Automate and optimize contact center operations for a big impact

Contact centers represent a key touchpoint for brands—often at an especially critical time when the customer relationship is stressed—but these interactions are notoriously difficult to assess in real time. Data silos, departmental ownership that limits visibility, and the technological challenge of analyzing voice recordings have made it difficult to draw insight from the contact center experience.

By collecting data from contact center interactions and conversations, brands can find areas in need of improvement. Extracting rich insights about customer satisfaction will shed light on customer churn, competitive intelligence, service issues, agent performance, and campaign effectiveness.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at how one QSR brand automated and optimized contact center operations for big impact.

CKE uncovers the need to prioritize the call center experience

CKE Restaurants, parent company of Carl’s Jr.® and Hardee’s®, was managing customer and employee inquiries through a third-party contact center—a strategy that proved to be an expensive solution for addressing reported issues and an ineffective path to developing meaningful insights.

The existing program was set up with 225 different categorizations for customer contacts and a complicated framework that made it hard to efficiently evaluate and address customer issues.

CKE knew to economize operations and uncover meaningful insights, it needed to address the use of third-party customer contact management, a complicated issue management catalog, and data that wasn’t reaching its potential.

CKE creates call center optimization action plan

With help from its SMG team, CKE implemented the following changes to its experience management program:

Streamlined operations: CKE began collecting digital customer feedback and reduced its 225 existing customer contact types to 15 primary categories, making for a more efficient process that was easier for customers and employees to navigate.

Improved accuracy: By moving from a contact center to an intuitive, always-on digital feedback form, CKE allowed customers to categorize issues and directly communicate with the system, resulting in faster resolution and less labor overall.

Centralized programs: Customer feedback, in-platform case management, + real-time alerts were combined in one platform, eliminating inefficiencies and allowing for a more holistic view of the customer experience.

Distributed feedback: With more customer feedback data readily accessible in smg360®, actionable feedback to franchisees increased 400% and included celebration and recognition alerts to highlight positive customer interactions.

CKE drives significant results + improvements to the call center experience

Since implementing a system optimized for automation, customer response, and data visibility, CKE:

• Eliminated the need for an external call center, leading to a six-figure cost savings annually
• Reallocated a full-time employee to focus on other critical initiatives
• Automated more than 80% of customer inquiries, improving labor allocation
• Reduced the average daily call volume by 65%

What’s next for CKE’s contact center experience?

To further increase efficiency in its customer experience management system, CKE service agents will use SMG’s digital comment card system to easily capture feedback from customer voicemails to add to the stream of digital customer feedback.

The brand also plans to use the smg360 platform to help agents provide customers with case status updates in real time for interactions spanning multiple contact events, allowing for a more efficient and consistent customer experience.

Use your contact center to build better customer connections

Delivering a seamless, cross-channel experience has gone from ideal to mandatory—and the pressure is on for your contact center to provide friendly service and prompt resolution to deliver an optimal experience.

SMG helps brands measure the contact center experience by making it easier to integrate reporting with other CX channels, monitor and coach agents on key performance measures, and close the loop efficiently and effectively with real-time service alerts.

And our AI-powered speech analytics gives brands the ability to capture and analyze each call center interaction, helping to extract insights from unstructured data to drive action.

To learn more about improving the contact center experience and driving better business outcomes, check out our Q+A video with conversation analytics leader CallMiner.