Customers: Service Net Solutions LLC

Based in Jeffersonville, Indiana, Service Net creates, markets and administers warranties, service contracts and loyalty programs for companies like Philips, Maytag, Staples and Sony. With business growing exponentially, the company encountered an enviable but difficult problem: how to maintain service and quality standards in the face of rapid expansion. The answer was Click2Coach^®, which delivered a number of important benefits, including a 33 percent jump in quality scores, a fourfold increase in the number of calls captured for evaluation and a reduction in mishandled calls from 30 to one or two per week.

In an era when many businesses are shutting down, Service Net Solutions LLC, an affiliate of the Kemper Insurance Companies, is going gangbusters. Since its founding in 1996, the company has experienced a growth rate of more than 300%. It has been named among the fastestgrowing private companies in its region for two years running, and it was honored with an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Service Net creates, markets and administers warranties and service contracts for blue-chip companies like Office Depot, Philips, Maytag and Amana. The phenomenal success of the business poses some challenges for its 24-hour, seven-day-a-week contact center. Jennifer Holland is general manager of customer experience, the group that handles everything related to claims administration. "Service Net is growing by leaps and bounds. There are always new clients, new programs and new software. And we often have little advance notice of changes."

The 135 agents on her team must have a fair degree of product knowledge, because they support an ever-increasing group of clients — currently 48 — each with multiple products. They also need to exercise a high degree of judgment about how customer requests are handled. According to Jennifer, "We like to hire people who don’t have contact center experience. Click2Coach makes it easy to bring new agents up to speed quickly, so they perform at high levels right away."

What is happening on the calls?

Click2Coach is an award-winning contact center solution that includes Envision™ Quality Monitoring and Envision eLearning. Prior to adopting Click2Coach, it was difficult for the Service Net contact center managers to ascertain how well their agents were doing. This was because call monitoring was done manually with tape recorders. Because of system constraints, managers and trainers could record only one call at a time, so the total number of interactions captured was small. In fact, agents were evaluated only once a month and only on three calls.

It’s about time

Click2Coach automatically captures customer interactions according to a schedule set by supervisors. This helps Service Net manage growth, because it enables managers to get more done in less time. Where they formerly spent an hour on a single call, they can now, in the same amount of time, provide evaluations and feedback on five calls. This is critical because the manager/employee ratio increased over the year from 1/10 to 1/15, and the call volume jumped from 45,000 to 70,000.

The time saved also greatly benefited the department’s trainers. Where they used to focus almost exclusively on call monitoring, they are now free to do what they do best — provide one-to-one training, develop training manuals and conduct classroom training. Further, like the managers, the trainers are able to accomplish more training than ever before.

Remarkable Results in Record Time…

"In the past year," Jennifer says, "we reduced our staff from four trainers to three. Yet we continue to increase our output without any hiccups." Coaching for improved quality and satisfaction Jennifer explains how automated call monitoring paved the way for effective coaching. "Click2Coach greatly boosts the amount of attention and feedback we give to people on the phone. As a result, we now have a pulse on our agents and can focus our energies on aggressively coaching them and catching any mistakes."

Thanks to Click2Coach, agents receive four times as many evaluations as they did before, for a total of twelve per month. By providing the evaluations in the context of actual calls and increasing the frequency of the coaching, agent performance has improved significantly. "Our quality scores are challenging," says Jennifer. "We intentionally set the bar high, so people always have something to learn. In 2001, the average score was 67 out of 100; now it’s 87. With Click2Coach, our quality scores have improved by 33%."

Making the grade in other areas

While quality scores have increased, other metrics have decreased in a positive way. Prior to the use of Click2Coach, the customer service group had a weekly record of 30 misentitlements, which are calls in which clerical errors occur. Because of Click2Coach, the team now has only one or two misentitlements each week.

Another measure of success relates to the center’s service escalation reports, which identify how many calls come back into the contact center for rework. At one point, the ratio for escalations to dispatch had gone up to 7%. Using Click2Coach, the team has reduced that number to 1%.

Training videos delivered directly to the agent desktop Click2Coach lets trainers easily author and distribute video training, and Service Net makes great use of the feature. Jennifer explains the advantage of using videos instead of classroom training. "We used to huddle everyone together to explain things like updates to procedures or policies. But we lost valuable time with our customers whenever we dragged 120 people into a room."

While Service Net continues to conduct classroom training when appropriate, they’ve starting replacing some sessions with Click2Coach videos. This has produced average monthly savings of $3,900.