Post Office Ltd. delivers superior customer experience
The combination of Nuance solutions has reduced costs for Post Office Ltd. and allowed agents to handle more cases, faster—offering customers a superior experience at every moment of their journey.
A new approach
Post Office Ltd.’s manual approach to customer service took up a lot of agent time and demanded that all team members were trained to handle a broad range of cases. The company knew there was a way to improve its approach, and it searched for a partner that could help achieve its vision. Read the story to discover how they achieved a better experience for their agents and customers.
Challenge
Offer a superior customer experience in all moments of the customer journey by introducing self‑service options and reducing transfers between agents.
Solution
Nuance Natural Language Call Steering directs callers to the right agent and enables agents to see why customers call. Nuance Live and Async Assist and Nuance Virtual Assistant offer customers self‑service options.
Results
Customers get quick answers to their problems, and agents save time handling simple customer cases so that they can focus on more complex queries.
Background
Post Office Ltd., the UK’s leading retail postal service company, offers a wide range of home broadband and phone services. The company’s Telecoms division contact centre receives hundreds of different queries every day—from sales and billing to installation and technical support.
Previously, all cases were handled by human agents using either phone or email, no matter if it was a customer asking for an update on their order progress or for clarification on a bill. Transfer rates between agents were high—and often took up to 70 seconds to complete. It was a manual approach to customer service that took up a lot of agent time and demanded that all team members were trained to handle a broad range of cases.
Post Office Ltd. knew there was a way to improve its approach to customer service, and it searched for a partner that could help it achieve its vision.
An entire contact centre transformation
After choosing Nuance to support its contact centre transformation, Post Office Ltd. adopted Nuance Live and Async Assist and Nuance Virtual Assistant. Using the virtual assistant, the company provided an automated service for the first time in its contact centres, creating a significant shift in customer interactions from the telephony channel to digital.
With the Nuance Virtual Assistant, Post Office Ltd. can automatically solve more than 30 different types/categories of customer requests, such as viewing account information and offering users upgrade details, freeing up agents’ time for more complex cases. If the virtual assistant doesn’t solve a customer’s problem, the case can be elevated to an agent in Nuance Live and Async Assist or transferred to the telephony channel.
Looking to update its entire customer service offering, Post Office Ltd. also adopted Nuance Natural Language Call Steering. Now, when customers call the contact centre, they’re greeted by the IVR (interactive voice response) and can explain their issue using conversational speech.
Natural Language Call Steering recognizes the customer intent and transfers them to the appropriate agent—so agents’ skills can be developed for specific service areas, and customers get faster solutions to their problems. The company even included its Data Protection Act clearance process as part of the Natural Language Call Steering sequence, saving agents time and helping them to get straight into the customer’s case.
Smarter, more convenient customer experiences
The company deployed Nuance Live and Async Assist and Nuance Virtual Assistant in just six months, with Nuance Natural Language Call Steering coming only three months later. As opposed to telephony where an agent can only deal with one call at a time, Post Office Ltd. is now running 3 concurrent live chats per agent for Customer Services. This significantly reduces handling costs and drives efficiency.
The company’s live and async assist service now has an 84% CSAT score, and less than 4% of chats are escalated to phone agents. The combination of Nuance solutions has led to an overall reduction in agent handling time of two million minutes a year. Not only has this reduced costs for Post Office Ltd., it has allowed agents to handle more cases, faster—offering customers a superior experience at every moment of their journey.
Unmatched outcomes
84%
CSAT in Live Assist
2M
minutes per year reduction
in agent handling time
Continuous customer experience optimisation
As more customers interact with its virtual assistant, Post Office Ltd. is working closely with Nuance to introduce new cases it can solve. Using the conversation data the virtual assistant collects, the company can identify the most common issues among its customers and optimize the virtual assistant to solve them.
For example, when contact volumes spiked in the first half of 2020, the company was able to optimise its virtual assistant to answer new COVID‑19 related queries, deflecting most of the increased demand away from its agents.
The company’s Natural Language Call Steering data is also proving valuable. Analysing trends in Natural Language Call Steering intents, Post Office Ltd. can identify common problems based on intent spikes, or decide which low‑level intents can be directed to self‑service options when demand is high.