CUSTOMER PROFILE

As a full-service solution provider in the travel industry, Open Network Exchange (ONE) offers its partners innovative products, customized software solutions, tech-enabled sales and marketing products/programs, an online marketplace, product sourcing, and global contact center servicing. When the company wanted to better understand the customer journey and how customers felt about that journey, it turned to NICE to gain a 360-degree view of customer interactions and enable next-generation QA. 

01 THE BEFORE

Manual QA and limited insight into interactions

As a fairly young company, ONE’s quality assurance (QA) processes were highly manual, with calls chosen randomly for evaluations. With a small but mighty QA team—less than 45 people performing QA for more than 1,000 agents globally—the company was only able to evaluate less than 1% of its total interactions. That limited the insights available to the company and hampered its ability to truly understand the customer experience. Additionally, Supervisors were unable to identify and objectively assess agent soft skills that influenced customer satisfaction. As a result, they found it difficult, if not impossible, to rate agents beyond their ability to hit sales goals, adhere to compliance requirements, or meet basic standards for behaving professionally during the interactions that were chosen for evaluation. This impacted their ability to provide meaningful coaching, and opportunities for praise were limited to a small sample of agents’ calls.

“Our evaluations weren’t giving us the full picture,” said Alexandria Doucet, quality assurance manager at ONE. “Everything was focused on compliance and policies—on protecting the back end—rather than on our guest experience during those interactions.”

02 DESIRE TO CHANGE

Understanding the customer journey

Customer service in the travel industry can be highly complex, with a variety of factors and activities contributing to the customer experience. Before a cruise, agents help customers make reservations, book hotels, set up transfers and onboard activities, arrange flights, and more. After the cruise, agents not only help with any additional hotels and flight reservations but also resolve any issues that arose during the sailing.

”We wanted a full, 360-degree view of everything that takes place, and the first step was really to map the customer journey,” Doucet said. “We wanted to understand what customers go through—to enhance key touchpoints—and make our QA department more advanced than what you see at other call centers.”

ONE turned to NICE Enlighten AI for Customer Satisfaction to meet those goals.

03 THE SOLUTION

From listening to phone calls to analyzing data with Enlighten AI

ONE began evaluating solutions for everything from workforce management to customer experience shortly after it was founded in early 2022. The company’s current SVP of Global Technology Strategy and Innovation had worked for NICE before taking the reins at ONE, and “he knew that implementing a NICE solution would open up a whole different world for QA,” Doucet said.

ONE implemented Enlighten AI with its more than 1,000 agents globally and began monitoring 100% of its customer interactions. Enlighten AI unlocks the ability to correlate specific agent behaviors with higher customer sentiment ratings, providing a roadmap for improvement. ONE started with four specific agent behaviors—demonstrating ownership, active listening, building rapport, and effective questioning—to better understand how those behaviors are tied to customer frustration, sentiment, and silent time during interactions.

ONE also leveraged Interaction Analytics' AutoDiscovery feature, which automatically categorizes and identifies topics and relationships in the interaction data with the visualization of volume, sentiment, handling time, and other trends.

AutoDiscovery enables the company to uncover issues that were not on their radar, leading to improved insight into call drivers. “We have such an advanced tool that I’ve never had access to before within my 10 years of experience,” Doucet said.

“We are able to dial into what specific behavioral traits we should be looking for in our contact center based off of previous data. I can look at frustration, I can look at silence. Enlighten helps automate the identification of agents who may be call avoiding or who may need coaching on product knowledge or a soft skill. I can look for calls where certain specific keywords are mentioned without having to listen to every single phone call within the system. It has changed the way I look at quality. Instead of listening to phone calls, we are analyzing data.”

04 THE RESULTS

Running a tight ship

Within 90 days of implementation, the company had shifted the way it coaches its agents, saving a significant amount of time in the process.

Supervisors now have insight into coaching opportunities for each individual agent, each team, and globally for the entire contact center. Rather than relying on QA evaluations as they did in the past, they can quickly search by specific categories or behaviors, such as frustrated contacts or calls where agents received a negative score for effective questioning, and easily access those calls for use in coaching. That results in an average savings of four to five hours per supervisor each week.

“It’s amazing what this system can really do when you use it the right way,” Doucet said. “Besides just saving time, I think the biggest effect has been on the employees themselves, because they’re getting coaching that’s catered to their specific opportunities on 100% of their total interactions.”

Using Enlighten AI with NICE Interaction Analytics has also democratized data. While reports in the past were pass-fail using QA scores, the company can now share reports that shed light on the overall picture, including silence, frustration, and hold counts. The solution’s analytics capabilities are also a big selling point when ONE brings on a new partner, Doucet said.

05 THE FUTURE

Full steam ahead for continued improvement

ONE plans to continue to expand and refine its use of Enlighten AI to map out success metrics and create coaching sessions based on the behaviors measured by Enlighten AI for Customer Satisfaction. While the company started using Enlighten AI to measure agent soft-skill behaviors to improve customer satisfaction, it intends to expand its use of the solution, including leveraging it to better understand sales effectiveness.