The customer's digital resources — the website and mobile app — are used by more than 30 million customers throughout Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus. When users have questions about products and orders, they can ask them in the chat room. Chat room requests are processed by an outsourced contact center.
The customer planned to test the new operation model with new contractors. ICL Services was among the companies entrusted with the pilot project.
Key Challenges
Organize a contact center for receiving and processing user requests and, together with the customer, test the new operation model.
Implemented our solution
The pilot project was launched at the end of May 2022. In just one week, a team of managers with extensive experience in running pilots at contact centers and organizing quality management systems was assembled to participate in the pilot. For the next two weeks, operators and supervisors were trained in the customer's ITSM system.
The training lasted ten days and included in-person lectures, webinars, tests, and team and individual case discussions.
The training period culminated in diagnostics: a complex 45-minute exam simulating a situation where the customer reaches out to the contact center and the employee undergoes an online survey. Statistically, no more than 10 out of 40 candidates pass the diagnostics stage. This exam reveals how well the employee navigates the knowledge base and how quickly and correctly they can provide an answer.
This kind of candidate training is a fairly time-consuming process, so many other contractors taking part in the pilot did not make it until the end. ICL Services, however, was able to organize the team thanks to the proper selection of candidates, a dedicated training center, and separate programs for supervisors.
How a contact center works
The ICL Services team works within the customer's technologial environment and interacts with tickets that the chatbot was unable to handle. Operators communicate with users in the chat, and in cases where they cannot solve their problem on their own, pass the ticket to another support line.
There are twenty operators, a project manager, quality managers, and instructors working at the contact center simultaneously. Each operator would take on at least 100 requests during the day, the average time to close a ticket was 7.5 minutes.
After the pilot was prolonged in September, the number of tickets processed doubled, and the average closing time was reduced to 3.5 minutes. This was due to a change in the processing format and an increase in the proportion of tickets that were escalated to other units.
The customer is deeply immersed in the operations of the contact center and monitors the performance of each operator and assesses:
- the number of processed tickets,
- the number of man-hours on the line,
- request processing quality,
- whether the escalation of tickets to other support lines was appropriate,
- the customer's satisfaction level.
Results
- ICL Services has set up an outsourced contact center for the customer and handles 4,000 user requests daily.
- The company helped the customer test the effectiveness of the new pricing model.
- Thanks to the high level of operators' training and stable quality indicators, ICL operators perform the functions of the 2nd line of user support and solve more than 90% of inquiries without outside assistance.
- Based on the results of the pilot project, ICL Services gained the trust of the customer and was invited to participate in the competition for providing essential user support, which it won.