Exemplary Customer Service

Outperforming Expectations for Consumer Electronics Giant

GC Services has provided customer service for a large consumer electronics company for more than fourteen years. The pilot program involved us handling dedicated agents to provide customer support. We implemented best practices garnered through our experience in delivering an exceptional customer experience, which resulted in our agents outperforming expectations in After-Call Work, Hold Time, and Average Handle Time.

Each month, agent results are compared to everyone in their network, where incentives are awarded to the provider that is ranked best in performance, based on CSAT survey results. Our agent-centric management approach focuses on weekly and monthly contests, focus groups, and extra coaching as needed. “We push the 3 E’s on every call: Empathy, Engagement and product Excitement,” the manager in charge of the project comments. “We want every customer interaction to be memorable.” We firmly believe that with proper training, available coaching, and focus on the customer, we are able to deliver a better experience the first time, which prevents repeat calls and enables our agents to handle more customers per shift.  Despite having several competitors, GC Services consistently ranks among the top vendors earning a disproportionate share of the available incentive dollars, which are passed on to our agents and supervisors, as they are the ones achieving the performance.

Our focus on delivering exceptional service the first time includes the development of a program we call FCR Homework. Each week, we provide a packet to each agent listing their individual customer call-backs. Agents are then required to research why the customers called back, what questions were asked, and how the customer’s issue was resolved. This homework assignment has proven to help educate agents on how to better deliver service the first time and prevent repeat calls. We shared this practice in a client best practices meeting, which resulted in the program being adopted universally and ultimately helped improve their other sites FCR rates.

Because of our flexible scheduling model, we successfully meet the unique challenges of this company’s peak season, which occurs every September as new products become available. In the past few years, we have been called upon to double and quadruple the number of steady-state agents, and ramp each year to cover the increased volume and then rapidly trend down through agent re-assignment to other projects, agent upgrade opportunities, and natural attrition.

To accomplish this increase, in May of every year, our managers submit a ramp plan to the client, as all new agents need to be trained and ready to answer calls by the first week of September. The plan details what the projected agent headcount will be each week, and outlines the training schedules. Once the plan is approved, our HR team begins setting up virtual interviews with applicants. In the most recent year, eight trainers conducted classes, with six classes occurring simultaneously in order to ensure all temporary agents were fully trained in time. When managed properly, we are able to reassign agents, offering diversity in the daily job duties for the impacted agents, promotional opportunities and a seasonal job for those agents enrolled in higher education. We have found a way to effectively maintain our strongest agents while simultaneously exceeding the expectations of our client through performance and cost savings. 

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