Yorkshire Water Transforms Customer Experience with Verint Quality Management

The opportunity

Loop has been a Verint customer for more than 20 years. It required a means to evaluate large numbers of customer billing inquiries across various criteria, including importance, agent performance, and customer input. Loop realized that customer insights would be difficult, if not impossible, to attain by randomly sampling small numbers of interactions and evaluating them against inwardly focused metrics.

“Our main drivers for quality management are two-fold,” says Paul Bentley, Development Center Manager at Loop. “First, we need to monitor the quality of service to report regularly and consistently to the industry watchdog, OFWAT. Second, we want to understand more about our interactions to deliver an even more rewarding service.”

Emphasize the customer experience with Verint Quality Management

A recent initiative is also addressing outmoded forms (almost 50 in total), which previously underpinned quality monitoring. These forms offered minimal drill-down insight into the quality of engagement on “soft” skills such as empathy. Moreover, the customer experience, which Loop calls the “customer promise,” section of the forms was relatively small. Loop could only rate the overall experience on a four-point scale, ranging from “basic” to “exceptional.”

“There was very little science behind the questions,” says Bentley. “The outputs were minimal, and we struggled to look at skills such as listening, customer empathy, or emotional intelligence.”

The forms have now been streamlined in Verint Quality Management, with a strong emphasis on the customer experience. Verint’s team of consultants have supported Loop with the design of forms, which are carefully built to provide the desired outputs for reporting purposes. Loop can now identify the skills frontline advisors need to develop, such as how well they understand the customer scenario. A risk-based approach has also been adopted, scoring high to low, based on the severity of customer experience impact.

“We can now monitor customer experience far more effectively,” explains Bentley. For example, we can identify the contact types driving the calls and why they are driving the calls.”

Reimagine quality management

Loop is reimagining quality management with Verint. Its forward-thinking customer engagement strategy is delivering value across the organization:

• Meets compliance obligations: OFWAT sets a minimum “confidence grade” that should be attained by a utility company for a given metric, with a target confidence grade. Companies like Loop are expected to improve reporting performance over time, leading to the target confidence grade or higher. Using Verint Quality Management, Loop has documented evidence of engagements, including complaints, repeat calls, and other criteria, which are submitted to OFWAT.

In response, an innovative project named “Inspired” has been launched to roll out modern coaching to all of Loop’s customer-facing people leaders. A oneday customer experience workshop has also been developed, which includes coaching in soft skills like empathy and active listening. The project has enabled Loop to jump from a bronze to gold ranking on the Investors in People (IIP) standard. Agents are now more empowered to deliver the right solutions when handling complex questions.

• Increases productivity: Loop can automatically categorize calls that impact the customer experience, including greetings, escalations, and call hold behavior. This has resulted in a drop in repeat calls from over 15 percent to 12 percent. Powerful search and filtering functionality helps surface data such as high-profile accounts. Further, the solution can help Loop focus quickly on the critical parts of the process that drive a higher value of interactions and take immediate action. For example, the number of stage 1 billing requests has reduced by one third.