“Measure what can be measured and make measurable what cannot be measured.”

Sourced to Italian astronomer Galileo, that quote could have been echoed by our client, a telecommunications giant that struggled to quantify and track performance metrics for its contact center associates. Driven to enhance the experience for customers and secure their loyalty, the company sought to identify opportunities to fortify and personalize support through asynchronous messaging.

In many regards, the telecom was flying blind.

Challenge

The chief hindrance? The coaching model hadn’t advanced much since the Renaissance period. Coaching was manual and decentralized, making it complex, time-consuming, and cumbersome to analyze data from siloed systems to extract meaningful insights that could inform decision-making.

Without visibility into coaching effectiveness and performance trends, it was difficult to decide where to focus development resources. What was working well and needed to be adopted as a best practice? What aspects of customer interactions were suboptimal? What steps could be eliminated or streamlined? Lack of a unified platform for coaching documentation, feedback, and analytics impeded efforts to improve performance.

This called for a scientific solution to enhance the channel customers value for its 24/7 availability and the records it automatically generates that chronicle an exchange — a handy historical reference for customers needing to call back at a later date to get their issue resolved. Asynchronous messaging is a flexible option preferred by many mobile-first customers who just don’t want to engage in a real-time, live conversation.

Our solution

TTEC deployed a turnkey approach that started with a centralized, AI-enhanced coaching platform. Called TTEC Perform, the platform provided a dashboard for team leads to view performance across teams and benchmark against high-performer personas; track performance commitments; engage in daily games; and access learning content and self-paced learning.

With enhanced visibility, team leads were able to develop data-driven, precision coaching tailored to an individual’s strengths and weaknesses. The multi-phased rollout to our teams in Pampanga, Philippines, included a number of milestones:

• Behavior tree and scorecard integration aligned coaching metrics to our client’s messaging-path-to-resolution standards.
• Coaching playbook and role-playing scenarios enhanced frontline readiness.
• Delivered onsite and digitally, our leadership training was completed by 100% of leaders.
• The TTEC Perform platform launch included testing, single sign-in (SSO) troubleshooting, and role-tagging for proper access.
• Tool enhancements involved coaching forms leveraging the four pillars of the GROW framework: Goal, reality, options, and way forward. NPS feedback forms and gamification strategies were also incorporated.
• Recording software was installed across all leadership desktops to enable coaching session capture.
• Ongoing enablement involved microlearning modules, dashboard walkthroughs, and onboarding to support adoption.

Results

The performance enablement platform’s analysis made abundantly clear that coaching needed to focus squarely on NPS performance. As a result, 194 coaching sessions were devoted to NPS versus 15 coaching sessions on first contact resolution (FCR), for example. 

NPS scores shot up 23% just four months after the launch of TTEC Perform. Not only did overall performance improve, but 32% more associates achieved NPS goals post launch than had met goals prior.

Associate productivity rose month after month, up more than 5% post launch. Coaching effectiveness rose to 60%, which positively impacted FCR.