Client background

•  Client name or descriptor – One of the largest US based telecom companies
•  Industry type - Telecommunications
•  Products or Services or Core Business – Various telecommunication offerings spanning several use cases
•  Geography or Areas of operations – USA
•  Annual revenue: Over $100 billion

About the Net Promoter Score®

The Net Promoter Score® (or widely known as NPS) is an internationally recognized system that measures customer experience and is used to predict customer growth. A survey is circulated among customer respondents who rate the offerings of a company on a scale of 1 to 10.

Respondents who have given a score of 9 and 10 are called Promoters and the ones who have given a score between 1 to 6 are called Detractors. The NPS is determined as the difference between the percentage of promoters and the percentage of detractors.

Challenge

The client’s customer care hotlines receive several calls on a daily basis pertaining to queries and concerns about the client’s offerings. After each call, the NPS survey is triggered and the customers are encouraged to offer feedback on the satisfaction level of their call experience on a scale from 1 to 10.

For more than a year, the client registered NPS scores (both overall and transactional) that trended in the negative region, with more unhappy customers (detractors) than happy ones (promoters).

Wipro was onboarded on March 2020 to handle calls from customers regarding order status, complaints or queries about their products and services, and schedule technician visits if necessary.

Solution

Wipro conducted a root-cause analysis of the client’s value chain and determined the following reasons for the negative NPS values:

• Lack of an overall process framework
• No response from sales teams from the client’s side on critical queries
• Delay in provisioning (order entry and order management)
• Issues in sales process and pricing methodology
• E-mail communication issues
• High AHT values

Specific actions included the following:

•  A key detractor is the lack of understanding of the voice of the customer due to signal issues. In these cases, a call-back mechanism gets triggered to gain accurate understanding of customer issues.
•  Sometimes the customer issues cannot be solved directly by the agent speaking to them. In such cases, the customer’s call is put on hold and the agent uses this time to search for engineers or SMEs to aid them. However, putting calls on hold raises the risk of customer dissatisfaction, especially if the call is placed on hold for a long time. This challenge was addressed by optimizing the process’s value chain by reducing the need for call holds. The agents were able to get immediate help for exceptional issues by proactively involving engineers/SMEs in these calls.
• A team was set up for escalations (called the ‘Level 2 team’) in case issues could not be solved by the initial line of agents, engineers, and SMEs.
  
•  Proper communication and refresher training programs were set up to address detractor-based issues.
  
• A prompt feedback mechanism was set up to aid the client’s sales team with any sales and provisioning issues.
  
• Since our agents worked from home (due to the pandemic), there was a risk of background noise leading to customer satisfaction. Measures were taken to reduce it by modifying the ‘service scape’ of the agents at home  
• Mystery callers (mock calls) were used to gauge the performance levels of all agents in real-time scenarios

Business impact

Figure 1 shows how the client’s NPS scores majorly trended negative for over a year. The score boosted up to 20% once Wipro was onboarded on March 2020.

Figure 1: Client’s NPS scores prior to engagement with Wipro

After Wipro’s intervention, the NPS scores continued to trend positively in the double digits, while reaching a peak at 84% on July 2021.

Figure 2: Client’s NPS scores post intervention by Wipro

Overall, we positively impacted the client in the following ways:

•   Boosted NPS from an all-time low of -68% to an all-time high of +71% (A shift of 139%)
•   Reduced in overall AHT by 27% which helped save the FTE count by 18%
•   Created additional business opportunities worth $25 million
•   Facilitated significant gain in the client’s reputation while protecting their brand