CUSTOMER PROFILE
THE CHALLENGE
Nimble is a collections-focused business with a call center operation consisting of 1,500 agents in six locations spread between its headquarters in South Africa as well as Botswana, Kenya, and Namibia. The company has experienced extremely high growth since its launch in 2009, and as a result Nimble sees extraordinarily high call volume. A single day can see as many as 350,000 calls initiated.
With such high volume both in aggregate and on a per-agent basis, Nimble recognized that conventional call review techniques were not nearly up to the task. A conventional team manager review of a handful of calls per week did not provide Nimble with an adequate sampling of the variety of call outcomes and experiences.
Nimble identified a strong need to understand how agents were performing, on both an individual and collective basis. The overall business goal is to improve collections for every agent, while remaining on the right side of regulators, and operating with efficiency and focus.
THE SOLUTION
Selection and implementation took place in 2017, with three months of implementation, one month of onsite training conducted by NiCE, and three months of internal training and rollout planning supported remotely by NiCE.
Working with NiCE, Nimble designed analytic queries to target five areas of agent activity:
- Compliance
- Risk Management
- Customer Service
- Profitability (Effectiveness)
- Efficiency
Nimble’s agents can now self-monitor their performance, instead of waiting for team manager reports and reviews. And because the solution rates agents on multiple dimensions of activity, agents have a comprehensive view of their performance and a more granular understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, rather than focusing on a single measure like revenue or call volume. Agents can view how they are performing relative to their peers and, can click into their evaluations and see the phrases they should consider using more or less often in order to improve performance in a given area.
THE RESULTS
Nexidia Analytics immediately provided Nimble with more accurate categorization of call activities and outcomes than agent notes had provided. The solution also helped Nimble navigate rapid shifts to work-from-home status, making it easier to keep agents connected and aligned despite working across a half-dozen contact centers and many at-home locations. After early successes identifying agent behaviors and patterns, Nimble invested time and energy in connecting those insights with positive changes to those behaviors. Although some agents responded simply to the dashboard reporting showing how they were performing relative to peers, gaps remained.
To instill culture change on a wider level, Nimble first developed a comprehensive skills framework based on Nexidia Analytics insights into the key areas of agent activity tracked by the solution such as compliance, profitability and risk management. The next step was to design online coaching content and micro-courses based on those analytics insights and associated discoveries about the key behaviors of high-performing agents in each discipline. This content highlights techniques and phrases shown to promote improvement in one or more of the five targeted areas of agent activity. In just nine months, Nimble increased agent adoption of the highlighted techniques and phrases by 50%.
As a result, Nimble is able to both drive agent change more quickly and measure the impact of new training. In the past, communicating a new skill or introducing a new training focus could take two months or more to show any measurable result. Today, both the changes and the measurements are nearly instant from the rollout of a new training module. Agents are improving profitability as a result, while learning to work more efficiently and waste less time on calls unlikely to produce results. The increased focus on compliance helps Nimble support its goals of aggressively pursuing collections opportunities while reducing exposure to legal and ombudsman action as well as negative media exposure. Since implementing Nexidia Analytics, Nimble has reduced its noncompliant call volume by more than 80%.
