Japan Automobile Federation (JAF)
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The Japan Automobile Federation (JAF) is an automobile association established in February 1963. JAF’s road service crews currently provide nationwide roadside assistance 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to its 20 million members*1.
To meet the needs of society as well as its members, JAF is also involved in campaigns to actively promote traffic safety. These include conducting road safety and driver training events and courses. It is also committed to implementing measures to protect the environment. These include the launch of the Eco-Drive Promotional Campaign and its continuing commitment to acquiring the ISO14001 certification*2 for all regional branches.
JAF Customer Service contact center receives over 4000 daily road service and insurance inquiries, more than 1.3 million calls per year, from all over Japan. Because the contact center is responsible for all non-face-to-face customer support except for emergency calls for roadside assistance, they must provide members with reliable responses 100% of the time. To achieve this, JAF is committed to continuously enhancing the call center performance and response quality and has received the highest HDI customer service evaluation possible. They were looking for ways to continue improving call center performance and response quality.
JAF faced a significant challenge effectively and efficiently analyzing members’ calls and quickly gaining valuable business insights. JAF also wanted to transform their agents’ evaluation and coaching process to make it better for agents while simultaneously driving greater customer and business value. To make improvements in this area and improve the CX, they decided to implement ForeSight Voice Mining.
“We used to keep track of different cases using inquiry codes, but we could not analyze the details of each inquiry, so we needed a solution to display the analysis results in greater detail.”(Mr. Ooishi)
To improve JAF services and quality, they believed that understanding customer needs was essential. However, their analysis of contact center call inquiries lacked the specific details necessary for them to understand these needs effectively. To overcome this challenge, JAF introduced ForeSight Voice Mining in 2015, which allowed quantitative analysis of the call inquiries.
ForeSight analyzes and visualizes dialogue between the agent and customer and provides insights from multiple perspectives. It allows analysts to see the quantitative results of their interactions, recognize issues efficiently, and implement corrective strategies if needed.
The quantitative analysis data has enabled JAF to take concrete measures to improve the satisfaction of JAF members. Using this quantitative analysis, they could see that members found the usability of their membership website low and they experienced difficulty using it. JAF then started a project to improve the membership site. While listening to the voices of the members, they made improvements with the aim of creating an easy-to-use website and services that members would like to use. The result for JAF was an immediate decrease in inquiries caused by the incomprehension of its membership website.
“Based on the analysis data of individual agents, we hold meetings to give coaching and feedback. ForeSight allows us to make various analyses using keywords. We create radar charts to show if an agent used the mandated phrases.” (Mr. Takeshi Ooishi)
“We give guidance to agents in certain areas where they score low. Then, depending on how much they can change, we adjust the instructions as needed.” (Mr. Takeshi Hibino)
ForeSight Voice Mining has transformed our agent evaluation and coaching process. Previously it was left to the evaluators only and was labor-intensive and time-consuming because calls had to be listened to repeatedly for accurate evaluation. It was also challenging to ensure that the evaluators could produce standardized evaluation results based on the criteria.
ForeSight visualized individual agents’ performance in multiple tables and diagrams with a one-click operation. It evaluated what was said in the call script, for example, if the opening was complete or if misunderstandings were clarified, and reports were provided for all calls. It was also possible to evaluate from a customer service perspective, such as the politeness and professionalism of the agent and the level of customer orientation.
The ForeSight analysis call evaluation was clear and logical to agents who responded positively to the feedback. It was also an opportunity for agents to see their growth, which was encouraging and motivating. It inspired them to provide more customer-oriented and professional responses and improve customer support.
“We sometimes receive calls from customers who want to cancel our services, and when the agents successfully persuade them to stay, we can easily extract the successful transcription from ForeSight. We then highlight the key reasons for success and share them with other agents so they can use them for better customer retention.” (Mr. Takeshi Ooishi)
Reliability of the evaluations was maintained using sophisticated call scripts and appropriate keyword settings that match real-life dialogue in contact centers. Positive phrases from successful case and call scripts were also updated and improved regularly, and NTT TechnoCross analysts revised keyword settings for updating and tuning.
ForeSight quantitative analysis delivered the PDCA cycle for improved services, and higher quality evaluations and coaching for agents.
“I am confident that we can continue to utilize ForeSight as a part of our PDCA cycle.” (Mr. Takeshi Ooishi)
The Thank You Rate is a percentage of customers who say “Thank you” after their inquiry to the JAF Customer Center. This rate increased from 30% to 50% and showed the result of JAF’s commitment and success in constantly enhancing the quality of its customer’s experience.
“By visualizing the conversation between the customers and the agents, we can now see the details of customer inquiries, including the different call reasons categories. We can easily give agents feedback indicating best practices. I believe ForeSight Voice Mining has been a great help in enhancing the quality of our customer’s experiences.” (Mr. Takeshi Hibino)