HomeServe Reduces Customer Effort with Verint Speech Analytics

HomeServe is one of the UK’s leading home assistance providers.

The results

Analyzed nearly 2 million customer interactions
Reduced hold times by an average of 20 seconds per call
Eliminated barriers to first contact resolution and call volume reduction by identifying the drivers of repeat calls
Discovered that 20 percent of voice interactions were repeat calls, enabling subsequent process improvement to enhance the customer experience
Reduced overall service call levels by 10%

About HomeServe

HomeServe is one of the UK’s leading home assistance providers. For more than 20 years it has made its customers’ lives easier by delivering a range of services, including plumbing, drainage, electrics, heating, and more, through a nationwide network of HomeServe approved engineers.

While the organization is committed to building a customer-centric, multi-channel business, voice remains its largest customer contact channel, with the company’s contact centers handling close to 2 million calls each year. Given its large number of voice interactions and aim to ensure that every customer consistently receives a rewarding experience, HomeServe sought to gain greater insight into the quality of service offered through call centre engagement.

“We’re committed to making life easy for our customers, and while we focus strongly on the voice of the customer and regularly collect feedback, we needed more analytical insight to understand why customers were calling in order to improve our interactions,” explains Alison Hanson, director of contact centre strategy at HomeServe.

Transcribe and analyze 100 percent of recorded calls with Verint Speech Analytics

Having identified speech analytics as a key technology to support its customer-centric strategy, HomeServe engaged its contact centre technology partner Sabio to help identify and deploy the right solution for the business.

“We immediately understood the potential impact of speech analytics. It could deliver the analytical insight we were missing to help us further hone our customer engagement focus.”

The solution HomeServe chose was Verint Speech Analytics, which can transcribe and analyze 100 percent of recorded calls to help surface valuable intelligence. Automatically discovering and examining words, phrases, categories, and themes spoken during calls, the Verint software can reveal rising trends and areas of opportunity or concern to help enhance contact centre performance.

“Verint Speech Analytics met all of our key criteria and was fully compatible with our existing call recording platform,” Alison adds. “The technology gives us the flexibility to mine all recorded calls, surfacing intelligence by specific keywords, phrases, or business categories, to help us gain a greater understanding of our customers’ journey.”

During implementation, the HomeServe team worked with Sabio to build a complete language model and configure 54 speech categories. The categories encapsulated themes such as emotion, positive language, vulnerable customers, knowledge gaps, and confusion.

“Verint Speech Analytics helps us find key customer engagement issues. For example, why customers demonstrate positive or negative emotion and the type of calls where this is most prevalent.”

HomeServe is also using Verint Speech Analytics to support speaker separation. This enables the organization to distinguish between customer and agent language and, in turn, refine the accuracy of insight.

Alison continues, “Fact-based information derived from speech analytics is important for our contact centre operations. It’s no use simply surfacing insights, or identifying potential problem areas in the customer journey, unless we have working processes to fix the issues.”

The benefits

With up to 2 million recorded customer interactions to work with, HomeServe was able to draw on a comprehensive data resource for its initial two speech projects: analyzing hold times and tracking repeat calls.

Using Verint Speech Analytics to directly address the question of why customers call more than once, HomeServe was able to identify multiple calls from the same numbers. The organization was then able to analyze which interaction categories were associated with these calls to determine key areas requiring attention.

The Verint software highlighted that approximately 20 percent of total voice interactions were repeat calls, with document-related call backs and incorrectly transferred calls accounting for almost a third of repeat calls. Armed with this intelligence, Alison’s team met with the relevant business owners to develop new processes aimed addressing the issues to enhance the customer experience.

"By addressing key issues such as hold times and repeat calling, Verint Speech Analytics enables us to streamline the customer journey and unlock operational benefits for the business.”
Alison Hanson Director of Contact Centre Strategy, HomeServe

Reduce hold times with Verint Speech Analytics

HomeServe also applied Verint Speech Analytics to identify specific call types that were leading to longer hold times for customers. Analyzing calls by category, the Verint solution helped the company pinpoint those departments responsible for the longest hold times, those that generated the most transferred calls, and instances of long hold times that were the result of agent knowledge gaps.

By testing and implementing new processes developed based on its findings, HomeServe reduced hold times by an average of 20 seconds per call.

“By addressing key issues such as hold times and repeat calling, Verint Speech Analytics enables us to streamline the customer journey and unlock operational benefits for the business,” concludes Alison. “Plus, we’ve been able to apply the technology to other aspects of the customer journey, such as identifying where customers are having issues with particular areas of our online offering. This is a great example of our digital and contact centre teams collaborating to optimize the end-to-end HomeServe value proposition, and one that will continue to add value to the business.”

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