23rd January 2012
CNA Surety
Productive Workforce™ helps improve overall performance and enhance customer interactions
The Company
CNA Surety Corporation is the largest publicly traded surety company in the United States. Through its principal subsidiary, Western Surety Company, CNA Surety provides surety and fidelity bonds in all 50 states through a combined network of approximately 37,000 independent agencies. The company operates one contact centre with 40 agents managing customer service and sales calls in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
The Business Challenge
CNA Surety was managing approximately 3,400 calls a day in its contact centre and business was growing. Previously, CNA Surety was recording calls with a Dictaphone machine, which resulted in poor call quality. Additionally, supervisors did not have an easy way to share recordings with agents to support coaching and training programs. The company realised it needed more advanced quality monitoring and recording technology to ensure consistency across its agents.
During the business growth, the company also noticed that service levels were slipping occasionally. For example, some customers would call the contact centre more than once to see if they would get consistency in agent service and answers. After some investigation, CNA Surety found that the service was affected by desktop distractions, such as agents responding to emails. Additionally, agents were not always properly staffed at peak call times.
CNA Surety needed an application that could offer both advanced workforce management and quality management capabilities to improve service levels, staffing, and training processes.
The Solution
CNA Surety searched for a contact centre vendor that had a strong reputation in workforce optimisation, and turned to contact centre managers at other companies for references and software recommendations. The company evaluated three vendors before selecting Aspect and the capabilities of Productive Workforce, a unified communications (UC) application for the contact centre that leverages Aspect workforce optimisation capabilities.
Productive Workforce unites workforce management, performance management, and quality management to help companies optimise resource utilisation and adopt a continuous improvement culture. Specifically, CNA Surety implemented the workforce management and quality management capabilities. Within Productive Workforce, workforce management provides essential forecasting, scheduling and tracking functionality for single-skill, multi-skilled, and multi-channel contact centre environments. And, quality management evaluates and analyses agent interactions and captures real-time customer feedback to deliver insights into business issues and agent performance.
Results
Aspect implemented the UC application capabilities and spent a week at the CNA Surety contact centre training agents and supervisors. The company is seeing several benefits from using Productive Workforce™.
CNA Surety now regularly monitors call recordings and is seeing improved service levels. Its agents are regularly meeting or exceeding the company’s 90/10 service level goal, even though the call volumes are increasing. CNA Surety heavily relies on these metrics, along with call recordings, to measure agent progress for monthly coaching and feedback sessions and year-end performance evaluations. The company also utilises quality management capabilities in legal situations when it needs to listen to recordings to address customer issues and inquiries.
It uses the workforce management capabilities for forecasting call volumes and scheduling agents. Now, CNA Surety can easily staff agents according to forecasted call volumes, and also use this insight for hiring purposes for the contact centre. As a result, schedule adherence, availability and average call handle time are all improving.
With Productive Workforce, CNA Surety is seeing improved job satisfaction among its contact centre agents. In addition to very low turnover rates, the agents have responded positively to the regular coaching sessions and scheduling tools. For the future, CNA Surety is looking at implementing the performance management capabilities of Productive Workforce to align key performance indicators with business goals and enhanced customer focus.
Solution
· Productive Workforce™ capabilities
· Quality management capabilities
· Workforce management capabilities
Results
· Met the 90/10 service level goal, even with increased call volumes
· Improved schedule adherence, availability, and average call handle time
· Improved agent job satisfaction
We pride ourselves on delivering the best customer care possible. With Productive Workforce, we have the capabilities to ensure high quality customer interactions and consistency across the board. Overall, the whole experience in working with Aspect has been great.”
Larry Kasten
Assistant Vice President,
Business Services
CNA Surety
“Having these capabilities combined together from one vendor into Productive Workforce has helped in deployment and maintenance costs, in addition to increasing agent productivity and improving customer care. Clearly, implementing a UC application from Aspect could help any company hit the ground running with a UC strategy.”
Larry Kasten
Assistant Vice President,
Business Services
CNA Surety
