Zestlife is a financial services provider that offers insurance products. The company has built its business on its passion for customer service and commitment to fair treatment. This necessitates efficient and effective management of customer communication and engagement.
Understanding a Contact Centre
A contact center is pivotal to customer experience and satisfaction as it is where customers interact with the business. The goal of every interaction should be to connect customers with the correct agent, who has context and the right knowledge to successfully resolve queries. A contact center manager plays a crucial role in the organization by ensuring everything runs smoothly and optimizing operations for a more effective contact center. Challenges include dropped calls, long wait times, and a lack of customer context visibility for agents.
Challenges Faced
Craig Swain assumed the role of call center manager for Zestlife in 2019. Being already familiar with the business, he understood its goals and identified precisely where the contact center was falling short. At that time, the call center operated with unstructured inbound calls, resulting in extended wait times for customers due to challenges in call routing and unacceptably high rates of dropped calls. Consequently, many customers or potential customers did not receive resolutions to their queries.
This situation arose because no one in the business comprehended the systems underpinning the contact center. Although Zestlife had already implemented the Telviva suite of products, they were not utilized optimally, barely scratching the surface of the technology’s capabilities.
The intervention
Because Telviva was already implemented, the process of turning around the contact centre was far easier. One of Telviva’s strengths, outside of the actual technology, is a managed-services model that enables customers to learn, manage and deeply understand the technology. Through the Telviva technical team’s close collaboration with Swain, the Zestlife staff gained an understanding of how to set up and effectively deploy the Telviva solutions.
The process involved optimising the Telviva investment with a commercial alignment between Zestlife’s needs and Telviva’s solutions to meet these needs. This took the shape of streamlining the contact centre set-up, working closely with the Telviva team, and deliberate staff training on the use of the Telviva platform and its functionalities.
The Positive Outcome
The effectiveness and efficiency of the contact center saw a remarkable improvement. By March 2024, the average wait time had been reduced to 16 seconds, a significant improvement from the previously long waits. Importantly, there has been a notable decrease in dropped calls and a remarkable enhancement in call routing accuracy, leading to improved customer service and increased sales.
In addition to the commercial benefits for Zestlife, optimizing their Telviva suite has also boosted the efficiency and productivity of their contact center agents. With a better understanding of the product suite, Swain, in his role as call center manager, can effectively monitor contact center operations, knowing that support is readily available. Ultimately, the successful turnaround of the contact center has facilitated flexibility, agility, and scalability for future growth.
Swain attributes the remarkable turnaround directly to the ongoing, live support he and his team received. “Telviva speaks the language of someone who doesn’t understand technical jargon. They make everything easy and simple to understand. Their turnaround times when we log tickets are simply remarkable. By way of example, in 2020 during the lockdown, all staff suddenly had to work from home. Besides enabling this switch to a remote contact centre working within a day through Telviva One and Telviva Mobile, they guided us on how to deal with many different internet connections, routers, and technology, and taught us how to route calls to consultants efficiently. This kind of hands-on guidance continues today, and agents have great flexibility in how they access and use the Telviva platform.”
Swain mentions plans to deploy additional capabilities using Telviva Engage to seamlessly integrate various communication channels in the future.
