects an associate most needed to improve.

Our solution

We helped the client move quickly at scale from traditional quality assurance to an innovative and cost-effective analytics and insights-based solution using speech and text analytics. Working with our technology partner Level AI, a full 100% of customer interactions were analysed in near real time and all metadata was processed — a dramatic improvement over the prior 1% of interactions examined.

It was not only spoken dialogue the AI solution analysed but also conversation style, broken out by intent, to tease out what might be more subtle cues to guide coaching. This provided unprecedented visibility to clearly defined black-and-white issues and also flagged many less-definable, grey areas of customer interactions that had great potential to improve.

The company’s coaching strategy was expanded and enhanced with precision, empowering a high level of customisation to the individual associate. Insights gleaned from customer interactions provided a detailed roadmap for high-impact coaching because a greater variety of interactions were incorporated. Coaching was more effective because it was centred on very recent interactions — those that occurred just an hour ago — rather than days or weeks prior. That’s a conversation associates could recall in vivid detail and as a result, they were more engaged with coaching.

In fact, the solution put associates in the “driver’s seat” on coaching because they could view their own performance dashboards and tell team leads: “Here is where I was having a problem.” This new ability to be proactive about their own performance improved associates’ motivation and led to greater job satisfaction.

The results

Our client saw impressive efficiency gains and productivity improved 97%. The solution saved 358 hours in a 90-day period by eliminating manual review and data collection.

Analysis revealed quick-hit opportunities for cost savings by improving inventory management and proactively addressing product expiration issues. Refunds associated with expirations could be reduced more than 6% and the number of calls stemming from these high-volume intents could be reduced 6%.

CSAT also improved because our client was able to leverage 15% more customer feedback and apply those insights to improve the experience. Customer sentiment rose 9% during the 90-day pilot period.