Hope Rufrano of Zenylitics’ customer Dunlop Sports Americas discusses their journey in maximizing customer experience using CallMiner.
Transcript follows
Will Stagl
All right, let’s get started. So again, hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for the webinar how to deliver conversational analytics results in the first 90 days. My name is Wil Stigall. I’m the Product Marketing Manager here at CallMiner. And I’m joined today by Toronto, Brandon Matobo, Kyle Carter, who are all going to join in on a discussion today about how organizations can ensure that they make quick progress towards their quality and efficiency goals when they’re adopting conversation analytics platforms like homeowner and based on the experiences of Dunlop sports and their approach and their outcomes. Before we dive in today, I do have a couple of housekeeping items I like to run through real quick. First, this is going to be a Listen Only presentation with a live q&a. So you’re welcome and encouraged to ask any questions using the q&a function that you see built into this platform. You’ll see it there on the bottom right hand side of your console. And we’re going to address those at the end of the session during the q&a section here. Second, if you happen to have any audio issues, please refresh your browser or close it entirely and rejoin the webinar to hopefully address those problems. Third, the link to a recording of this webinar is going to be sent to you within 48 hours using the email address that you gave us when you registered. So it’ll take you back to this console, where you’ll be able to watch the webinar on demand or view any of the additional resources that we’ve linked for you on the right hand of the console. Lastly, if you want to book a call with a CallMiner, expert, or view a demo of our platform, you’ll notice there’s a book a meeting button or view Demo button in the bottom left hand of your screen as well.
Now with that behind us, I’d like to officially introduce our speakers for today’s webinar. First and foremost, I hope we’re finally the director of customer experience for Dunlop sports hope. Thank you for joining us today.
Hope Rufrano
Thank you. Well, it’s so good to be here. I appreciate CallMiner and Zenylitics inviting us to participate.
Will Stagl
Well, we’re glad to have you here. And I see that you brought with you Brandon Montalvo, who’s your data analyst at download sports. Brandon, thanks for joining us also.
Brandon Montalbo
Oh, thank you so much, very excited.
Will Stagl
Perfect. This also serves as our audio checking you guys out loud and clear, which is great. And then finally, last but not least, Kyle Carter, VP of deliver delivery and co founder of senolytics who helped you guys achieve the results that you got that we’re talking about here today. Welcome, and thanks for joining us, Kyle.
Kyle Carter
Thanks for having me. Will.
Will Stagl
excellent. All right. Well, let’s move on and start to start talking about the experiences that Dunlop Sports had working with Zenylitics to put CallMiner in place and start to see some results. Hope Can you talk to us a little bit about Dunlop Sports and your background with the company what brought you here today?
Hope Rufrano
Who is Dunlop sports. We are the North American subsidiary of Sumitomo rubber industries. We manufacture and sell premium golf and racquet sports equipment to players of a variety of skill levels. Right? Not everybody’s a pro. And we have a portfolio of brands that include Dunlop SRECS, on Cleveland, golf, and Zarxio. And we are also a licensed exclusive distributor of ASICs golf footwear. So I have been with the company for 11 years now, and very excited to talk to everybody today about what we have been able to achieve.
Will Stagl
Excellent. So thanks for giving us a little bit of background and context there. Let’s talk about the project that you guys engage with Zenylitics on and and how you got started. I know your project charter was kind of the cornerstone for this and and how you framed the initiative.
Hope Rufrano
When we started looking at this, you know, our mission and CX is to be best in class right to deliver that best in class experience to customers with every transaction. And at the time, we were focused on Channel expansion, and we were focused on providing the human touch. But we really needed insight into customer engagement and the call drivers within those interactions in order to really move the dial forward and be best in class. We also wanted to connect to the employees experience. You know, you can’t take care of your customers unless your employees are in a great place. And we believe that the ability to provide our agents with focused feedback would ultimately increase their effectiveness and their efficiency. This would reduce our average handle times, we knew this would help us achieve first call resolution. And ultimately it would help us increase sales effectiveness overall. So when we looked at all of that, we recognize that we didn’t have the technology to analyze calls, tickets, chats, and text interactions. Our omni channel approach was there, but we couldn’t gather what we needed out of that. And Zenylitics was a perfect partner for us. They provided us with the team as a service, they heard our needs, and then quickly developed an initial project charter, which you see on the screen in front of you is kind of a recap of that. That was really the starting point to us moving forward with CalMiner, which is what we needed. Kyle, I’m going to turn it over to you to kind of speak a little bit more about a few of those things that you guys helped us with?
