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Customer Service Analytics Help Thomson Reuters Improve Customer Interactions and Remote Agent Performance

Doug Lang, senior vice president of customer success, Calabrio

A leading provider of business information services, Thomson Reuters’ products include highly specialized, information-enabled software and tools for legal, tax, accounting and compliance professionals combined with the world’s most global news service—Reuters.

Like most companies, Thomson Reuters shifted employees to remote working during the pandemic, including its staff of customer service team members. But with business still in full swing, the company continued to hire new contact center employees in its Tax & Accounting Professionals group. And, for the first time, managers were onboarding and training high volumes of new contact center agents who were fully remote.

To test the quality of the new remote onboarding and training process and its potential impact on business, Thomson Reuters managers decided to break down and analyze interaction and performance data to determine if there were areas of onboarding and training that needed to be adjusted.

They started by looking at customer service calls with long and multiple hold times to identify the reasons behind the call holds. Ultimately, understanding the root cause could help reduce or eliminate these types of holds, either through modified training or other changes to customer service, leading to better customer interactions and more productive agents.

Smart Data Analysis Uncovers Answers

Thomson Reuters’ secret weapon was its contact center analytics platform which was able to parse out the calls with long and multiple hold times so managers could understand why they were happening. Calabrio Analytics was used to identify which of the calls completed by new agents had long and/or multiple holds, and Calabrio Desktop Analytics revealed exactly how the agents handled these particular scenarios. The desktop analytics were particularly helpful, allowing managers to see every application, URL, or other resource each new agent accessed during the day. When combined with other metrics also gauging agent effectiveness, such as hold time, desktop analytics gave Thomson Reuters insights not available elsewhere.

The company analyzed data from a particular group of new agents participating in onboarding and product training while completely remote. Revealingly, managers discovered the new agents all maintained an average handle time that was significantly above target; and they tended to rely on other team members—instead of the proper resources—for the assistance they needed to answer customer questions while callers waited on hold.

This was a eureka moment for leaders because it pointed to specific agent actions that could easily be solved through modified onboarding and training. To resolve the issues, contact center managers built a revised virtual training program focused on troubleshooting and using the proper resources to efficiently find answers to customer questions.

"We suspected—then proved to be true—that Calabrio’s combination of quality analytics and desktop analytics would give us the important contact center insights we needed," said Jonathan Schaffer, Thomson Reuters’ contact center team leader.

Real-world Savings from Revised Training

Thomson Reuters’ new virtual training program allows its Tax & Accounting Professionals business unit to potentially save up to 3% of its contact center’s annual operating budget. In addition, contact center leaders witnessed a significant, measurable increase in the number of times new agents utilized programmer resources and additional critical thinking skills to answer customer questions. The average call time was reduced by 1.54 minutes and number of call holds per call was cut by 1.5% equating to an increase in customer satisfaction by 6.4%.

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