Leading telco uncovers a hidden problem … and a new opportunity

The client is a top 5 global telecommunications company with over 9000 agents across call centers worldwide. As a FORTUNE 100 company, they are committed to providing exceptional customer service to their millions of users. The company operates numerous call centers, both client-owned and outsourced, to handle customer inquiries and support. Their goal is to continuously improve the customer experience, reduce repeat calls, and enhance agent performance through innovative solutions and technologies. Partnering with Mattersight, they aimed to leverage Behavioral Analytics to achieve these objectives and uncover any underlying issues affecting their call center operations.

As part of an effort to elevate the customer experience for their millions of users, this client partnered with Mattersight and deployed a Behavioral Analytics pilot to a subset of agents in one of their business units, with the goal of reducing repeat calls, developing predictive models for some of their key metrics and improving agent performance. In the early stages of the linguistic modeling process, Mattersight’s dual-track audio recordings revealed some unusual patterns on the agent end of this client’s unproductive outbound calls. The Behavioral Science team that discovered these anomalies shared their findings with our Customer Success team, who proceeded to dig deeper. They quickly identified four specific inappropriate behaviors— unproductive outbound calls, calls with no agent activity, abandoned calls and calls being put on hold prematurely—in a small set of recordings, then built a set of algorithms to systematically uncover them in the client’s larger body of call data. When they did, they made a startling discovery: significant inappropriate agent behavior, traced to specific outsourcer sites, which was contributing to high repeat rates, unnecessary expenditures and, undoubtedly, significant customer dissatisfaction. Not only was the client stunned when they were presented with these findings; they were infuriated. Outsourcers are paid per second of call time, which means all of that non-interaction time amounted to money down the drain — a lot of it. The outsourcers themselves, when they were informed of what was going on in their centers, were equally surprised and angered. A few bad apples, behaving in ways these vendors had no knowledge of and no way of identifying, had violated the vendors’ own standards of service, and seriously jeopardized their relationships with a highly valued customer. No one was happy, and everyone wanted the issue fixed as soon as possible.

The client’s first order of business was to deal with the known problem. Within weeks of Mattersight identifying and sourcing the inappropriate behaviors and sharing the findings with the client and the outsourcers, they saw a reduction in those behaviors of over 60%. The immediate issue was eliminated, and over the following four quarters, the client averaged a 7% reduction in repeat calls across the target call centers. Mattersight’s revelation, however, was a wake-up call for this client, and it sent a new priority to the top of their list: prevent something like this from happening at any of their call centers, ever again. Mattersight responded to that need with the creation of a brand-new Performance Reporting Dashboard. This customized tool gave the client an “end to end” view of its call center operations. Aggregating data and trends from both client-owned and outsourced sites, the Dashboard enables the client to view and monitor activity by call center, supervisor and specific agent, and extract exactly the information they want in a clear, succinct report, as well as drive performance with adjustable measures, metrics and analytics. Effectively, this client is now able to listen to every call at every call center, hearing and proactively responding to the critical information they couldn’t hear before. Through a combination of advanced technology and skilled human input, Mattersight was able to: 1) identify a problem that, though virtually invisible, was costing this client significant money and untold customer satisfaction and goodwill, 2) work with the client and their outsourcer partners to address the situation, and 3) execute both an immediate solution and a permanent, scalable one.

• Within weeks of Mattersight identifying and sourcing the inappropriate behaviors and sharing the findings with the client and the outsourcers, they saw a reduction in those behaviors of over 60%.
• The immediate issue was eliminated, and over the following four quarters, the client averaged a 7% reduction in repeat calls across the target call centers.
• Mattersight’s revelation was a wake-up call for this client, and it sent a new priority to the top of their list: prevent something like this from happening at any of their call centers, ever again.
• Mattersight responded to that need with the creation of a brand-new Performance Reporting Dashboard, giving the client an “end to end” view of its call center operations.
• The Dashboard enables the client to view and monitor activity by call center, supervisor, and specific agent, and extract exactly the information they want in a clear, succinct report, as well as drive performance with adjustable measures, metrics, and analytics.

• 60% reduction in inappropriate behaviors.
• 7% reduction in repeat calls.
• $30 million projected annual benefit of system-wide Mattersight solution deployment.