Mitchell: Excellence in the B2B Customer Experience

As anyone knows who’s ever filed an insurance claim or been hurt in an accident or at work, it can be a long and frustrating process, with a lot steps and back-and-forth. Or it used to be. In recent years, though, technology has made a huge difference, streamlining the whole process. That’s where Mitchell comes in: We bring together a wide variety of experts, technology solutions, networks, and partners to boost better claims outcome and restore lives.

Our business is complex because we have different business divisions, and our many contact centers are central to the services we provide. Because we’re in the business of providing medical expertise, technology solutions and support to our customers, we’re even more aware of how critical it is to have the right technology solutions and support for our own business.

The Mitchell Way

Although we’re primarily a B2B company, we’re also mindful of how everything impacts our customers’ customers. In the solutions and services we provide our business customers, we’re really helping them work with their customers so that they can process those claims as quickly, insuring that patients are guided to restore their lives after a challenging event. The Mitchell culture is one of innovation and passion for our work and of commitment to delivering better business outcomes for our clients and better personal outcomes for their customers. The Mitchell Way revolves around relationships: We care deeply about our customers and each other and foster personal connections through collaboration and teamwork. It may seem like an oxymoron, but it’s technology—being in the cloud on the CXone integrated CX platform—that enables our contact centers to deliver on our brand’s promises in responsive, personal ways in providing solutions that help customers help their customers.

The importance of the B2B customer experience

Although Mitchell has always been customer-centric and committed to the customer experience, we became focused on the customer to an even greater degree as we evolved from offering technical support as a software vendor to a very complex service provider.

If you’re a B2B company in any industry, you’ve probably noticed an increasing amount of attention paid to B2B CX—because it has the potential to be richer and more consequential than ever. Across the board, B2B CX has undergone what experts call “consumerization”— more customer-centric and an elevation of CX quality and importance. Even so, some companies may still neglect to apply the most basic principles of B2C CX to their business customers—but hopefully that’s changing.

This intensified interest in B2B CX has brought with it thought-provoking perspectives and commentary. For example, McKinsey & Co experts lay a great foundation in Improving Business-to-Business Customer Experience. The authors explain that “adopting a customer-centric mind-set is just as critical in B2B dealings as it is when serving retail customers…” but also that “players face special challenges that can trip them up.”

In Kellogg Insights from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, an article explores how businesses can “up their B2B game.” The author makes the case for not just focusing on solving your business customers’ problems but also for going beyond to anticipate and solve problems they aren’t even aware of yet.

And finally, there’s more food for thought from B2B International: Six Steps to B2B Customer Experience Excellence—six B2B CX pillars, ranging from being responsive and proactive to seamlessness and evolution.

The B2B contact center as customer connection

Mitchell has a lot of different kinds of contact centers-- upwards of 30 now. We started out as primarily technical support because we were primarily a software vendor. But over the years, we've grown into more of a service provider—many different contact centers providing different types of services to our customers—for example, bill review, nurse review, or telemedicine. And we've also grown immensely. We're have service teams in about 10 different countries working with partners, and even when we outsource toa BPO, we always put them all on NiCE and Salesforce®.

We’ve got sales teams that are primarily taking inbound calls and also outbound campaigns; support groups that are doing things like technical support for our software products; nurses reviewing bills, telephonic case managersand also general customer service teams that are taking payments or answering general questions. Regardless, all of our centers are committed to providing the same levels of exceptional CX and building relationships, all with shared objectives that include Improving efficiency, improving metrics, and reducing costs.

Visibility into the customer journey

We rely on some of the reporting to look at the customer. What's the journey with each call that they make to see how many touch points are there? How painful was it for them with the options on their menu? We can head off potential issues before they expand into something more. Before we had NiCE reporting tools, unless a customer called and complained about something, we didn't necessarily know that they were confused or bouncing around. Now the team can go in once a month and make sure things are flowing smoothly.We have that immediate real feedback from a technology standpoint as opposed to waiting until a customer complains about it.

Improving CX overall

Being in the cloud and on CXone has helped us improve the quality of the CX we provide. We’re more efficient and have reduced average handle time (AHT). Skills-based routing gets callers to the right agents the first time, greatly reducing the number of transfers. Reporting gives us actionable insights and metrics for our operations, many in real-time. We’re heavy users of Salesforce… and with NiCE’s Agent for Salesforce®, we’re able to more effectively “see” our customers who call in more effectively, immediately begin working with them and solving a problem or challenge they’re having. It gives agents the tools to excel and to do their best in helping customers.

We have many different focuses within our business, different business units, almost like working with multiple businesses. NiCE really pulls it all together, making it much more streamlined for the customer. They don't have to know that this is in this group and that's in that other group over there. Now to them, it's all Mitchell. It's really improved the customer interactions because we always want to make it easy to do business with us. And it’s definitely improved that from an agent perspective.