Kyle Carter
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, the project charter is really key to success of any program, right? When you’re engaging with interaction analytics early on, there is a wealth of data that you’ve never had access to before, you know, hope mentioned the idea of call drivers, anecdotally you understand why people call you and what’s really going on in your contact center. But once you once you roll out a tool, like call minder, you’re getting visibility to, you know, the the raw numbers, the data under around why people are calling you and having something like a charter as your guiding principle, keeping guardrails on a program really keeps you focused on the key objectives. Right. And that’s one of the you know, that’s one of the reasons I think Dunlop has been so successful is that, you know, with the engagement of, of hope and brand, and we were able to develop a charter that really aligned with their business initiatives and Hope I love your point about, you know, the best in class experience. And you guys are really committed to that. And I think each of these charter objectives that we developed and agreed upon, were, you know, focused on that idea of how do we provide that not only for our, for our customers, but also for, you know, our staff. So I think, you know, just the idea of the charter as a as a basis and a foundational step in the program is really important to call them.
Will Stagl
Great, thank we can jump next slide. Did you guys want to talk then a little bit, I know, you’ve you’ve got to within that framework, then you had some target goals around, you establish some objectives, but then you focused on kind of those early results and, and what what the low hanging fruit was in terms of what you could achieve.
Hope Rufrano
It’s true, you know, right away, we had visibility to available information that was pretty valuable. One of the things that really stuck out about that was the category of silence. Silence on our interactions, particularly on phone calls wasn’t something we had really focused on before. And by having it brought to our attention, and being able to see the context around that silence. Right. When was that happening? Why was it happening? Once we knew that we quickly identified that our agents didn’t have quick access to information they needed. So there was more silence time because the agents were trying to find the information they needed. And so when we did that, and learned that we were able to give the agents fingertip access, if you will, to the information they needed, and it rapidly eliminated the silence. And we pretty quickly saw a shortened call handle time, and improved cutter customer satisfaction as a result, because the customer is not sitting there waiting. You know, once silence was addressed, we saw an improvement on the scorecards, the information that we see then those recording that we get. And our senior leadership was also really happy because they saw an immediacy of tangible positive results. And that reduction in call handle time is obviously cost savings. So there was a positive contribution to the ROI. For us, we have a lot of seasonal business, you know, there’s golf season, there’s tennis season. And so it’s important for us to be able to quickly address what we see as recurring customer inquiries, in the scorecards, and the data data analysis that we get now are and will help us achieve that in ways that we weren’t able to do previously. So, I mean, it’s just been a real, a real benefit to us.
Will Stagl
And sounds like that translated then from reducing silence, improving the call handling times into overall improvements in customer experience.
Hope Rufrano
Absolutely. You know, our customer satisfaction scores. So we saw a slight bump and nose. And I think if there’s anybody else on the call today who’s in customer experience, you know that large bumps in customer satisfaction are hard to achieve. So small wins add up over time. And we really started seeing that.
Kyle Carter
I think, I think just to kind of jump onto that point, you know, coming from silence, the idea of looking at silence as a metric that that Dunlop hadn’t been looking at before, you know, the idea of rising tide lifts all ships, as we’re working on that metric, and seeing, you know, improved performance there, we’re not only becoming more efficient as an organization, right, we’re able to have less hold time have less dead air and calls, but we’re also filling that with the behaviors that we know are going to provide that experience. And that’s actually what we’re looking at on this slide right now. This is, you know, the overall score, one of the scores that we created for the Dunlop team, around their QA assessment, and it’s, it’s an aggregate of behaviors, that are really core to how they want to interact with their customers, you know, be confident, build rapport, you know, have a consistent type of engagement and interaction with their customers. You know, we always, I’ve said this countless times with the Dunlop team, the idea of taking a call that could be transactional, and turning it into an interaction, and the behaviors that they’ve woven into this scorecard, really, you know, ensure that their agents are putting their efforts in the right places. So while we see silence go down, we’re seeing that gradual behavioral shift in, you know, our QA or our call flow score, where we’re filling that time in that would have been silence in you know, previous months, we’re filling that in with, you know, building rapport with customers, and engaging with them and making sure that we’re, we’re solving whatever issue it is that they’re that they’re bringing to us and making it a great experience along the way.
