NICENEWS : October 2004

Interview with Virginia Albanese, VP Service, FedEx Custom Critical

What makes your contact center unique?
Empowerment. Our agents take complex orders, verify available resources, coordinate directly with drivers, offer the best option, assign a truck, secure an aircraft and even give back money under certain circumstances. We're really more like an operations center.

Also, we have a very trustworthy environment. Agents work in tandem with customers, doing whatever is necessary to meet customers' needs. If we discover that something went wrong, we will do anything it takes to fix it. If a truck broke down, we transfer the freight to another unit or maybe use air transportation to make the deadline - at our expense.
Sometimes the entire process can take two or more workshifts to complete - so it's really important for us to be able to listen to calls and verify that information was taken correctly.

How did you first hear about NICE Perform?
Chris Files, our Quality Team facilitator, attended the 2003 NICE Summit and when she saw the demo said, 'hmmm, this would really help us.' Shortly after that we began testing the system as part of the NICE Perform beta.

You were an early user of the emotion detection and content analysis features of NICE Perform. What were some of the achievements?
We have used it all across the enterprise. We found that it's a great tool to improve driver satisfaction and retention, gauge effectiveness of sales and marketing promotions, uncover need for new services, help reduce days sales outstanding (DSO) and implement proactive issue resolution with customers.

Can you give us a specific example?
Let's take one of these issues - our contractors. We have 100% independent owner operators who work as the drivers for shipments, but we also had high turnover. This represented a very big cost factor (recruiting owner operators, establishing contractual agreements, obtaining permits for trucks, and more).

We were looking to understand a little bit better how we treat the contractors and how we can respond proactively when something is not being done correctly, without waiting for them to call us. Word spotting and emotion detection, can identify the contractors who have issues - maybe they thought something else was going to happen in a specific situation, or concerns have built up along an axis of time - and can help solve these issue and significant savings.

We just recently started using the NICE tools to aid in contractor retention and satisfaction, and it's amazing to see how well our proactive approach is working.

In addition, since drivers are also recruited over the phone, our recruiting team can learn from these cases, see how we can improve the recruiting discussion to make it more efficient for both parties, with shorter calls and more effective descriptions of the expectations from both sides.

How did you "sell" it to the rest of the enterprise?
Actually, we didn't need to do much of a campaign for other departments to begin using it. We just showed them what we could do with it inside the operational area, which I'm in charge of, and they came up with uses for NICE Perform themselves.

Today, IT is using NICE Perform to aid in the creation of new order-entry system, and training is using it to improve their focused quality training of new hires.

Even in our sales presentations we use NICE. When we have somebody come in, and we talk about what we do, just before we take them out into the operations center, we play back a couple of calls (usually that same customer's calls) and then show them what happens behinds the scene.

For both existing and prospective customers, a sample call is the best way to show them what happens before, during and after they place an order. If they can hear it, all of a sudden, it's real.

We also listen to calls during each monthly team meeting, and this is always a trigger for action.
We're just at the beginning of what we're going to do with NICE Perform. This is the most exciting and the most usable technology that we've implemented in the last few years, because we've gone outside and seen what you can do with this tool. If you open your eyes, the possibilities for this tool are endless.

Company Snapshot:

	An expedited transporter of premium freight(150 pounds and up), operating in the US, Canada and Europe. Sister company, FedExExpress, transports smaller packages.
	600 employees, over half of them agents in the operations centers.
	Majority of communications (customers placing orders, agents arranging deliveries with drivers) are done over the phone.
	Mostly business-to-business shipments, via ground (exclusive-use truck, door-to-door for each shipment) and air.