The 2014 Implementation Awards
Customer: Nautilus
Vendor: CallMiner
Product: CallMiner Eureka call monitoring, recording, and speech analytics
Nautilus started out more than 40 years ago with one signature product, a revolutionary strength-building machine for home-fitness enthusiasts. Today it has evolved into a company with a diverse family of strength and cardio products sold under the Nautilus, Bowflex, Schwinn, and Universal brands through both retail and direct channels. Its home fitness equipment can be found in millions of households around the world.
At its Vancouver, WA, headquarters, the company employs a customer care team with more than 30 agents who take calls relating to order status, troubleshooting, and customer service. Between April and November, those agents average 900 calls per day. During its peak season, from December through March, the average daily volume is 1,500 calls. CallMiner's Eureka call monitoring, recording, and speech analytics product helps the company manage them all.
Nautilus also leverages insights from CallMiner's speech analytics system for cost savings and process improvements. CallMiner Eureka uses conversational analytics data pulled from phone, email, chat, social media, and other sources to reveal unique insights into the communications between Nautilus and its customers. The system's automated analysis of multiple channels allows Nautilus to convert all customer interactions into a consistent format. This, in turn, allows for easier evaluation and comparison of agent and platform performance, as well as key call center metrics, for a more complete picture of how the company and its customers interact. Eureka also helps determine root contact causes through topic analysis and automatic outlier identification.
Nautilus began implementing Eureka in November 2012, with the rollout taking several weeks to complete.
"We'd been looking at speech analytic platforms for about three years prior. CallMiner was always our number one choice," recalls Jennifer Buffaloe, senior manager of customer support at Nautilus. "We knew we had to evolve and continue to make improvements and needed more than simple word or word-group search functionality. We needed a well-rounded suite of tools, and CallMiner provided exactly what we were looking for."
In the time since the implementation, Nautilus has seen improvements in marketing intelligence, sales performance, compliance adherence, and operational efficiency. Among the operational efficiencies have been reductions in average handling time, abandon rates, transfers between agents, and head count. The number of calls answered within 20 seconds has increased by 196 percent. The company has also seen a 17 percent reduction in talk time, a 36 percent reduction in call abandonment, an 11 percent reduction in transfers between agent groups, an 8 percent reduction in head count, and a 3 percent reduction in payroll.
"We could have found other ways to achieve these ROI efficiencies, [but] it would have taken much more time and resources to accomplish," Buffaloe says. "We are able to move faster with CallMiner because we can make informed decisions based on good data."
Without speech analytics, it would have taken weeks or months to perform a root cause analysis on call drivers, she says, noting that Nautilus in the past largely relied on a manual call monitoring and grading system. With that system, it was very difficult and costly to get a sample size that could provide enough valuable data.
"Prior to using the platform, statistics such as abandonment rate and service levels were just numbers," Buffaloe says. "The marriage between CallMiner metadata and standard call center reporting helps us analyze business questions, create efficient processes, and drive operational excellence."
That led Nautilus to draft a consistent call flow process and retrain agents to more efficiently handle calls based on the company's systems, philosophy, and policies. As new processes or procedures are introduced, Buffaloe and her team can determine where they best fit into the flow.
Based on its current success, Nautilus plans to expand its use of Eureka. "The possibilities are endless," Buffaloe states. "Truly, the Eureka tool has exceeded our expectations, and we continue to find unexpected ways to use it."
Customer care agents and supervisors are adding myEureka, CallMiner's full performance management suite, to more effectively manage their performance. Nautilus also plans to start using CallMiner more aggressively with its sales teams. "We can't wait for what the outcome of that will be," Buffaloe says. "We've only scratched the surface on the program's capabilities. Whether we are looking to drive efficiency or increase sales, we know that CallMiner can help us make informed decisions and monitor our efforts."
The results
Some of Nautilus' efficiency gains since implementing CallMiner Eureka include the following:
- a 17 percent reduction in talk time, resulting in a 196 percent increase in the number of calls answered within 20 seconds;
- a 36 percent reduction in abandonment rates;
- an 11 percent reduction in transfers between agent groups; and
- an 8 percent reduction in head count and a 3 percent reduction in payroll.
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