Hope Rufrano
It is Kyle into that point. I think customers really see that as being heard, right, of having empathy with them, of connecting with them. And I think the relationships that you build with customers long term, that’s what keeps the customers you have and starts the word of mouth that helps build your customer base as well.
Kyle
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it goes back to and then the slide we’re looking at now is Zenylitics’ idea of iteration zero, there are certain things that we want to look at with every customer. And we just touched on, we just touched on a few of them, right? The idea of looking at handle time looking at silence, not only just looking at the metric as a whole, but what’s underneath it, you know, what are the drivers? Until you have an interaction analytics piece of software like CallMiner in place, it’s really hard to understand what’s driving long calls, what’s driving really low silence or really high silence and CallMiner allows us to uncover that. And you know, Hope you touched on that before, it’s kind of understanding the seasonal shifts in your business and you know, rolling out new products, what does that do to your business, and it allows you that level of visibility. So our idea around iteration zero. And many of these, we touched on with the you know, the the Dunlop team were deep dives into duration into silence into the idea of first call resolution. Everybody wants to talk about fcr is a metric. But really what does that mean? Looking into repeat calls, looking at the customer journey, putting multiple interactions into a string and seeing what the you know, what the impacts are, what the underlying issues are. And then just looking at your call drivers mentioned earlier, the idea of, you know, we know why people call us or they initiate a chat with us. But now we can put value to that. And we can look at impact. So if someone calls me because they have an issue with a with a product or a shipment, I can start to understand what the impact to our businesses does that make calls longer or shorter? Do we see higher dissatisfaction and that really can be kind of our guiding light on where we spend our time. So iteration zero for us is is a process that we go through with near every customer. These are all things that can help businesses, whether you’re in the consumer product space, whether you’re in the set, you’re in sales, you’re in financial services, wherever you are.
Will Stagl
So you’re enabling all those teams, you’re setting up the right metrics, and then you’re you’re monitoring in promoting behaviors to improve that customer experience.
Hope Rufrano
Yeah, you know, we traditionally see an increase in average handle time when we launch new products, which we have done this year. And that is because customers have more questions. They’re looking at upgrading their equipment or replacing their equipment. And at the same time, our agents are accessing new product knowledge, right? So lots of questions from the customer new information for the agents, so they’re trying to get accustomed to that. So those average call times will get a little bit longer that period of time. And that handle time is obviously A big part of our cost to serve, right. And so when we’re able to utilize the data insights, like we did with silence and gathering that information, to use that to be able to shorten our handle time, and still deliver a quality experience to a customer that we’re able to build a relationship with, that ends up giving us a win win situation, which directly translates to customer satisfaction. From that, like, we’re measuring that customer experience improvement as relates to those customer interactions. But at the same time, we need to measure our employees experience as well, and be able to act on that knowledge. So we see satisfaction in the employees perception of what their work life is like. And then long term, when we’re looking at those results from a customer’s experience and an employee’s experience, we’re anticipating that that’s going to be reflected in increased sales, because we’ll be able to share real customer feedback and real customer interactions and relationships with our sales and marketing teams.
Will Stagl
Great. So we talked about, we frame this conversation around, you know, initial successes in 90 days, but you could also kind of look at your longer term and broader trends as part of this in terms of CX and where you’re, where you’re heading and where you want to head. Sure.
Hope Rufrano
So you know, our program really evolved, right. So in the beginning, you’re just focused on launching, getting this new technology out beginning to understand the technology, how it reacts with your systems, your incoming channel platforms. And so we initially launched, only focused on phones, right for about the first six months. And very early on Brandon, our data analyst jumped in to work side by side with Zenylitics to walk us through not not necessarily just the launch, but also through calibration phase. So when you look at the categories and components we were measuring, we needed time to calibrate that and make sure we captured it right with language and jargon that specific to our industry. And through CallMiner, we have the ability to do that. So it’s really calibrating and customizing the platform to our specific needs in golf and racquet sports. As time went by, after we passed about that six month mark, we started adding channels one at a time. And now we have full omni channel data that’s going into our data analytics. And now we’re starting to move into year two, right, it seems like we just started doing this, but we’re moving into year two, because we added our channels thoughtfully over time, and calibrated to each of the channels, because obviously your interaction is different by phone than it is by email or text or ticket or chat. We’re still as a result of that building our baseline of data. But we have published metrics and expectations to our agents. We have built those into their annual performance goals for 2023. And our achievements in this space are part of our overall team metrics that we report back to senior leadership on every week, every month. And so the progress from launching this new technology to now being able to have a standard by which we can analyze and view our channel transactions is just a huge benefit to the organization. I think that’s a good transition to the next slide. Actually, yeah,
Will Stagl
you talked about your program evolution.
