Reduce the Time-to-Resolution for Call Centers

This French telecommunications company has tens of millions of customers that rely upon it for mobile phone, land-based phone, and high-speed internet service. Customers interact with the company either through its call center or by visiting one of the hundreds of brick-and-mortar locations.

Challenge

The speed and success with which issues are resolved are key to customer satisfaction. Information needed to resolve customer issues resided in 20-30 different applications. Turnover is high, so customer care agents had limited experience with the various systems. It was not for lack of training, as they invested three weeks in each agent’s training.

The company needed to simplify the process of finding information to improve the customer service experience, enable call center employees to handle more calls, and reduce training time. Given the volume, this was not an easy task:

Solution

This telecom simplified the issue resolution process and improved the customer experience. They built an application that used Sinequa’s search-based application platform to condense the information from twenty different applications into one interface. This application enabled agents to have a 360-degree view of customer information without opening multiple applications.

Making information from multiple applications available through one interface has reduced average call duration for 10,000 agents by over 25%, saving the company over $20 million per year. This has also simplified training, with a future goal of reducing training time by 33%. Given that turnover is well over 100% per year, this savings is also significant.

In the future, their plan is to leverage Sinequa to query the 10-year database of customer care cases and bring an agent the best solutions to every problem encountered on every call. Automatic commentary that the call center agent doesn’t need to type is expected to shave an additional 1-2 minutes off every call saving additional millions per year.