Leading telco uncovers a hidden problem … and a new opportunity

As part of an effort to elevate the customer experience for their millions of users, this client partnered with Mattersight and deployed a Behavioral Analytics pilot to a subset of agents in one of their business units, with the goal of reducing repeat calls, developing predictive models for some of their key metrics and improving agent performance. In the early stages of the linguistic modeling process, Mattersight’s dual-track audio recordings revealed some unusual patterns on the agent end of this client’s unproductive outbound calls. The Behavioral Science team that discovered these anomalies shared their findings with our Customer Success team, who proceeded to dig deeper. They quickly identified four specific inappropriate behaviors— unproductive outbound calls, calls with no agent activity, abandoned calls and calls being put on hold prematurely—in a small set of recordings, then built a set of algorithms to systematically uncover them in the client’s larger body of call data. When they did, they made a startling discovery: significant inappropriate agent behavior, traced to specific outsourcer sites, which was contributing to high repeat rates, unnecessary expenditures and, undoubtedly, significant customer dissatisfaction. Not only was the client stunned when they were presented with these findings; they were infuriated. Outsourcers are paid per second of call time, which means all of that non-interaction time amounted to money down the drain — a lot of it. The outsourcers themselves, when they were informed of what was going on in their centers, were equally surprised and angered. A few bad apples, behaving in ways these vendors had no knowledge of and no way of identifying, had violated the vendors’ own standards of service, and seriously jeopardized their relationships with a highly valued customer. No one was happy, and everyone wanted the issue fixed as soon as possible.

The client is a top 5 global telecommunications company with over 9000 agents across call centers worldwide. As a FORTUNE 100 company, they are committed to providing exceptional customer service to their millions of users. The company operates numerous call centers, both client-owned and outsourced, to handle customer inquiries and support. Their goal is to continuously improve the customer experience, reduce repeat calls, and enhance agent performance through innovative solutions and technologies. Partnering with Mattersight, they aimed to leverage Behavioral Analytics to achieve these objectives and uncover any underlying issues affecting their call center operations.