Backcountry.com Improves NPS and Lowers Costs with Verint Workforce Management

Backcountry.com is always looking to stay abreast of new contact center technologies and approaches to support customer care. Highlighting the company’s excellence in customer care, Backcountry’s contact center operations were recognized with 2019 Honorable Mention honors in Contact Center Week’s Excellence Awards.

The premier online specialty retailer of outdoor gear for snow sports, hiking, camping, paddling, biking, climbing, fly fishing, and more, including a wide selection of premium technical and casual apparel, Backcountry’s mission is to connect people to their passions by supplying customers with the gear, knowledge, and inspiration necessary to chase down life’s greatest moments. Backcountry does this by providing the biggest and best assortment of premium outdoor products, personalized expertise, inspirational content, a superior shopping experience, and lightning-fast fulfillment.

Backcountry uses Verint Workforce Management to empower its agents with modern tools to help simplify their jobs and support delivery of exceptional experiences. The company has contact centers in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Portland, Oregon, along with agents who work
from home.

Because its agents have high expectations for work-life balance, Backcountry relies on Verint Workforce Management to help facilitate flexibility. This includes allowing agents to have input and ownership into scheduling, as well as providing them with ease of schedule management.

The software also delivers key metrics and analytics to enable the company to understand agent performance and effectively allocate resources to match phone and chat volumes. Agents and managers have extensive visibility into performance data, providing an in-depth understanding of schedule adherence alongside other key metrics on a daily, week-to-date, previous week comparison, and month-to-date basis.

Backcountry has been able to improve staffing to demand as well. This has helped increase agent utilization and empowered the company to cut hours during intervals with low demand, in turn enabling better management of payroll dollars. As a result, contact abandonment rates have dropped by 76 basis points year-over-year or nearly one percent.

Verint Workforce Management also helps Backcountry forecast contact center needs at various intervals to understand when the company may need to bring on more seasonal help. This is a business-critical activity considering Backcountry generates approximately 60 percent of its revenue in the fourth quarter. The company generally hires 150 FTEs annually during this time to handle increased transaction volumes.

Finally, Backcountry’s investment in Verint Workforce Management has helped improve another key contact center metric – employee NPS. Its employee NPS continues to trend upward – between 40 to 45 points – besting baseline scores prior to the deployment of Verint.