NTT Business Process Outsourcing
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NTT Business Process Outsourcing(NTT BPO) designs, builds, and manages intelligent, connected, frictionless CX delivery solutions for leading brands in core vertical markets including Financial Services, Telecommunications, and Retail / eCommerce. We help organizations strengthen their brands by leveraging leading technology applications and infrastructure, dedicated customer delivery centres, and strong process know-how to acquire, protect, and grow their valuable customer assets.
Even as NTT BPO pushes many of its simpler customer interactions to digital self-service, the company relies more than ever on its agents to deliver outstanding service on its more complex issues. The company implemented ForeSight Voice Mining as a fundamental differentiator that can help enhance its value proposition and help it live up to its brand promise of being a trusted partner to its clients.
NTT BPO’s managers can now monitor the calls of several contact center agents at once and provide real-time coaching during calls to enhance its levels of positive resolutions. Keeping a pulse on the business in real time is critical for NTT BPO’s clients as well as for the company’s service commitment as a CX-focused organization. The company can now monitor service level agreements, average speed of answer, and average hold time in real time for its traditional business processing contact center. With ForeSight, NTT BPO’s leaders proactively monitor VOC in real time and get customer sentimental pulse on demand. As the result, the company has dramatically improved its time to resolution for complex calls.
Clients turn to NTT BPO when they want their business processes to run faster, better, and more cost-effectively. They expect their interactions with NTT BPO to be just as seamless. That means the BPO solutions provider must remove any friction from its contact center. The pressure to do so only became more intense in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic put the world on lockdown.
“Our vision for NTT BPO is to deliver a trusted customer experience for our clients as well as for the customers they support,” explains Christine Barr, CEO, NTT BPO. “Part of it has to do with minimizing the amount of time people must spend and the number of people they have to talk to as they get issues resolved. COVID only accelerated the digitization of products and services. To stay competitive, we must not only offer a seamless experience in our contact center but also deliver our brand promise of being a trusted partner —consistently in every interaction.”
Even as digital support channels grow in popularity, NTT BPO will always rely on its agents’ expertise. The company realized that transforming the customer experience began with augmenting the abilities of its contact center agents.
“Although simpler inquiries can be managed digitally and through self-service channels, the contact center is the preferred option for more complex inquiries,” remarks Leslie MacDonald, Vice President of Operations, NTT BPO “Agents must have the knowledge to resolve the customer’s issue and provide a great experience on every interaction.”
To strike this balance, NTT BPO’s agents need considerable training and coaching. Foresight gives the company a strategic advantage by supporting agent knowledge, guiding the call flow and improving efficiency.
“I manage 17 agents right now, but it has been as many as 27,” says Felisha Hawes, Team Lead, NTT BPO. “My goal is to meet with each of them once a week for coaching. For years, I was choosing call recordings at random to review for quality. It would often take me over an hour to review calls and make notes. There was no consistent way of zeroing in on the specific challenges each agent was facing. And because I was spending so much time reviewing calls, I was starved for time to spend actually helping my agents improve.”
The process of creating a positive customer experience is often easier said than done. For NTT BPO, it meant more than just training agents to handle calls efficiently.
“One of our biggest challenges was to think above and beyond the call,” says William Chen, Sr. Director, Business Insights and Digitization, NTT BPO. “Can we provide recommendations to help that client enhance their brand and market position?”
After considering its options, NTT BPO chose NTT-TX ForeSight Voice Mining as its new solution for supporting agents. ForeSight offered the full range of capabilities that NTT BPO needed, along with the backing of a true business partner.
“From the beginning, the NTT team took the time to understand what our business challenges were and showed a commitment to helping us future-proof our business,” recalls Barr. “ForeSight was the best solution for removing obstacles to a frictionless customer experience. It delivers real-time information that guides our agents through interactions with clients. It empowers our managers to coach in real time while agents are on a call. It also identifies in real time any problems that customers need to be resolved. All of this increases first-call resolution, reduces customer dissatisfaction, and helps us contain our operational costs.”
