CUSTOMER PROFILE
Open Network Exchange (ONE) specializes in technology and customer care solutions for the travel and hospitality industries. Reviewing a key relationship with a major cruise line partner uncovered several opportunities for improvement. ONE, a leader in innovative solutions, explored ways to enhance customer satisfaction and guest retention using AI technology. With Enlighten AI solutions, ONE can evaluate agent analytics to determine areas of opportunity and ensure guests are provided with a thorough customer experience and a decrease in call escalations. By offering guests a superior customer experience, ONE observed an increase in post-purchase transactions occurring on a guest's self-service portal, demonstrating how guests are feeling empowered to modify their vacation experience without the need to call an agent. Enlighten AI provides robust reporting to the supervisors saving them around 4-5 hours per week on monitoring their team’s performance.
01 THE BEFORE
A distant view of agent performance
ONE manages complex customer service processes for travel and leisure clients. For a major cruise brand, ONE helps consumers book flights and hotels, manage onboard activities, post-cruise travel, and more. At the start of the relationship with NiCE, ONE’s quality assurance processes were entirely manual with a team of 45 supervisors selecting calls to screen based on total length and other administrative factors, with little to no insight into the actual content of the call, or overall trends for each agent’s behavior.
With limited visibility into call activity, supervisors primarily focused on compliance, sales targets, and surface assessments of agent professionalism. The manual review processes limited the supervisors’ time to deliver customized coaching, or to recognize agents with consistently high and exemplary performance. ONE also observed that a high volume of calls reaching live agents had little to no value-added potential - upwards of 30% of calls were from existing customers who simply wanted to make an installment payment on a previous purchase.
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
Parting the clouds
While evaluating a major client relationship, ONE realized that limited visibility into their interactions was negatively impacting customer experience, efficiency, and revenue. “Monitoring less than one percent of total interactions didn’t give us the full picture of the customer journey,” said Alexandria Doucet, ONE’s Senior Manager of Quality Analytics. “In the travel industry there are so many different elements of the relationship. And knowing how our guests are being treated and how to better serve them connects directly to how we earn revenue.”
ONE wanted to improve customer experience, create more opportunities to make targeted up-sell and crosssell offers when customers reach live agents, and direct more post-purchase transactions to self-service options. The company set a goal to resolve at least half of the most common post-purchase inquiries through automation. With these optimizations in mind, ONE also sought a new toolset to engage with agents and optimize their schedules.
03 THE SOLUTION
Efficient and effective insights from every contact on a single platform
ONE made it a priority to implement new software solutions to gain more insights into existing purchases to get the most out of every caller interaction. “We are really a software technology company at heart, and that means we should have the best software technology on our side to offer to our partners,” Doucet said.
Implementing NiCE CXone gave the organization an immediate upgrade in call recording, review, and analytics capabilities, and NiCE Workforce Management made it easier to staff to caller demand and to unify leadership and agents on a common platform with shared data and insights. From the CXone platform, ONE implemented Enlighten, NiCE’s AI purpose-built for CX, to add next-generation insights into their customer experience. One use case for Enlighten is to automate insights from customer interactions across ONE’s global network of over 1,000 agents, which unlocks the ability to correlate specific agent behaviors with higher customer sentiment ratings, in turn providing a datadriven roadmap for performance improvement.
With the Interaction Analytics AutoDiscovery feature, ONE surfaces key topics and relationships across the entire organization, while also providing visualizations of volume, sentiment, handling time, and other relevant trends. “Our implementation with NiCE gave us the 360-degree view of the customer journey we weren’t able to understand when we only monitored a small fraction of our calls,” Doucet said.
To improve digital experiences, ONE implemented Enlighten Autopilot. The conversational AI solution handles a variety of inquiries previously referred to live agents, particularly those that are post-purchase transactions that were previously increasing call volumes.
04 THE RESULTS
Meeting and exceeding targets for stronger customer relationships
By expanding their contact center insights, ONE achieved several targets for more effective and efficient interactions. Overall call volume has been reduced by 30%, with 20% fewer call escalations. Using another Enlighten solution that was previously deployed, supervisors were able to establish a new coaching model that emphasizes specific categories and soft-skill behaviors on a per agent basis.
The discovery tools save an average of four to five hours per supervisor per week. Now, supervisors spend more time working directly with agents or addressing other areas for contact center improvement. A recent initiative identified some agents misspeaking about a similarly named competitor, enabling ONE to take quick corrective action.
Enlighten Autopilot now resolves the installmentpayment calls ONE had sought to reduce and has substantially exceeded the 50% self-service resolution goal. To date, Enlighten Autopilot has successfully deflected 76% of payment call volume. A key differentiator in ONE’s self-service strategy is how they are leveraging Enlighten XO (Experience Optimization) to learn from their conversational data to identify customer intents, utterances, and optimal resolution workflows - it’s this data that drives even greater effectiveness with Autopilot. “We knew that leveraging Enlighten XO would automate various payment processes and deflect calls,” said Ryan Romero, Senior Vice President of Global Technology Strategy and Innovation at Open Network Exchange. “But I wasn’t expecting to exceed our goals! Enlighten AI has fundamentally transformed our company’s operations.”
05 THE FUTURE
More AI enhancements and performance improvements
ONE will continue to widen its range of agent insights to further expand and refine its agent assessment program. A key shift will be to combine Customer Satisfaction scores with contact center KPIs to provide a more comprehensive understanding of each agent’s performance and contributions.
The ONE team also plans to significantly expand the use of AI to improve the customer experience, including implementing NiCE Enlighten Copilot to provide more efficient and informed real-time assistance to agents.
