Relying heavily on aging complicated Microsoft Visio workflow diagrams that were very hard and time consuming to update, the Customer Service Representatives struggled to provide a great consistent customer service experience. It was time to identify process optimization and automation possibilities that would help increase first time right, customer satisfaction, quality of service, while at the same time reducing customer service cost by 10% year over year.
TDC achieves 12% increase in customer satisfaction score
The customer care team at TDC supports a wide range of telecommunication products within Internet connections, telephony, and TV. When the opportunity came to evaluate an AI-driven knowledge management system, they chose Dezide.
12%
Increase in customer satisfaction
13%
Increase in First Time Right
37%
Reduction in unacceptable fault-handling experience
About TDC
TDC is the leading Danish provider of communication solutions within Internet connections, telephony and TV with market leadership across all segments of the domestic market.
In other Nordic countries, TDC is the main challenger in the business market.
TDC employs more than 9.000 people and is located in Copenhagen, Denmark.
High handling time, agent churn and heavy training costs
To maintain its leading role in a very competitive market, TDC among other initiatives saw a need to reduce the cost of customer service, agent churn, and training costs while improving the quality and consistency of service. In a market, with customers churning in a blink of an eye if the customer service experience is less than stellar it’s imperative to provide best in class service, and with an extensive range of products, it was impossible for all CSR’s to have expert knowledge about all products and services.
A high average handling time results in a low quality of service and TDC was set to improve.
TDC has previously used separate knowledge bases for self-service and the call center. Also, they have been using different knowledge bases for various business units, consumers, business, wholesale, etc. These knowledge bases were simple static document databases with a search capability.
We see Dezide as an essential strategic element that translates very complicated business rules into easy-to-follow operating procedures
Program Manager, TDC
Converting existing documentation to Dezide
The first part of the project revolved around transitioning the old existing knowledge base consisting of more than 800 Microsoft Visio diagrams that were used to guide Customer Service Representatives to help customers. The Visio diagrams didn’t help the agents enough – it was too easy for the agents to skip steps that were too hard to perform and essential details were missed in the process. Furthermore, updating the diagrams had a very long turnaround time. From the editorial team receiving a request for an update, to the change being implemented, and agents becoming aware of this change could take up to as much as two months.
The Visio diagrams were converted into basic Dezide guides and then underwent editing to introduce dynamic elements. The Visio diagrams underwent a transformation from static decision trees to dynamic guides operating on causes, probabilities, actions, and costs that Dezide uses to present the most efficient troubleshooting step.
For some of the most advanced troubleshooting flows like troubleshooting DSL internet connection lines, the old Visio diagrams were discarded, and new dynamic Dezide guides were built up from the ground, which provides a much better experience and much more efficient fault handling experience for both CSR’s and customers.
The next step was to introduce automation to optimize average handling time and increase quality.
Automating DSL line checks
The transition to Dezide guides allowed TDC to leverage the Internet of Things to automatically perform DSL line checks in the background, without the CSR having to complete a long list of manual steps. The old school way of performing DSL line checks involved triggering two different measurement systems that would measure the state of the DSL line from TDC’s equipment into the home of the customer on both physical hardware level and on the protocol level. When the measurements were retrieved, it was all up to the CSR to manually evaluate the data and make a decision as to the quality of the line. Even with training, it was difficult for most agents to perform an accurate evaluation. Furthermore, the same data would often be evaluated differently based on the experience of each CSR.
TDC started leveraging the Dezide Data Collection Framework that would automatically trigger the measurements systems, retrieve the relevant data and make the difficult evaluation of complex data automatically thereby taking away a huge pain point from the agents.
By having the system automatically evaluate data and just presenting most effective troubleshooting step based on that data, TDC reduced average handling time significantly while at the same time increasing the quality of service as the human element of data evaluation was eliminated.
This also meant that new agents could be trained easier and faster as they now do not have to learn to perform the difficult data evaluation.
Integration with Microsoft Customer Care Framework
Dezide is not the only tool used in the TDC call center. On an average day, an agent can use up to as much as 59 different systems! Using the Microsoft Customer Care Framework (CCF), TDC consolidated many of these applications into one application – including Dezide.
The CCF allowed for integrations between the applications and data could flow to Dezide from the other systems for helping the agent in troubleshooting scenarios.
Dezide is a crucial element in our product design philosophy, giving us the ability to implement rather radical changes, basically by the hour.
Program Manager, TDC
TDC increases first time right, quality and customer satisfaction with Dezide
The Dezide project is a huge success for TDC. First Time Right and customer satisfaction is increasing, and also customers feel well informed after talking to a customer service representative. Furthermore, training time of new employees has been reduced from eight weeks to two weeks, primarily attributed to automation as the system now performs many of the difficult training-intensive tasks automatically.
Finally, TDC is experiencing a much faster turnaround time when implementing updates to the agent workflows. Changes are rolled out to the entire workforce in minutes as updates to the guides are instantly published to all users.
These are the impressive results achieved so far:
- 8% Reduction of Average Handling Time
- 13% Increase of First Time Right
- 5% Reduction of call volume
- 34% Higher quality in escalations from first line to second line
- 9% Increase when TDC ask the customers after a call “How well informed do you feel?”
- 12% Increase in CSAT (customer satisfaction score) for Hotline calls
- 37% Reduction in number of customers with an unacceptable fault-handling experience