Now that NTT BPO has moved to a distributed contact center model, the company needs a solution that enables it to ensure a consistent customer experience no matter where an agent is located. ForeSight delivers these capabilities.
“With ForeSight, our managers can provide real-time support to our agents from any location,” says Barr. “This helped improve an agent’s productivity cycle and enhances their training experience. Dashboard reports alert us to areas where an individual agent may face challenges. These features enable us to focus on those areas that really make a difference for our clients’ brands. Our clients have noticed—they constantly give us feedback about how focused we are on supporting their brands to their customers.”
From the day NTT BPO went live on ForeSight, its agents found the solution to be highly intuitive. Interaction between agents and team leaders is seamless. Managers can now monitor multiple agents at once, dramatically increasing their effectiveness.
“I can easily email an agent to remind them, ‘Next time, make sure you show more empathy towards the cardholder’s issue,’” explains Hawes. “Even more importantly, ForeSight uses keywords to flag calls when they’re likely to become troubled. I can then start monitoring the call and provide live coaching via chat to help the agent handle the issue and satisfy the customer. Agents no longer have to wait for weekly coaching sessions with me to work on these issues. They can implement feedback immediately in the context of a call.”
As agents and managers work to keep customers happy, NTT BPO’s decision-makers can easily track contact center performance through dashboards. ForeSight enables the company to capture more real-time data and close the loop by providing feedback to agents so that they can take immediate action.
“ForeSight enables us to deliver advanced analytics by capturing real-time actionable insights from all conversations at scale in a very innovative manner. Especially in the hybrid work-from-home environment, customer escalation is managed passively, relying on each agent’s own initiative. With ForeSight Voice Mining, we’ve created an active management experience and made it part of the daily operating model. This has sped up time to resolution by delivering real-time agent assistance and reducing callbacks.” says Chen. “Rather than focusing on one call at a time, we now have a picture of how we’re doing overall in willingness, resolutions, empathy, selfservice, escalations, and many other key areas that affect the customer experience. But the solution’s real power is that it only pushes the data our agents need most, when they need it, in the form of useful insights or recommended knowledge articles as a connected customer experience. The ultimate goal is to enhance the customer experience.”
That data includes real-time insights on what customers are saying about the products and services that NTT BPO’s clients provide. By sharing these insights with its clients, NTT BPO is strengthening its reputation as a trusted business partner.
“We service some of the most recognizable brands in Canada,” Barr explains. “When one of them launches a new product or marketing campaign and there are issues with it, we become aware of that in real time and can deliver those insights to our clients. This gives them a chance to take action in ways that support their business objectives—and it cements our reputation with them.”
With ForeSight, NTT BPO has saved many hours for its managers while dramatically increasing their ability to coach agents. Managers can search transcripts of all calls for a particular agent to verify that appropriate language was used or identify cases in which it wasn’t.
“ForeSight automatically highlights whether the agent showed willingness and empathy or asked resolution questions,” says Hawes. “I can then put my coaching in the built-in notes sections of the transcripts, and the agents can see it instantly. I’m now spending much more time actually coaching agents.”
Meanwhile, metrics are showing an improvement in agent performance. Agents are resolving calls more quickly and displaying a better grasp of core skills.
“With ForeSight, we’ve streamlined our time to resolution by 15 to 20 percent for some of our complex call types,” says Chen. “We’ve also seen more consistent agent performance and a shorter learning curve for new agents.”
NTT BPO’s CEO is convinced the company made the right choice of contact center solutions. Christine Barr sees ForeSight as a key part of her company’s future.
“Since we went live on ForeSight, all the core metrics for our customer experience have trended in the right direction,” she concludes. “We’re resolving issues much more quickly. We’ve also changed the whole tone of conversations because the right information is at agents’ fingertips. As a result, our quality scores and perceived empathy have increased along with our efficiency—which is a win-win for our customers. ForeSight is a fundamental differentiator that helps us enhance our value proposition.”
