Envision | Click Network
Click Network
Boosting Service and Sales through Coaching
Click! Network provides local residents and businesses with more and better choices for cable TV and Internet services. To maintain an extremely high level of customer satisfaction while increasing sales requires the utmost in service delivery. To meet this need, the company turned to Envision’s Click2Coach®.
“Fortunately, our reps love what they do. They are dedicated to ensuring our customers have positive experiences. In a variety of ways, Click2Coach takes their enthusiasm and passion for the work and helps translate it into topnotch customer service.”
Theres Steiner, customer care manager at Click! Network in Tacoma, Washington.
Click! Network is one of five operating sections of Tacoma Power, a public utility that built a state-of-the-art fiber optic telecommunications network to increase its operational reliability. Tacoma Power determined that expanding the network to offer a wide range of “non-electric” services would benefit the community and provide revenue diversity. So Click! Network also provides residents and businesses in the area with cable TV, highspeed Internet and broadband data transport services on the fiber optic and coaxial cable network.
The customer care department adopted Click2Coach in June 2003 in order to automate call monitoring and raise the bar even further on their already great service. Click2Coach is an award-winning agent development solution that includes Envision™ Quality Monitoring and Envision™ eLearning. As Theres readily admits, stiff competition in the industry is another reason why customer service is so important to Click! Network.
Improving performance through more frequent monitoring and coaching
One of the ways Click! Network first used the Envision solution was to provide coaching more frequently and effectively. Their customer care reps tackle in-bound calls on everything from support to service to sales. “And our people aren’t just order takers,” Theres says. “They really do consultative selling, so they have to be able to listen to customers and make effective recommendations.”
The team began by using Envision Quality Monitoring to better understand what reps were actually communicating to customers. Before this, call monitoring was done manually by Theres, which was not only inefficient but also extremely time-consuming. With Envision Quality Monitoring, calls are recorded automatically and, as a result, the group can record and evaluate more calls. And now it’s the team leads who listen to and score the calls, providing each rep with at least two evaluations per week. This means that the team leads are much more knowledgeable about performance and can provide better coaching.
The Reps are also much more informed, because their evaluated interactions and any verbal feedback are sent directly to their desktops, and they can review all this in-between calls.
When the team leads discover reps are providing incorrect information, or when something changes, they often use Envision eLearning to quickly create brief, personalized training videos that are also delivered to the desktop. “With the network continually being built out, our products are in a state of flux, and answers can change minute by minute,” Theres explains. “Sometimes e-mail isn’t enough to communicate when rates change or an area has been remapped. But with Envision eLearning, it’s easy to show people step by step what they need to do.” One valuable consequence of improved coaching is that the customer care group has been able to cut new hire training time in half, from four to two weeks.
Giving employees what they need to be successful
And what has the reaction been to Click2Coach? While there was some initial reticence, reps now embrace Envision Quality Monitoring and Envision eLearning. They recognize how the products make their reviews more fair and objective, and they appreciate the ability to record challenging calls on demand. And, fundamentally, they love listening to their own calls, particularly because much of the feedback is positive.
The team uses the Envision solution to publicize top salesperson of the month, top performer of the month and other internal success stories. According to Theres, “This form of recognition is really important to our reps, because we do not have a commission structure. It’s loyalty and pride in their work that drives them, and having calls recorded can be a great source of acknowledgement.” What’s more, Theres can share calls with anyone outside the department, so the company’s leaders can appreciate and learn from the phenomenal job done by the customer care group.
Using recorded calls to promote best practices
The Envision products provide bottom-line benefits in more ways than increased employee satisfaction. For one, the department is required to answer 90% of all calls within 30 seconds. Since using the agent development solution, they’ve been able to continue to answer 95% of calls within 30 seconds. And they’ve achieved this with only minor increases in head count, even as their customer base has grown. To what does Theres attribute this great call response metric?
Using recorded calls as best practices.
“With Click2Coach, we learn new ways to handle calls more efficiently. For example, believe it or not, our customers love us so much that some call occasionally just to chat. To help our reps discover ways to be responsive to these customers while also wrapping up calls quickly, we’ve held training sessions to review calls where other employees routinely do that successfully.” And when calls end more quickly, reps can answer the next call faster.
Sharing calls has also been very beneficial in terms of helping people sell more effectively. Theres cites one circumstance in which a rep ended a call by saying, “Before I let you go, I want to tell you about a special we’re running right now.” Forwarding that call to other employees helped them identify sales opportunities they may not have discovered on their own.
Professional, courteous service every time
As a result of using the Envision solution, Click! Network’s customer care group has been able to achieve aggressive sales projections. But, equally important, they’ve delivered stellar service year-round. As Theres declares, “In the first year of using the Envision products, our quality scores jumped 27%, and the team has been able to maintain an ‘extremely satisfied’ satisfaction rating of 4.5 out of 5.0.” She is especially proud that “even as we’ve expanded, our service has never faltered. Click2Coach has a lot to do with maintaining such a high level of customer satisfaction.”
Results
> 27% increase in quality scores in first year
> Ability to maintain high customer satisfaction ranking of 4.5 out of 5. (“extremely satisfied”) — even after rate increase and system changes
> New hire training time reduced from four to two weeks
Purchase Decision Factors
> Ease of use
> Automated call monitoring
> Coaching tools to give customer care reps personalized training and objective feedback
> Training videos that can be instantly created and distributed
> Customizable evaluation templates
Solution
Click2Coach®
Industry
Telecommunications
Web Site
“In the first year of using Envision products, our quality scores jumped 27%.” Theres Steiner, Customer Care Manager