Asurion

These millions of customers have many ways in which they can choose to contact Asurion, from text and SMS to voice calls or via the website, and this means the company must effectively manage the exponential growth of valuable customer information collected across multiple channels. Only by conducting analysis of rich, unstructured data and discovering insight at big data scale can all of this behavioral information be mined to support improved customer service and future business growth.

“Asurion partners with leading wireless companies, retailers, and cable and satellite providers to protect millions of consumer devices and ultimately to keep them connected, and our call centers are a big part of keeping our customers connected,” says Kathleen Drea, technology leader, Contact Center and Supply Chain Product Solutions at Asurion. “The contact center is where the culture of Asurion lives and breathes. It is one of our most important touch points with our customers.”

Asurion recognizes that delivering premium customer service is a powerful competitive differentiator and that the performance of its contact centers is crucial. This means streamlining the way it handles and uses data, working to better understand calls and get to the insights that will improve customer service and drive the business forward. It also needs to constantly evaluate and improve the activities of its contact center agents to ensure their efficiency and streamline customer interactions to gain maximum value from this core resource.

Process automation and constant analysis

To achieve these goals, Asurion chose the Qfiniti and Explore software. Qfiniti is a modular workforce optimization solution providing enterprise contact centers with call and screen recording, workforce management, quality monitoring, liability recording, coaching, eLearning and surveying in the modern contact center.

“We handle a large number of interactions across multiple channels every day, and Qfiniti and Explore enable us to understand customer behaviors and trends as they emerge so that we can stay ahead of them in the short term and make better business decisions in the long term,” said Drea.

The OpenText™ Qfiniti Observe module provides Asurion with secure and reliable full-time call recording, storage and playback, while enabling compliance with data security standards. Qfiniti Observe intelligently and automatically builds custom evaluation plans for Asurion’s quality assurance teams, significantly improving the frequency of evaluating the most relevant interactions.

Asurion uses OpenText™ Qfiniti Advise to automate centralized evaluation and analysis to drive contact center performance improvement across all customer interaction channels. Improvement is measured by enhanced coaching and eLearning effectiveness, the streamlining of quality management tasks and sustained scoring consistency.

In addition, these interactions can be selected for review in Qfiniti Advise based on the source of a call, the responding agent, time intervals, application activity and telephony or desktop events. With automatic evaluation queue building, Asurion increased quality assurance productivity by 60 percent, increasing the average number of evaluations performed by each QA specialist from eight per day to 12.

Asurion also recognizes that performance improvement requires fair and balanced reviews across all agents. Qfiniti Advise helps quality teams maintain consistency through a variety of tools, including online calibration reviews that supplement or reduce the need for traditional quality team calibration sessions.

Highly effective contact center agents make up only half of the customer service equation: Asurion must also understand the level of customer satisfaction. One of the most effective ways for contact centers to capture the Voice of Customer (VoC) is with post-interaction surveys, and Asurion relies on the OpenText™ Qfiniti Survey module to automatically link both the customer satisfaction score and the agent evaluation score to a recorded interaction (call, email or chat). This correlation measurably improves quality performance and reduces the time and cost incurred from traditional research methods. By forging a clear link to its customers and their comments, Qfiniti Survey offers Asurion a valuable supplement to other traditional survey methods, such as the Net Promoter Score.

Tightly integrated with the Qfiniti suite, Explore brings advanced VoC, speech and multichannel analytics capabilities to any customer engagement program. For Asurion this means that 100 percent of its call recordings, in addition to survey verbatims, CRM notes and social media, can be indexed, analyzed and reported in near real time to uncover trends, drive process optimization and discover root cause insights. Using Explore to analyze and correlate service interactions with social media posts, Asurion learned that the high call volumes during new product rollouts from one of its client partners thought simply to be the unavoidable outcome of product introductions to the market was actually triggered by product description inaccuracies. In this case, Asurion worked with the client to correct the root cause, greatly improving self-service processes, resulting in millions of dollars in savings.

Together, Qfiniti and Explore offer a purpose-built solution that extracts value through the entire interaction spectrum, from quality assurance and agent performance to customer behavior and sentiment analysis across all touch points.

Unified solution for process automation backed by OpenText Consulting Services

“One of the main benefits of the Qfiniti suite is a unified user interface. Our users are able to listen to calls, review calls, score calls, review surveys and interface with Explore all within the same unified product suite,” said Michael O’Brien, software engineer at Asurion. “The current version of the product has really improved IT operational efficiencies. Things that could take days or weeks to fix before are now frequently fixed the same day or in a matter of hours. Another real advantage of having the partnership with OpenText is the accessibility to the technical product managers and technical architects.”

Adds Tracey Strassner, Sr. Director of Customer Solutions, Technology Planning and Operations, at Asurion, “We thought it was going to take 90 days to launch a speech analytics engine for a new advocacy program, but with the help of the OpenText leadership team, it was accomplished in the kickoff meeting.”

Asurion also benefits from the process automation offered by OpenText software tools, which leaves staff free to concentrate on their customers. “With the OpenText platform, we are able to automate compliance, risk management and other procedures that used to be manual so that we can do what we do best, which is focus on our customer,” said Drea.

According to Strassner, it is the OpenText commitment to customer service that makes the difference: “It’s great to have a partner like OpenText who are there to help us innovate. They help us not worry about the technology but about how we can put the customer first and really build the experience for them going forward.”