Companies that have seen robust growth often encounter challenges around standardizing their processes and consolidating business units. These challenges can lead to inefficiencies that negatively impact the customer experience (CX).
The challenge
Our client is a large, U.S.-based corporation that provides financial services, property information and business intelligence across consumer credit, real estate and capital markets. In 2011, the company entered a significant growth period that resulted in a large number of dispersed customer support centers throughout the country.
The client was looking for a process consulting partner with customer experience management capabilities to assist them in assessing their existing contact centers and provide innovative solutions to drive efficiencies, improve technology and increase client satisfaction.
The TELUS Digital solution
The client decided to leverage TELUS Digital’s CX process consulting expertise to embark on a business diagnostic for its tax services division. The diagnostic included a re-design of the client’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system — an automated phone system that gathers information from callers in order to re-route calls to the appropriate department via menu options.
Since the client saw such significant improvements from the IVR redesign within its tax services business unit, they decided to re-engage TELUS Digital to replicate these enhancements within its real estate and platform services divisions.
Using a proven three-step methodology, our process consulting experts worked closely with various stakeholders to better understand the company’s current state and overall objectives. Additionally, call data, customer persona profiles, agent responsibilities and customer support trends were analyzed to assess the customer journey.
The TELUS Digital team was able to identify ‘quick win’ opportunities enabling the client to consolidate resources and get the most out of their existing people, processes and technology. They also uncovered ways to expand the IVR redesign, including technology enhancement recommendations to improve call deflection capabilities and address the client’s self-service aspirations.
During the assessments, our team recognized that its findings could be consistently applied across various business units to further optimize the client’s operations. This realization shifted the client’s emphasis from a diagnostic approach, to a transformation approach, which led to our experts creating a digital roadmap for the client. The roadmap delivered an easy-to-follow structure of what a transformation journey would look like, the complexity of any proposed changes and the value and benefit to the business.
The results
Our assessments of the tax, real estate and platform services units provided clear suggestions to the client on how to optimize their operations to immediately begin improving their customer experience. Using the information and data gathered by our team, an improved IVR system was created and implemented with call deflection and self-service capabilities at its core.
Our process consulting efforts have led to a reduction of average handle time (AHT) by 25% and call deflection rate of up to 49% for the client’s tax services business unit. Based on these metrics, it is estimated that the client will see future savings of $232,000 in 2023 and $525,000 in 2024.
Throughout the various process consulting engagements, the relationship between TELUS Digital and the client evolved far beyond a simple partnership. Through a highly collaborative approach and thoughtful recommendations around new and existing technology, we became the client’s trusted adviser and were able to encourage their innovation and help them gain confidence in their digital transformation plans.
To continue enabling cost savings and further enhance their CX, the client is planning to take its digital transformation to the next level. This will include developing a robust knowledge base, implementing a customer-facing chatbot, introducing other channels of support and adding automation to its processes.
TELUS Digital has been chosen as the client’s digital transformation partner and will continue to work closely with stakeholders to successfully transform its contact centers to provide customers with a full-service, omnichannel digital experience and a more simplified approach to customer service.