CUSTOMER PROFILE

THE CHALLENGE

Before using CXone, Nine’s contact centre was located in the Philippines and a BPO serviced its interactions. When the contact center operations were moved back to Australia, Nine selected NICE CXone as its vendor of choice.

Rich Rose, Director of Customer Service explains: “When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, our inbound volumes ballooned as much as 111%. To complicate matters, it occurred at the same time as we were moving our agents to working from home. At the same time, we were also struggling with a 90% attrition rate.”

Poor employee engagement contributed to high attrition. Rich says agent engagement was low partly because quality assessments focused on traditional contact centre metrics.

To improve all these factors, the CSC implemented a plan focused on four key areas: creating a mission, focusing on its employees, changing leadership actions and behaviours, and using technology as an enabler. It used CXone to assist in accomplishing many of these objectives.

THE SOLUTION

Agent attrition drops 55%

The new strategy led the CSC to create a mission statement that gave its team members a clear purpose: To consistently deliver outstanding customer experiences that drive meaningful value to Nine.

The company also focused on improving employee engagement. “I’ve always believed that a great customer experience is predicated on a great employee experience,” says Rich. “How can you expect your agents to deliver great customer service if they’re part of a contact centre that has a poor employee experience?”

Nine’s mission to improve employee satisfaction paid off: attrition dropped a whopping 55% and engagement increased 8%. One of the factors that contributed to both improvements was giving the agents the choice to work from home or the office. “The largest factor that contributed to the jump in employee engagement is the CXone cloud platform’s flexibility. With it, our employees can work from anywhere as long as they have an Internet connection and login,” says Rich.

“Ultimately, I’d like to move our contact centre to 24x7 hours,” continues Rich. “With CXone’s cloud platform, we can easily utilize onsite resources to achieve this. That’s massive for us.”

Another factor contributing to improved employee engagement was streamlining the IVR. “When I f irst joined Nine, our call transfer rate was 33%,” says Rich. “After completely redesigning the IVR, we reduced it by 69%. That benefits our agents because they’re actually handling calls rather than passing them off. It’s fundamentally changed the way they feel about servicing calls.”

Rich also values the fact that all the functionality the CSC needs is integrated into the CXone platform—there’s no struggling with disparate systems. “CXone is a complete package, and I love that the agents just need one login to access all the functionality and the user interface is consistent across all of CXone’s applications.”

“I’ve used other contact centre systems where the vendor says they have a complete package but, the reality is they’ve cobbled together different solutions and haven’t bothered integrating them into one environment. That’s not true of CXone— everything, such as quality management, channels and workforce management, are built into the CXone platform.”

OPPORTUNITIES IDENTIFIED

NPS jumps 22% and revenue increases 18%

Nine believes that high customer satisfaction translates into increased revenue. And that focus paid off: the company boosted its Net Promoter Score 22% with a corresponding 18% jump in revenue—even during the pandemic.

Rich explains that CXone had an enormous impact despite challenges that arose. “I’m amazed we saw an increase in revenue during the pandemic. Without the CXone platform and its flexibility, we wouldn’t have been able to move the agents to working from home or quickly make updates to the IVR. CXone enabled us to keep the lights on.”

New focus on first contact resolution and agent engagement

CXone Quality Management also contributed to improving agent engagement. “With CXone Quality Management, we can now tell our agents how well they’re performing. For agents who are doing a fantastic job, we can recognize them and that’s boosted engagement. We can also identify agents who need coaching.”

Nine also tracks data from post-call customer surveys using CXone Feedback Management to give the agents deeper insight into their performance. “On every applicable phone call, we get feedback from customers and use that information to graph agents’ performance on a talent matrix.”

“It’s had a huge impact on engagement because the highest performing agents are more engaged than they were when they had no idea whether they were performing better or worse than anybody else.”

“CXone Quality Management gives us everything we need to assess call quality brilliantly. Quality assessment is now an extremely extensive process that delivers very meaningful insights for our agents and supervisors. For instance, we’re reviewing calls to understand if an agent used the proper greeting, if they were empathetic and if they ensured they resolved the caller’s issue before hanging up.”

He continues: “Our job is to consistently deliver outstanding customer experiences. So we need to understand if our agents are following our standardized processes correctly. With CXone Quality Management, we have a well-rounded view of their performance.”

Nine also realized that focusing on traditional contact centre metrics to assess agents’ performance wasn’t motivating. By switching the focus to first call resolution and employee engagement, agents’ job satisfaction increased.

“We believe that the other key metrics, like Net Promoter Score®, and revenue, will look after themselves if we focus our agents on first contact resolution, and the supervisors concentrate on employee satisfaction.“

Zero issues with CXone

Rich’s enthusiasm for CXone is clearly evident. “We’ve had zero issues with CXone and that’s one of its biggest selling points. The CXone platform also does everything we need. It’s part of the lifeblood of our customer service center.”

He concludes by praising the NICE CXone service team that helped train the Nine staff and implement CXone. “They’ve been outstanding in helping us out. Their after-sales support is great and that’s so important. They really care about us.”