This multinational communications, electronics and IT corporation has a health solutions arm delivering connected devices for which Blue Ocean provides both sales support and customer service support.
For both types of customer calls – sales and support – the client was using an IVR system which directed calls, by type, to an appropriate contact center agent. However, the IVR was not integrated with the client’s off-the-shelf, cloud-based help desk ticketing system, Zendesk. As such, once customers were connected to a live agent, the agent would need to verify account information and manually enter other details. These steps and manual entry resulted in longer Average Handle Times, lower quality customer experience, and, sometimes, inaccuracies or errors in customer information. Streamlining this process would improve all of these areas.
Collaborating with our information services experts and the operations team that supports this client, Blue Ocean’s technology team designed a custom integration between the IVR and Zendesk ticketing system. The integration ensures that all questions answered through the IVR, including customer or product ID, language, category of call, and more, are automatically recorded in a web-based app that integrated directly with the ticketing system. With this seamless integration in place, when the customer is connected to an agent, their information automatically pops up on the agent screen. Instead of spending valuable call time on verification and manual entry processes, agents are able to jump immediately in to resolving the customer’s issue.
With development and testing from both a back-end and front-end perspective completed, Blue Ocean launched live demos with the client to ensure all objectives were met. From there, agents underwent one-on-one training to get up to speed quickly.
The custom integration between the client’s ticketing system and IVR was immediately successful. The data reveals that after the IVR integration, AHT per call was lowered by 53 seconds reducing cost per call. Efficiency is a core component of a good customer experience – with the streamlined process in place and average handle time successfully lowered, our quality assurance results improved as well. We measure “How would the customer rate the service experience?” as part of our QA process. After integration of the systems, the customer rating increased by 34%.