These included the practice of voicemail ‘camping,’ where agents stayed on idle lines or called into voicemails without speaking for extended periods, reducing efficiency and overall performance.
With 2,000 agents spread across three countries, the company’s manual process for conducting QA reviews struggled to keep pace. Agent calls averaged 15 to 20 minutes alone, while the QA reviews themselves extended up to 45 minutes per agent. All this meant performance evaluations had to be limited to just twice a month for each agent.
This bottleneck restricted insights into customer interactions and hindered the company’s ability to improve customer experience and sales metrics effectively.
Transforming Evaluation
To improve operational efficiency, ServiceFirst’s speech analytics team turned to Observe.AI and implemented Auto QA to accelerate its QA process. This solution enabled supervisors to evaluate nearly all customer interactions. By leveraging Observe.AI’s Moments to automate agent evaluations, the team has seen a 100% increase in evaluation efficiency and an 1,800% rise in the number of assessments since its implementation.
Moments are key instances in customer interactions that reveal insights and trends when measured across all agents.
“Each of these Moments is tied to specific items on our QA form, so we can see if our agents have covered each required item during the call,” explains Jon Reynel Lumongsod, Global Head of Speech Analytics.
Tackling Behavioral Issues for Better Results
With full visibility of customer interactions, the speech analytics team was able to tackle behavioral issues among agents, particularly voicemail camping.
QA managers identified which agents were engaging in this behavior—and how frequently—by scaling the customer interactions they captured and evaluated through Moments. This enabled them to address voicemail camping through targeted coaching, reducing instances by 43% in just three months.
Elevating Compliance
Likewise, ServiceFirst improved compliance—a crucial component of its QA efforts because many of its lead generation and customer support clients are lending companies in the United States (US). As Lumongsod notes, US financial institutions must adhere to various regulatory requirements.
“Compliance failures in contact centers are common and often overlooked,” he says. “So, one of our top priorities is call monitoring to detect and address compliance errors.”
By evaluating customer interactions specific to compliance, such as calls involving verification and recorded disclosures, ServiceFirst reduced compliance failures by 96%.
Boosting Efficiency and Conversion Rates
The speech analytics team also tackled call hang-ups by analyzing Moments around common drop-off points and concerns among loan customers.
Previously, ServiceFirst’s contact centers experienced high rates of hang-up calls. By focusing on reducing controllable opportunities—instances where an agent can influence the outcome of a call but fails to do so—the rates fell by 39% and 20% at two contact centers over four months.
The right party contact (RPC) conversion rate at these centers—the percentage of successful loan conversions after contacting the correct person—increased in tandem by 44% and 36%, respectively.
Today, these improvements are flowing through to higher loan volumes generated for clients.
“If these [trends] continue throughout 2024, we expect to generate an additional annual loan amount increase of $1,726,500 for a headcount of 15. That’s $115,100 in extra revenue per agent,” says Lumongsod.
Refining Rebuttal Strategies
Looking ahead, the speech analytics team aims to refine its rebuttal scripts to help agents turn more calls into loan conversions. With detailed customer interaction data at its fingertips, the team can enhance how agents handle objections by training them to recognize and capitalize on these opportunities effectively.
Agents previously often failed to provide adequate rebuttals to objections, resulting in missed sales opportunities.
“By focusing on Moments that track agent rebuttals, we aim to improve how agents handle objections and increase conversion rates,” says Lumongsod.
Discover how ServiceFirst transformed its QA operations with Observe.AI. Read the full customer success story.
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