CUSTOMER PROFILE

ABOUT ACCESS CUSTOMER SERVICE CENTER

The Access Customer Service Center is the contact center for San Diego County’s Health and Human Services Agency, which offers food assistance, cash, healthcare, employment service and housing support for San Diego County’s more than 3.3 million residents.

Access employs 2,500 agents who pride themselves on offering world-class customer service to San Diego County’s most vulnerable population while supporting healthy, safe and thriving communities. Access handles an annual contact volume of 1.8 million, making it one of the busiest government con- tact centers in the country.

01 THE CHALLENGE

The Access Customer Service Center’s mission is to provide outstanding customer service. However, its on-premises Avaya system made it difficult to achieve that goal because callers often received busy signals or calls were dropped. This was especially problematic during crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic, when call volumes rose precipitously.

“One of our biggest issues with Avaya was that it could only sustain so many ports which limited the number of incoming calls,” Mike Schmidt, Human Services Operations Manager explains. “Callers received busy signals when port capacity was reached and sometimes calls were dropped altogether. As you can imagine, that’s a frustrating experience for our customers. On top of that, if a caller is trying to get help to feed their family, waiting on hold just adds to the emotional trauma they’re experiencing. It was one of our biggest frustrations with the Avaya system.”

Avaya was also a complex system to learn and difficult to customize and maintain. “Avaya wasn’t exactly user-friendly. Also, it wasn’t a cloud system which meant we didn’t have the flexibility to move the agents to alternative locations. That became a big issue when the pandemic hit, and we needed to quickly transition them to working from home.”

02 THE SOLUTION

To address these issues, Access Customer Service Center knew it was time to look for a cloud con- tact center platform. Mike says, “Our top priority was improving customer satisfaction. This was very important because we wanted to minimize any frustrations our already vulnerable clients are experiencing when they contact us.”

After evaluating multiple solutions, Access chose NICE CXone, in part because of the company’s deep experience in serving government agencies. “NICE CXone has many government customers,” says Mike. “That was important to us as we knew they’d understand our operations.”

Mike continues, “Another key criteria was giving our customers a much more pleasant, seamless and consistent experience.”

To that end, Access simplified its IVR to just three options. “The CXone IVR enabled us to simplify our IVR’s previous complexity so it’s much easier for customers to navigate. We’ve already received a lot of positive feedback on that improvement,” says Mike.

CXone also enables the Access team to record new IVR messages. Human Services Operations Manager Terra Berhe explains, “If we have an emergency, we can quickly record a new message that explains the actions callers can take. The old system required creating a support ticket, which took more time to implement the changes. It’s ex- ceptional that CXone lets us make these system updates ourselves.”

Also, port limitations and busy signals are now a thing of the past. “CXone’s scalability lets us quick- ly scale up or down based on call fluctuations. Our customers no longer get a busy signal and CXone automatically scales our staff to handle any vol- ume of calls,” says Terra.

All these improvements improved the customer experience and contributed to a 91% reduction in average wait time, a 75% decrease in average speed to answer and a 71% reduction in aban- doned calls.

03 OPPORTUNITIES IDENTIFIED

CXone ensures business continuity

Because CXone is a cloud platform, it makes re- mote work possible, which was a big selling point for the Access team.

According to Mike, “A few years ago, one of our locations suffered a power outage that left two- thirds of our workforce unable to take calls, which meant our customers couldn’t access crucial health and social services.”

Access would have experienced a similar situation at the beginning of the pandemic if they hadn’t al- ready switched to CXone. “Since CXone is a cloud platform, within two days we were able to move over 80% of our staff to remote work. No calls were dropped, nor was one busy signal received during the transition.”

Mike adds, “Giving staff the ability to work from home also reduces costs and improves employee productivity. We’re a government agency, so we try to be very aware of how taxpayers’ dollars are spent. CXone’s flexibility enabled us to move to a smaller office location that’s less expensive.”

Boosted agent engagement

By integrating all functionality on CXone’s unified platform, the council now has visibility into all as- pects of the customer experience.“One of the biggest benefits realised is improved visibility into all of our processes. Our senior stakeholders ap- preciate having an in-depth view of our customer service operations. And, it helps to drive a con- tinuous improvement focus on our operations.”

Dave continues: “With CXone, we can examine all the processes we use to service interactions. We use that information to make process improve- ments and system enhancements. This level of visibility enables better decision making.

”Council is also starting to use CXone Performance Management to track performance and identify the root cause of issues. “The real-time dashboards within CXone Performance Management are in- sightful. They’re helping us achieve our goals and improve performance.

”The agents are also enthusiastic about how CXone has changed their jobs for the better. CXone removed the tedious manual processes they used to do and increased the variety of work. Now agents have a solution that works and gives customers a really good quality experience.”

Customer satisfaction grows 445%

Access also uses customer feedback to measure satisfaction and identify needed improvements. “We send customers postcall surveys using CXone Feedback Management which tell us exactly where we’re doing well and areas for improve- ment. The feedback is that we’re doing much better. In fact, the number of satisfaction surveys we’ve received back from customers grew 511% and the number of positive surveys increased 445%. It’s also encouraging that negative feed- back fell 5%.”

When Access does receive negative feedback, it reaches out to customers to identify the issue’s root cause. Mike explains, “With CXone Feedback Management, we can identify issues that we wouldn’t have know existed. A great example is callback time. Our customers complained it took too long to receive a return call. Initially, we were returning calls in 30-minutes; now we’re currently at two minutes—a 93% reduction!”

Agent satisfaction increases 5%

Employee satisfaction was another area Mike wanted to target and improve. Using CXone Performance Management, Mike and his team created contests and awards that are motivating and driving higher performance. “The gamification initiatives have been really well-received and are improving agent engagement.” Gamification also contributed to improving agent satisfaction, pro- ductivity and attendance by 5%.

Access also uses CXone Interaction Analytics to analyze calls based on sentiment rating and key phrases to identify when agents need further training.

“We use CXone Interactions Analytics to filter calls based on sentiment rating, which is huge. There’s no way we could analyze such a large volume of calls ourselves. We also search for calls that need improvement, such as when an agent forgets the greeting or if a customer expresses a concern,” says Brandon Villanueva, Program Specialist.

“Since the data is real-time, we can immediately coach the agent, and they can correlate the feedback back to a specific call,” says Brandon.

Mike also says CXone was invaluable during the pandemic. “Even though we were moving 80% of our staff to working from home, no calls were dropped and not one of our customers received a busy signal. That’s the type of experience we’re striving for at our contact center.”