Bell Aliant trusts eGain

Company

The largest publicly traded company in Atlantic Canada and the third largest fullservice telecom business in all of Canada, Bell Aliant’s offerings include local and long distance telephone, wireless, Internet, eCommerce, interactive multimedia, data, and managed network services. It serves more than two million consumers and over 80,000 enterprises.

Challenge

With deregulation Canada’s telecom sector became highly competitive. Smaller companies were challenging Bell Aliant’s market share. The company decided high quality customer service was key to maintaining its market leadership, and launched its Customer Service Transformation Initiative. The goal of the initiative was to take customer satisfaction and retention to new levels, while reducing contact center operating expenses. The company would focus on the following tactical areas to attain its strategic goals:

• Consolidation of call centers
• Web-based self-service
• Service consistency across interaction channels and agents
• First call resolution
• Agent productivity
• Agent and customer adoption of enabling technologies

Solution

The notion of knowledge as a key enabler of quality service was at the heart of the new initiative—contact center agents as well as customers would be given easy access to consistent and accurate information. Bell Aliant wanted a knowledge management solution trusted by other large telecom companies, and a vendor who would infuse industry best practices into Bell Aliant’s customer interaction and knowledge management processes. eGain’s software and services have been used for over a decade by global telecom giants such as AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Virgin Mobile, and Orange UK. This track record, combined with eGain’s reputation for best-practice expertise in the customer engagement arena, played a key role in Bell Aliant’s selection of eGain as the technology provider for the Customer Service Transformation Initiative. The knowledge management and web self-service applications in eGain’s customer engagement software suite would:

• Ensure consistently high quality service across all channels
• Enable customers to help themselves, thereby reducing the need for agent assisted service
• Increase first-call resolution
• Reduce call handle and wrap-up times
• Reduce the need for agent training
• Enable cross-sell and upsell in service interactions

Implementation

Bell Aliant implemented eGain Knowledge Agent™ and eGain SelfService™, and also engaged eGain’s Professional services for business process consulting and implementation. The team conducted a comprehensive analysis of the agent-assisted and web self-service processes at Bell Aliant, and recommended best practices to improve agent performance, design user interfaces, provide dialogue based web self-service to consumers, and manage knowledge across contact centers. The eGain solution includes interfaces to fit a range of user profiles. eGain’s team set up the knowledge access best suited to the various types of users at Bell Aliant. This approach facilitates agent and customer adoption of the new knowledge base.
eGain’s professional services organization demonstrated deep knowledge about customer service processes as they apply to the telecom industry, says Ginger Carson, Bell Aliant’s Group Leader for contact center knowledge management. Moreover, eGain consultants showed great professionalism and flexibility throughout the entire implementation process.

Results

With the business benefits enabled by eGain’s contact center knowledge management and web self-service solution, Bell Aliant is well on its way to attaining the goals of its Customer Service Transformation Initiative. Among the results already achieved are:

• 17% reduction in call handle time, approximately $1.53 million in operating staff expenses.
• 7% increase in first-call resolution.
• 5% increase in Customer Value Metrics, Bell Aliant’s independent measure of customer satisfaction based on the following criteria: Providing information that is easy to understand, being knowledgeable and providing access to support, providing thorough and accurate information, and the ability to find the cause of problems and handle issues.

Bell Aliant’s customer service managers also noted other factors leading to contact center productivity and efficiency.

• Consolidation of knowledge bases across the four provincial contact centers enabled agents at these centers to access a single, comprehensive knowledge base for customer service in both English and French, and provide consistent answers.
• The new knowledge base reduced the need to train agents on new products and services, further improving agent morale and productivity.
• In addition, the knowledge base enabled frontline agents to effectively answer customer questions that were starting to get increasingly complex with the constant expansion of Bell Aliant’s offerings.

Feedback from customers revealed that they found the self-service website user-friendly and fast. eGain’s web self-service solution allows Bell Aliant’s customers to get to the right answers through an interactive natural language Q&A. Bell Aliant expects this capability to help them easily surpass their 10% call deflection goal for the year.

“eGain Knowledge Agent has proved to be the single largest contributor to the operational efficiency that we have achieved in our contact centers,” explains Bell Aliant’s Mike Costello. “Having already deployed eGain’s knowledge solution within our Mobility and Broadband Divisions in both contact centers and for web selfservice, we are engaging in the process of rolling this solution out to our Repair Team. This solution could be applied to just about every aspect of our business— from service to even sales and other business functions through our intranet.”