Hope Rufrano
I’m glad I’m not the only one having some. So obviously, the data doesn’t mean anything unless you have eyes on and you’re consistently mining for information. Right. So Brandon, who is our in house expert on this partner with his analytics team. And I think he had many, many conversations and lots of support and help from them. As really, I think in our eyes, the team at Zenylitics is just kind of an extension of our own team. At least Kyle and his team makes us feel that way. Brandon, I think you can share a little bit, if you will, about this initiative overall and the role you’ve had and kind of where we’re going.
Brandon Montalbo
Yeah, so something that I really loved about working with Zenylitics and the CallMiner platform was that this is not like any traditional tool, a traditional data analyst with us. So I had a very good understanding of what We were wanting to do with it and where we wanted to go. And Kyle’s team was amazing about getting you up to speed on how to use the tool, and really showed me how powerful it was paired with them, you know, I was able to begin to uncover the easy wins for us that we could easily implement changes to really increase our customer experience and employee experience. You know, going forward, we’re really looking into how can we gather customer insights and revenue opportunities, particularly within our b2b channels. And then this year, we’re also really focusing on engaging with our team leaders in our online front like frontline agents, and participating in whiteboard meetings with them to continue to develop solutions and improvements based on all this information that we gather.
Hope Rufrano
Yeah, thanks, Brandon, I appreciate you jumping in there. You know, the, what CallMiner provides us through these analytics, I think has given us an overwhelming amount of information to start to dive into. And so we’re just scratching the surface on that. And I know, there’s a lot of room for growth. And I know there’s a lot of information there that’s going to provide us with improvement. Kyle, you and I were talking about that a little bit earlier today, can you can you share a little bit about what we talked about.
Kyle
As far as what I’d like to touch on before we before we move forward further here, as you know, we look at customers and you know, the idea of like a high performing customer and Dunlop fits that mold perfectly for us. Hope again, to throw back to your idea of like best in class experience, you guys truly commit to that. And the way that we see that in the interaction is that you’re you’re really bringing the human capital the resources in to make this program work, right, you’re not just expecting that you turn it on, and it’s just going to spit out results, right? There’s a lot of hard work that went into this and, and working, you know, so closely with someone like Brandon, who understands the nuance of the Dunlop business, and really what you’re trying to achieve and helping us get that calibrated, right. We’re behind the scenes, building all the content, building the models for you. But really having that engagement with your team that you’ve put in place to really get the value out of this, I think is why you’ve been so successful with it. That is so important. And not every not every one of our customers is able to do that, right. And the way that we look at it is what you stated before, you know, our team looks at, you know, the engagement, like we are an extension of your team, we fill in the roles that you don’t have, right. And that’s always how we’ve kind of envisioned ourselves is, you know, maybe maybe an organization doesn’t have a you know, a rockstar like Brandon to come in and do all that work and interpret the data. We can come in and help with that. But the fact that you’ve devoted the resources to do that, I think is why you’re seeing such, you know, such a good result, and you have such a good road in front of you, right? We’re talking about the idea of, you know, where do we go with chat? How can we better you know, how can we better manage our tickets and understand what’s coming in through those text channels, and really just have this this high level like overall view of all of our communication channels. So think as far as you know, the overall performance of of the program really comes down to the commitment that (Dunlop Sports) has made from leadership on down through the entire organization binding and down to the agents who are, you know, who are in it day to day and are living with this as part of their their day to day life?
Will Stagl
Absolutely. Okay, I think that I think that may bring us to our q&a section of the webinar. Any any additional comments, I guess, from the team before we, before we move forward and open up to questions.
Hope Rufrano
Let’s hear what people want to know.
Will Stagl
All right. Okay. Well, and interestingly, too, we gave, we gave our audience the option to post some questions before the presentation. So they came in with some areas of interest in questions for you guys right out of the gate. One of those was, how do you identify areas for improvement across your organization, as well as potential solutions? And, and this may go back to what you were saying kind of about iteration zero?
