Call Center Software | Customers: Retail: ShopNBC

The secret to success for any retail business is consistent delivery of legendary customer experiences that drive customer loyalty and retention. In fact, customers often decide where to shop on the basis of how they’re treated. This is why ShopNBC, an upscale multimedia retailer of high-quality consumer products, regards outstanding service driven by effective agents as an important component of their strategy to gain long-term, repeat customers. And it’s also why quality assurance manager Mary Gooding decided that ShopNBC should adopt Click2Coach^®.

Agent Coaching Leads To Legendary Customer Experiences

The secret to success for any retail business is consistent delivery of legendary customer experiences that drive customer loyalty and retention. In fact, customers often decide where to shop on the basis of how they’re treated. This is why ShopNBC, an upscale multimedia retailer of high-quality consumer products, regards outstanding service driven by effective agents as an important component of their strategy to gain long-term, repeat customers. And it’s also why Quality Assurance Manager Mary Gooding decided that ShopNBC should adopt Click2Coach®.

Gooding manages three quality assurance (QA) coordinators responsible for evaluating and coaching a team of 190 agents who field a variety of service questions—via both phone calls and e-mail messages—addressing customers’ concerns about order status, defective merchandise or incorrect shipments. The mission of the ShopNBC QA team is to strengthen agents’ abilities, recognize work well done and encourage improvement, all in order to ensure that customers receive high-quality, consistent and exceptional customer service. "To help our agents be their best," Gooding says, "we needed to find a way to give them more feedback, and more targeted feedback. Our time-consuming, manual processes were getting in the way. Click2Coach was the perfect solution to improving our quality and efficiency by delivering targeted training directly to agents’ desktops."

Designed to improve agent effectiveness, Click2Coach is an agent development solution that includes Envision™ Quality Monitoring and Envision™ eLearning.

" Before Click2Coach, agents received three evaluations per month. Now they receive as many as twelve, so we’re able to reward positive behavior more often." — Mary Gooding Quality Assurance Manager ShopNBC Agent Coaching Leads To Legendary Customer Experiences

Better Coaching = Better Service

ShopNBC uses Click2Coach to empower agents to provide consistent, high-quality customer service experiences across their sales channels:

ShopNBC, the nation’s third-largest home shopping network, which currently reaches about 60 million households nationwide via cable and satellite television
ShopNBC.com, which simulcasts ShopNBC TV and has over 10,000 items to browse instantly

Envision is dedicated to helping contact centers use

the voice of the customer to deliver exceptional customer experiences, and Gooding states that Envision’s customer-focused approach also influenced their purchase decision. "Not only are their products easy to learn and use, they back them up with exceptional technical support and services. Envision is a great partner in our efforts to increase customer loyalty and retention."

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Coaching for improved efficiency and effectiveness

An ineffective use of time and an inadequate amount of information were significant challenges for ShopNBC’s QA team. To monitor calls, either they observed calls live, which was very time-consuming, or they taped the interactions and listened to calls after they had been completed. Neither method, Gooding says, provided enough calls to perform sufficient evaluations to optimize the quality and performance of her organization. And, because the recordings captured only the agent’s portion of the call, "We’d have to guess what the agent was doing as he or she interacted with customers. Sometimes you’d hear a long pause, and you knew there was a problem, but there wasn’t any way to tell what was happening."

Click2Coach handily solved these problems. Automated call monitoring resulted in a 40% decrease in the time required for call monitoring and doing evaluations, while also capturing three times as many calls for evaluation, enabling supervisors to focus on professional development. As Gooding says, "Before Click2Coach, we were lucky if agents received three evaluations per month. Now they receive as many as twelve, and each coordinator completes as many as twenty evaluations daily. So we’re able to reward positive behavior more often and improve agent effectiveness within our center."

Equally important, Click2Coach captures a recording of the entire interaction—not only the audio of the call or the text exchange in the e-mail message but also what the agent is doing on-screen. Having this knowledge enables supervisors to see how agents are navigating the system, so they can coach them to follow best practices. Click2Coach lets the coordinators forward recorded interactions, along with annotations and evaluations, directly to agents. Frequently providing personalized, targeted feedback is a key element in increasing agent effectiveness. Gooding appreciates that, because supervisors can forward recorded interactions along with the evaluations, "agents are able to listen to the call and the customer in the privacy of their own desk, where they’re less self-conscious than a formal QA/Supervisor meeting. This helps them better understand the content of the coaching."

"While we focus on the customer’s experience, we also have the opportunity, where appropriate, to generate revenue for the company," Gooding says, identifying another benefit of Click2Coach’s quality monitoring capabilities. "Click2Coach gives us the tools to coach agents on sales and soft skills, which is important for training agents to up-sell and cross-sell our products." She also appreciates how Click2Coach enables the

eLearning Makes It Simple

QA team to reward success, for example, with a Flash animation running across their screen identifying the current top ten agents. "This kind of recognition motivates agents, leading to more sales."

Saving time and providing better training with the use of videos

"In my experience, there are more people who are visual learners rather than audio learners," Gooding says. "And that’s why we’re really excited about the eLearning video capability in Click2Coach."

This feature makes it simple for supervisors to author and deliver targeted training videos to the agent desktop. ShopNBC uses this form of training in many ways, such as showing agents when to use which reason for call code and tips on effectively showing customers how to get answers from their own account page at the ShopNBC Web Site.

e-Learning not only provides effective training, it speeds the whole training process. Because agents can watch training clips at their desks, there’s no impact on productivity by needing to pull everyone into a classroom-style meeting. And because agents can watch the training clips only when call volumes are low, customer service is not affected. The training clips along with the recorded calls also significantly ramp up new hire training time. Gooding has found that, as Envision believes, listening to the voice of the customer can make all the difference in the quality of the customer service you deliver. "When you hear a recorded call, it’s like reading between the lines. You can tell whether a customer is comfortable with an answer or not, and you can coach agents on how to recognize this kind of response and how to address it. This is something that would be difficult, if not impossible, to train without hearing the customer’s real voice."