The heart of contact centers: Agents

It may seem obvious, but we know that happy agents make happy customers. It really does come across on the phone if I’m frustrated and working on a tool that “Ugh, I can't get what I need." The Mitchell Way applies to our employees’ experience, too: We want them to be empowered and challenged to learn, to have the right tools to do their jobs well—and most of all, feel satisfied that they are making a meaningful contribution.

Agent for Salesforce is one of those tools. It’s easy to use and immediately gives agents the customer information they need. They love using it. But it’s also is an empowering tool. An agent may take a call from people who say…”You know, I’m working with your product and I’m just frustrated a little…” The agent can now spend time on those types of calls—super high-value, building-relationships types of calls—as opposed to just having to tell a customer their payment is 30 days late.

With the Salesforce integration, there are the screen pops for the agent—I already know who you are. I have a list of all your previous interactions so I can see if you're calling back on something you called in on previously or if this is a new item. I can also see your history. So even if this is a new item, I can see if it's potentially even related to a past question. I can provide much more proactive service because I have a 360-degree view. It’s a whole lot easier than ‘Who are you? What's your name? Spell that again...’ And it makes the job more interesting for agents. We’ve seen significant improvement in first-call resolution, which is good for customers and good for us.

Agent for Salesforce: a variety of benefits

Personalization

Not all that long ago we just rolled out the new Agent [for Salesforce] for our whole repair team. It streamlines the way they do their jobs. When the customer calls in, the agent can say, "Hello, Joe's Body Shop." That’s not a small thing: Personalizing that way lets the customer know the agent is there to really take care of him and isn’t just taking call number 7 in in the queue.

Cost savings

Improving efficiency and reducing things like handle time also means cost savings. For one of our very large contact centers that has not used the Salesforce integration historically, we're implementing [Agent for Salesforce] with them for the first time. They do about a 100,000 calls a month—and growing, based on customer volume. Their average handle time is about eight minutes per call, and the goal is improving that by 20%. That would drop the cost per call from $2.30 down to about $1.00.

Just having the screen pop with the customer data alone will cut off up to a minute or minute and a half per call! And then the other thing is recording some of the information that will be collecting from the customer in the IVR and having that automatically pushed into Salesforce so that the agent doesn't have to retype it—it’s already captured. So it’s just saving time on every single call, which also means cost savings.

Flexibility, customizability

One of the best things for us has been with the Salesforce integration is depending on the team, they're using different types of information potentially to identify that caller. Definitely some use the ANI, but then there are others who ask agents to put in a claim number or an account ID for example. Having that flexibility to be able to leverage multiple types of information as opposed to only being able to use a phone number is key. All our centers are quite different, and they're providing different services, so being able to customize for each individual group that we're supporting is important.

Service integration, revenue generation

We’re bringing on new teams whose company was part of a gigantic, complex organization. 

They have a nurse triage service for workman’s comp that they provide to insurance companies, who in turn, sell it to companies like large retail stores. If something happens at work, the employee calls and speaks to nurse, and gets instructions—all customized to specific work sites.

Currently there is no integration between the phone system and their CRM tool. We'll be able to do the integration for that team, making it easier to immediately identify callers and provide the right instructions to them. This will strengthen what’s already a great service and ideally, enhance its revenue-producing potential.

Salesforce data integration

One big benefit for us of the Salesforce integration has been the ability to pass some of the information from the call directly into Salesforce so that data can be merged in with other information from Salesforce. It used to all be very separate: The stats were in one place, and the case data was in another. Trying to match them up and even figure out how many calls, especially in technical support, are taken to actually resolve an issue was difficult to get, because maybe when you called back the second or third time, the agent opened a new case instead of adding it to the existing case. With NiCE’s Salesforce integration, we can do that seamlessly. I can see that on average for the technical support calls, it takes three interactions as opposed to a single one. Or I can calculate my first-call resolution much more accurately than I could before.

What’s next?

We’re always looking for ways to improve the customer experience and strengthen those relationships. The flexibility of the cloud and CXone enable us to continue to do that—and to do it in a customizable way, based on the unique needs of each contact center and the services they provide. For some groups, we look at things like automating routine interactions like status calls by leveraging a chat bot, so customers can get basic information more quickly and agents can focus on helping customers in more meaningful ways. In fact, one group who is doing this is looking for up to a 40% reduction in their live agent calls.

We’re also looking at additional communications channels in some situations. One of our groups for the auto body shops is looking at leveraging chat and SMS. On the insurance side, because of regulations, security, and other restrictions, they’re much more likely for everything to be a phone or email. Besides that, it goes back to knowing our customers, what their needs are and why they’re calling us—and then providing the channel options for that situation. That increases their satisfaction and overall, it makes us more efficient, which, of course, also reduces costs, which will always be important.