Improved Customer Satisfaction Score to a Five Year High

Our client provides 6 million Representatives with dedicated customer support and account management services, which are provided by a business partner outsourcer. The quality of those services is of paramount importance in maintaining a successful relationship with each Representative.

The company’s growth challenged them to undertake a programme of digital transformation that would meet its cultural and technical requirements. They wanted a dedicated partner providing highly skilled staff as well as an omnichannel solution.

Kura’s business encompasses multiple high-performing outsourcing teams based in South Africa and the UK, a thriving data science function, and an award-winning software company, Inisoft.

We helped our client to stabilise its operational KPIs, and most importantly for them we improved their customer satisfaction to a level not reached in over five years. One of the key elements of our successful partnership has been our commitment to their values. We understand the profound role that culture plays in the stability and growth of an organisation, which is why we made sure that their values were the cornerstone of our project.

1. Tailored Training, Targeted Hiring

We started the project with an appraisal of the existing processes and materials used for training and recruitment. Following that, we assisted our client with the development of training content that closely aligned to their business objectives. One objective was to significantly improve their customer service score.

To achieve that, we needed to understand that customer relationship. So, we dedicated time to listening to calls, which helped us see how to draw from their values to build the relationship. And we took a similar approach to examining written interactions. Having laid the foundations for strengthening the customer relationship, we were prepared for the hiring stage. Our recruiters adopted a values-driven approach which helped them attract and select candidates who would thrive.

2. Continuous Coaching

At Kura, we help our agents by providing continuous guidance from the live-floor support team. In addition, when we begin a new project, our trainers get involved too. They supplement the live-floor support team by offering dedicated guidance and reassurance to new agents, which enables the agents to complete their onboarding journey to full competency.

And this is what we did. Our comprehensive approach to agent coaching and training ensured that our client provided a high standard of customer service from day one of going live.

3. A Smooth Transition

None of the training and coaching goals could have been achieved without the guiding hand of a dedicated Service Improvement Manager. From the very start, Kura’s Service Improvement Manager oversaw each stage and coordinated a smooth transition of operations from the previous outsourcing partner to Kura.

4. Putting Digital first in our Transformation

When the operational foundations were firmly in place, the data team set to work on the digital transformation. We gathered the clients’ data through Syntelate XA, our own omnichannel customer engagement software, which is used by our operations teams to provide customer service to their sales representations.

The software was connected to their CRM and performance MI. With the data feed set up, we used Syntelate XA’s dashboards and its reporting to investigate the following:

• Statistics on failure demand and normal demand, by contact type and channel
• Contributory causes of the positive and negative experiences of customers
• Lengthy processes
• Processes that engendered human error

The results of our investigations allowed the analysts to design an extensive service improvement plan that could deliver cost efficiencies, new technology, and channel shift, and improve satisfaction scores.

After a year of operations, Kura has helped our client achieve an extraordinary increase in customer satisfaction.

Together, the client has announced a five-year high in its customer service score of +85 thanks to their partnership with Kura. The reason we’ve seen such a remarkable uplift in quality is due to the skill of the advisors and the operational efficiencies that cut out labour-intensive tasks from the advisor’s workload, which frees them to focus on the customer.

As well as helping our agents provide excellent customer experiences, the technology has made their workload more efficient. Nearly 2,000 hours have been saved during the collaboration through insight and development.  Failure demand was reduced by five percent, confirming the value of the partnership.

That time saving has led to cost efficiencies.

But results are not just about numbers. The cultural framework we embedded at the beginning of the project is helping the advisors thrive in their roles. Our operations team are passionate about helping our clients’ customers, and we’re proud of that.