Helping Utility firm E take QA and compliance to the next level

How UK energy supplier E grew its annual call center quality scores by 18% with evaluagent’s Quality Assurance platform.

• Industry

  Utilities

• Size

  75-125 seat call center operation

• Result

  18% year-on-year improvement in call center quality scores

• Result

  Number of calls evaluated per day up 100% on average

Introduction

Based in Birmingham, E (Gas & Electricity) is a UK-owned energy supplier with around 300,000 customers across England, Wales, and Scotland. The company is positioned as Britain’s best prepayment energy provider, and its activities are focused on keeping costs down so its customers pay less.

E is committed to ensuring that it always offers the highest level of customer service while, at the same time, recognizing that when its prepayment customers do get in contact they can often be frustrated – particularly over the last year with energy prices increasing.

Tracy James, Quality Standards Manager at E acknowledges that this places an increased focus on the role of the company’s contact center agents who provide frontline support for customers. “Our people need to strike the right balance between resolving customer issues while also ensuring that they have the right pathways to help them maintain their energy supply. That’s why having an effective QA approach in place is critical for the E business.”

Challenges

From a QA perspective, the E quality team’s approach requires the monitoring of customer calls for both service delivery and risk management. Tracy states: “We break the process down into five categories – Call Opening/Closure, Identification and Verification, Agent Interaction, Problem Solving and Resolution, and finally Systems and processes…..all these elements serve well to cover Risk and Customer Service.

“Around four years ago I was asked to take over the quality and compliance parts of our call center operations, it was clear that we were still approaching the task in a largely manual way,” Tracy explained. “Leaving aside the time and cost implications of managing the process with spreadsheets, using Excel also didn’t give us the control we needed to easily calibrate calls and create a more rounded, dashboard view of our overall performance. Right away I identified we needed a comprehensive QA and performance management approach that could give us a more structured way to evaluate, coach, and improve our agent performance.”

Gaining control with evaluagent

E ended up selecting evaluagent as its QA, coaching, and feedback platform, and that turned out to be a great choice for Tracy, particularly given the increased number of calls being handled in E’s call center.

Bringing all these elements into one view was what had been missing for Tracy and her quality team. “In order to absolutely support our agents, we needed to have a full picture from a business perspective of where we needed to focus our energies,” she explained. “For example, if you find that one person’s struggling with something it’s rare that they’re going to be the only one. Before we had to trawl through up to a hundred spreadsheets for each of our agents to try and determine if there was a pattern – and that was clearly a limiting factor on QA effectiveness. Now, with evaluagent in place, we’ve got much more control, and this kind of activity can be carried out at the touch of a button.”

evaluagent’s ability to provide E’s quality team with a comprehensive view across both agent performance and quality evaluation means the team can quickly prioritize what needs attention, and track QA activity against key E business KPIs. “This improved level of productivity is critical, particularly as agent headcount increases through E’s winter ramp-up.”

Clear productivity improvements

Before deploying evaluagent, Tracy’s quality team members were typically able to evaluate between eight and nine selected customer calls each day. Since using evaluagent, however, this has really ramped up, with the quality team now able to process and score 17 calls each per day – effectively taking individual call evaluation times down from 45 minutes each to between 20 and 30 minutes per call.

While QA productivity benefits are already delivering clear benefits in terms of cost and time, there’s also a powerful knock-on effect for both agents and quality team members. “Because our evaluators are listening to and scoring more calls, they’re becoming more expert and there’s much less requirement to go back and listen to calls again for confirmation. We’ve got to the stage now that our evaluation team has become much more confident and comfortable with the process – they’re even coming to me now and asking for extra calls to score!

“We’re also freeing up time so we can look at other aspects of the process, such as monitoring payments that have been made on the system to customers,” explained Tracy. “And from a personal perspective, the efficiencies that evaluagent has helped unlock from our regular calibration sessions have helped to release around 5-6 hours each week from my schedule that has allowed me to spend much more time working on other projects such as liaising more closely with our quality operation in South Africa.”

Successful QA contributing directly to an improved quality performance

evaluagent has helped to make a huge difference for E’s QA team in instilling new levels of confidence and capability into the process. “Our team members aren’t just sitting there hammering out call after call after call. Instead, they’re systematically getting their timings better, they’re looking more effective, and picking out important call elements more quickly. This has resulted in not only more coherent call assessments but also much greater consistency in terms of our weekly calibration sessions. Thanks to the QA framework that evaluagent provides, we’re now collectively much clearer and more concise – and that’s translating directly into how our agents have responded to feedback,” explained Tracy.

For the period January 1st to the 24th of July this year, the E call center achieved a quality score of 83.7% – that’s almost 18% higher than for the same period in 2022.

“It’s great that we’ve been able to demonstrate how a sustained focus on quality has translated directly into a significant improvement in our call center quality scores,” added Tracy. “Our team managers can see the difference, while increasingly clear and concise scorecard evaluations mean that our agents know exactly what’s expected of them – and they’re delivering!”

Confirming the value of evaluagent for E

E’s Quality and Compliance team had an opportunity to assess the benefits that deploying evaluagent had brought to its operations recently when the company decided to install a next-generation 8×8 cloud contact center platform to handle its telephony requirements. With the 8×8 software also including a quality component, the IT team recommended working with this rather than the Quality and Compliance team’s standalone evaluagent solution.

“While this made sense from a basic cost perspective, we were reluctant to lose the control, improved performance, and proven operational benefits that the evaluagent software had already enabled for our team,” explained Tracy. “We put together a business case to retain the tool, and I’m pleased to say it was convincing enough for us to stay with evaluagent. We looked carefully at where evaluagent made a real difference for us, and it became clear that two areas were key: the software’s in-depth capabilities and its powerful visualizations. Features like the appeals process for team leaders, the ability to add and remove staff, and control over admin rights are all invaluable to our function.

Quality is visual with evaluagent

“This process also highlighted the importance of the very visual nature of the evaluagent platform,” she continued. “For me, quality is visual. If I’ve got a call and it’s green across the board, or if it’s red, then I know exactly where I am. That’s what I get with evaluagent – an immediate visual awareness of performance. And that scales. I can quickly scan through multiple calls or multiple agents and pick up valuable insights quickly. evaluagent also offers a third option – DP (for Development Pass) – and that tells me that things are nearly OK and that we just need to do some focused coaching to turn those scores into a pass. It’s very practical details like this that confirm that evaluagent is a solution that’s been designed by people who live and breathe contact center excellence.”

Future for E and evaluagent

evaluagent will continue to play an important role in supporting E’s QA process, particularly as the company’s business continues to grow. A greater focus on compliance reporting as part of regulatory frameworks – such as the FCA’s Consumer Duty regulation – will also see evaluagent continuing to play a strong role.

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