Kyle
Yeah, I’ll take this one. You know, the idea of uncovering the drivers behind outliers, we talked about those standard metrics in iteration zero. So looking at long calls, looking at process inefficiencies, looking at points that might cause friction on a customer experience side, looking at those outliers and using CallMiner to uncover what the drivers are, you know, is there an issue with a product? Is there an issue with the process using that, that really drives where we spend our time, man Many of our customers come in and they think they have an idea of what they really want to achieve. And generally they’re, they’re, they’re pretty close. But we’ll find things that they may not have even known existed or opportunities in contact centers, or maybe in their network of BPOS that we can focus on. And it’s all based on the data that comes out of that iteration zero play, right? Let’s look at silence, let’s look at duration and what presents itself to us. And that’s really where we’ll start. And that really gets us value early, those are metrics that we can get to very early on in a program and start to see great results. And many of many of our customers are able to, you know, achieve ROI for the full program, just focusing in those areas, everything else becomes, you know, an add on It’s gravy after that, you’re really able to drive that ROI, just by looking in those areas and focusing there.
Will Stagl
We have sort of a follow up question to that, which is, what what is also out of scope for something like an iteration zero meeting, are the things that are either too big or too small. To make part of that, that iteration?
Kyle
That’s, that’s a good, that’s a good question. And and, you know, really the, the idea is to hit those iteration zero topics quickly. So you do have to be really cautious about your prioritization. Right? Does what we find fit within our original charter? Does it fit the goals that we’ve set? So it really comes down to having, you know, a clearer idea of what your priority is, and having conversations about it? We always have, we always have conversations with our customers about prioritization, there’s only so many hours in the day, there’s only so much we can achieve collectively, right? There’s only so much a customer can execute on. So having that conversation and being very clear about, you know, what is that we can achieve within the the time that we have, I think is really, really important to help you trim that down. And there’s always bring the business back in and ask those questions to say, you know, is this really as important as we think it is, is handled time something we care about, maybe CX, or maybe our NPS score is the metric that we really want to move and handle time isn’t where we should be spending our time. So asking those questions and being very clear about what the goals are, I think will help you really sight in on what is in scope and what’s out of scope.
Will Stagl
Okay, great. Thanks. Another question. What has been the what’s been the agent’s response to Zenylitics and CallMiner to the to that solution and what’s been implemented so far?
Hope Rufrano
Well, if I’m being honest with you, they were all a little hesitant at first, I think anytime you tell someone that we are recording and analyzing all of your transactions, there’s a little nervousness that goes with that. And there were some things we needed to do from a human resources perspective and a legal perspective. Because we were beginning to record phone calls, right. And that poses a different perspective. The agents followed along with it, obviously agreed to it. And it was important that we level set the expectations right, that we were utilizing the information from our agents for quality and training purposes. And reminding them that the categories and conditions that we were looking at and analyzing were things that had all been covered in the soft skill training that they all go through. So all of our new agents go through soft skills training. And then a couple times a year, we do refresher courses on soft skills as well. And so when the agents realized that the intent of it was to improve the customer’s experience, and to provide them with better resources, and understand their experiences, they’ve moved forward to now they provide feedback and suggestions. And so we’ve actively had some of our agents working with Brandon through calibration processes of the channels we added after phones. And so it’s really been nice to see our agents embrace it, and be able to see that it supports them, right and supports, sometimes difficult transactions they have with customers, when they reach out and say, Hey, can you take a look at this? Can you listen to this? Can you look at the analysis of this and tell me how it could be better? So that’s it’s been an evolution, for sure did not start out. Quite simple, but it’s in a really good place now. And it’s nice to see the agents that are engaging in the process.
Will Stagl
That’s great. It’s sort of a follow up question that we got, which is along the same lines, what’s been the organizational response to the program? What kind of feedback or response have you gotten internally?
Hope Rufrano
And the response has been positive from senior leadership. But I will tell you that I think we’re just scratching the surface. We really need a full year of data is is that baseline I was talking about earlier. err, I’m looking to create that baseline of data for all channels for a full year, which we should have for the year of 2023. And more analysis by Brandon, obviously, in that space, but to ultimately start to tell stories about our customers to give real life examples of groups of customers, right now we can define things that are specific to customers interested in certain brands or certain products. I think there’s a lot of stuff we’re going to glean out of that. But right now, we’re just scratching the surface. So we haven’t. We haven’t gotten full excitement yet. But I see it coming.
