Supernova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Problem

Acxiom needed an innovative enterprise contact center platform with the tools to establish a strong culture of customer excellence and transform our company’s internal support experience. In our early days, my team relied on a legacy on-premises solution to manage the contact center. However, our customers’ expectations and culture had evolved and even though the contact center vendor we were using was well-known, their system was keeping us behind the times. We often felt like cavemen using fire and sticks while everyone else had the “easy” button. One of the problems was poor reporting, which made it difficult for my team to identify where to improve the associate experience. Running reports and seeing results on simple metrics, like average handle time, often took 24 hours, proving it difficult to respond to problems in real time. In addition, our agents lacked the tools to do their jobs effectively and our system generally impeded the agility we needed to keep up with customer expectations.

The Solution

For us to be successful, I needed to establish a culture of customer excellence at Acxiom. I began to explore solutions to offer our associates the experiences they expected and deserved. I didn’t see much of a difference between first-generation cloud vendors I was evaluating. I had a few items to check off my list, including finding a platform that integrated with ServiceNow and our enterprise messaging tool Slack.

It wasn’t until I attended Talkdesk’s conference, Opentalk 2017, that I got my first taste of a truly innovative contact center platform that could deliver the tools my agents needed and amazing experiences my customers deserved. The event was a major game changer. The “plug and play” capabilities with AppConnect, Talkdesk’s innovation ecosystem, stood out as a means of adding exciting new functionality to my contact center—agility I wasn’t able to achieve with my previous provider or anyone else I evaluated.

The results

The idea of ‘customer excellence’ is not something we had, or even had the capability to provide, prior to Talkdesk. Establishing agent quality standards was impossible with our old system. By moving away from our legacy Avaya system, we can now leverage Talkdesk’s real-time reports, integrations with top business tools and innovative AppConnect partners to improve our customer’s experience.

For example, we’ve implemented quality management tools & programs to help accomplish our customer experience goals. I’ve set up a streamlined QM operation with my team. AppConnect partner PlayVox allows us to evaluate, coach and train agents. This new process has significantly improved how agents execute their job and serve associates at the company.

One of my first business priorities was to integrate our company messaging solution, Slack, into the Talkdesk platform. With Talkdesk for Slack I was able to create a “help bot” that lives within our “IT Help Me” channel in Slack. When an associate types “!help” into the channel, the next available agent in Talkdesk is identified and becomes connected with the associate. This has significantly cut down on the amount of wait time associates experience since they don’t need to deal with the hassle of an internal IVR menu. In addition, Talkdesk’s ServiceNow integration has streamline my IT service management operations.

Metrics

Access to Talkdesk’s advanced reports have enabled me to establish and measure performance on new key metrics, such as SLA. We launched Talkdesk with an SLA of answering 90% of calls in 30 seconds or less. My team has been able to outperform that metric and achieve a 97% SLA with our robust customer excellence program. The integration of our company messaging tool, Slack, within the Talkdesk platform enables support reps to immediately respond to customer requests. We’re very proud of the fact that we’ve been able to increase first level resolution to upwards of 80% of all interactions.

The Technology

Talkdesk Enterprise Contact Center Platform empowers companies to make customer experience a competitive advantage. With enterprise class performance and consumer-like ease of use, over 1,400 innovative companies rely on Talkdesk to power their customer interactions.

Disruptive Factor

We didn’t have any implementation or adoption challenges. We migrated to Talkdesk in just 45 days and had a working test environment in 36 hours. We had zero issues. During the transition to Talkdesk, training and onboarding the team was simple and straightforward. They were really happy with it. We had a Talkdesk Customer Success Manager and, frankly, an entire team was totally dedicated to our success. It took roughly two-to-three days for agents to get fully up and running.

We totally changed the status quo for our organization. When we asked ourselves what success looks like for us, we embraced the motto ‘Make Acxiom an easier place to work’. We recognized a need to change our entire culture from the top down to create a "Culture of Excellence." We believe that in order to serve our external customers, a cultural shift had to take place to better serve and support our employees. Before we embarked on this journey our customer experience looked like a cry for help. Talkdesk helped us change the way we help our teams get things done right—and done "right now." We take pride in making it easy for Acxiom employees to do their jobs and serve our customers. Now our programs start with knowing the expectations of our customers and meeting them where they are, rather than having them come to us. This is providing an excellent customer experience and that has a direct, positive bearing on CSAT.

Shining Moment

We have about 4,000 global employees that at any given point may need support. Talkdesk has given us the ability to exceed a 97% SLA, providing a differentiated, personalized support experience. Our team has been given the team nickname “Anything Anytime” or in short, the “The A–Team,” and we’re proud of our reputation throughout the company of offering the best support experience possible.