Will Stagl
Interesting. So we’re getting some questions with some some kind of patterns here. But since you said you were scratching the surface, I’m going to jump to a question that was posed to you hope, which was, what are the next big focuses? Now that you’ve got some good footing? So what are those kinds of notes? You scratch the surfaces? What do you envision next?
Hope Rufrano
Yeah, so thank you for that. That’s a good question. I think your, as a leader, you’re always thinking forward, where will we be in 2, 3, 5 years, right. And with the technology that we have in place, with the information that we’re now able to get to glean out of that, we’re looking at ways to elevate our entire agent workforce, right as one thing. So when we look at the employees experience, it’s how do we elevate them to the next place of really being able to quickly and effectively and with strong quality, deliver that best in class experience to customers? So on the one hand, we’re looking at focusing on the agents themselves. Beyond that is kind of what I was saying a few minutes ago from the organizational response, right? How do we take brand specific information, product specific information, and be able to work in tandem with our sales and marketing teams, for future considerations of promotions, or programs or things that we’re doing to further build our brands in the marketplace, and really look at market share, right, because I think that the information we have being on the front lines every day, and having agents that are right there speaking to consumers, speaking to our dealers, working directly with our sales reps, there’s a lot of information to be to be pulled out of that, that we hope will contribute to go forward to contributing to sales.
Will Stagl
That’s great. I’m going to shift gears here with some of the other questions we have coming in. One attendee asked to rate progress at Dunlop sports. So congratulations. But I want to show the kudos with you. Then the question was, how does what you’re doing today, support or work with automation? I’m kind of paraphrasing work with automation, either CCaSS or virtual agents. So are there any any of this so far, I guess I would interpret the question that plays into where you may look for opportunities for automation, or where this dovetails maybe with ways to offload some work from your agents.
Hope Rufrano
Yeah, I think so I’m kind of hearing that in two parts. So we do have AI, we do have a virtual agent. And so we have utilized some of this information already. Kind of that low hanging fruit, if you will, to be able to develop flows with our virtual agent to handle some things that we see that come in frequently. For instance, holding one is a great day in the life of a golfer. And we get a lot of communication from consumers about making making that happen, right that it’s Hey, I got a hold on one last weekend, what do you guys do recognition program for that. But we’ve been able to take some of the feedback we’ve gotten on those people that are calling about their whole and ones we’ve built out flows for our virtual agent who can go in for the people who reach out on our website, to be able to handle those on a, an a very quickly resolved basis, right or first call our first contact resolution to be able to move forward and get that recognition sent out to those folks. So we are able to do that. And it has helped us to develop some of those flows. And then of course, we as the virtual agent in the system for us appears like any other agent, right, that we could gather information from that. In terms of the technical side of that I think Kyle is probably more of an expert than I am. But I’m not sure if the question was related to technical or if I covered, covered what you were looking for hopefully so so
Will Stagl
but I’m not sure what do you have anything to add there?
Kyle
I think I think hope nailed it. But no, I do have I do a little bit to add, you know, the idea of using, you know, CallMiner to understand some of the reasons why people are calling in. And then using that to build out different tracks within your virtual agent, is really where we see you know, the first steps for an omni channel, Omni channel customer, right? How can I just use this to deflect some calls and do that effectively, one of the other things that we actually see is like hope you just said perfect segue to the point that I wanted to make, that virtual agent shows up in the data just like any other agent, I remember, Brandon, when we first looked at it, and this guy really takes a lot of a lot of chats, it was your virtual agent. But the idea is, we can also see how your customers respond to your virtual agent, right? That track that now we’ve created, does that cause friction? Does it cause customers, you know, just typing in representative, Representative representative? Are they trying to get out of there? Or are they are they going through that path to completion? So it’s not only does it help us create the track, it helps us measure the effectiveness of it as well. So I think that’s, you know, kind of the step two, and as we move forward with with omnichannel, I’m excited to really see where we go with that.
Hope Rufrano
Yeah, Brandon was recently reviewing some data. And he shared with me that one of our sales reps had commented back to our virtual agent and saying, Wow, you guys are working really late on a Saturday.
Will Stagl
So that’s great praise if they can’t even tell it’s a virtual agent. Right. Great. That’s great. So we’ve had a couple of questions that came in related to silence as an indicator as a metric. First one was pretty straightforward. You mentioned silence as a metric. Why did you choose silence?
Hope Rufrano
Well, I think silence chose us. I clearly don’t have a silence issue, as you’ve seen today. But silence was by far the category that that struck us with the lowest scores, and gave us an opportunity for immediate improvements and wins in that space. And so knowing that silence was there, the longer that silence was present, the customer was not connecting with us. Right, they were not connecting with an agent, the agent was not connecting with them. And so addressing that, and minimizing that was really positive in terms of our customers perception of how we were, you know, working with them how we were interacting with them overall.
Will Stagl
So we had a follow up question related to that, which was, in addition to observing the behaviors around silence events, what other resources did you reference when determining desired behaviors?
Kyle
So it’s not necessarily just the behaviors around silence, it’s not necessarily just the in proximity to the silence, right. So we look at all of the behaviors, drivers and other topics being really important on the calls, think of think about, if you’re applying this within your own organization, think about processes, maybe customers are talking about warranty, maybe they’re talking about returns, or shipping labels, all think about processes that might cause you know, an agent to pause, or an FAQ that needs to be pulled up to look at an agent for an agent to look at. Those are some of the the approaches that we’ll take. Beyond that. I know, Brandon, when we were when we were looking at silence, and to be honest, a lot of your other metrics you are taking data out and putting that alongside data out of your CRM. So I’m assuming product and other you know, in other metrics we may not have, we may not have visibility to in CallMiner. Do you have any any points you might want to add on that? Yeah. So,
Brandon Montalbo
you know, when I was looking at the flow of a conversation, I was really trying to figure out, you know, why are our guys stopping? Like, you know, what is it? And we really found that it just took our agents a long time to find things within the CRM. So something that was huge for us is, you know, this tangible silence category allowed us to change and upgrade a product and process that they think significantly faster for our team. So not only did it kind of highlight where our weak points were, that we didn’t know but it allowed us now to come at it with it, let’s apply this and instantly our agents were able to answer much faster, find the resources much faster, and it just made everything more efficient overall there.
Hope Rufrano
Yeah, and I think I would, I would jump into that and say, you know, that knowledge base of information that agents have, sometimes it was something as simple as tagging it differently, right? So when they entered a tag to search by, sometimes the agents are looking for things differently than the person who set up the knowledge article. And so that silence, you know, made us look at it and say why this is easy information. It’s right there in front of them, why are they having such a hard time, and they were looking under different tags than we the way we had it set up. And so that ability to see that I think showed us as well, engaging our agents in the calibration process, like what works, how they look for things, how they search for information became really important. I think in that question, as well, we’ll you were saying that the person asked about what other resources we referenced when we were determining desired behaviors. Yeah, so we conduct soft skills training with our teams. And we really looked to that because those soft skills kind of build into categories of what we expect our agents to deliver, when they’re interacting with, with our customers. And so that that entire group of soft skills and knowledge was a part of that. And then also basing it on, you know, expectations that we receive back from not only our sales and marketing folks, but also operations, shipping, engaging credit, and accounting, all of the teams that a CX department deals with, getting information from them on things that were important helped as well, because our customer base is not just consumers or dealers that purchase our products. It’s also our Field Sales Team, and then all of our internal partners or customers as well. So we had to look at it not just from an external customer perspective, but also from an internal customer perspective, and what they were looking for. And in some of those cases, you know, one of the feedback I got was, you know, your agents respond, you guys just respond to quickly you’re not very friendly. And when our agents are working with our sales reps, they know that they’re in their cars, facing windshield time trying to get 1000 things done. So our agents were looking at it from the perspective of I just want to give you the answer and not take a lot of time because you’re probably looking at this on your cell phone. But the field sales was like now we kind of want the personal How you doing too.
Will Stagl
Because they’re salespeople. Yeah, exactly. Okay, fantastic. Well, we’ve gotten through all of the questions that came up during the q&a session right now. Thank you so much, everybody. I hope, Brandon and Kyle, for all your insights and sharing all your experiences today. I think everybody who watched the webinar today is going to walk away with some new knowledge and insights that hopefully they can put into practice. On behalf of everybody who hosted and presented today I want to thank you once more for taking the time to attend today’s webinar. We hope you found this information valuable and we really look forward to seeing you on a future events as well. Take care everyone and have a great day.