16% decrease in Call Handle Time for Contact Energy, while achieving “World-Class” employee engagement
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Contact Energy is one of NZ's leading providers of electricity, natural gas, broadband, solar & renewable energy.
Dwina Dickinson, former Head of Retail Operations, Contact Energy
“These are the results BravaTrak is giving us that I care about most:
1. Call Handle Time down 16%
Our Average Handle Time (AHT) dropped initially by 45 seconds. It was 400 seconds, and it went to 355. Through continuing to use BravaTrak, we’re now sitting at 335 seconds: a 65 second or 16% drop in call handle time.
2. Quality of call up (calibrated by an external Quality Auditor)
When measuring Handle Time, you have to be sure that quality of conversation is being maintained. For that reason, we focused on outliers. In other words, some conversations were too long, but others were too short. We’ve improved the quality of each set of outliers while achieving our quantitative results too.
We know that call quality has improved because our call quality gets measured independently by an external Quality Auditor. Their calibration showed our staff and the customers were getting to a common ground – as opposed to just ticking through a checklist.
3. Customer availability increased from 50% to 95%
We also drove customer-facing time. Prior to BravaTrak, we were 50% available to customers (meaning the other 50% of customers at any one time were waiting to speak to a member of our team). We are now down to the point our team is 95% available to customers: a 90% increase in customer availability.”
Bryan Middleton, Head of Customer Engagement - Keep, Contact Energy
“When I first saw BravaTrak, I was not a believer, however after 2-3 weeks, there was a noticeable change in results. I was surprised to say the least.
“Using BravaTrak has significantly improved our service delivery. We’ve taken an increased email-burden in our stride, and we have not incurred the cost of taking on new permanent staff – even though our email volume has lifted by 250,000 per annum, while phone volumes have not dropped. The only reason for these measurable benefits is that we’ve been able to drive the behaviours we need through BravaTrak.
“Because of increased service delivery, we’ve reduced our headcount. The year we first started using BravaTrak, we’d budgeted to take on an additional 25 people that winter. We didn’t need to. That’s because service delivery had increased so much, and we’ve never had temps since. Today we save at least the cost of 20 temps every year. That’s a $300,000 saving every year.
“An independent survey (the Hays survey) shows that our staff engagement is now world-class (consistently between 88%-93%). This is happening because BravaTrak shows us the levers that lead to engagement, so we can pull them to get the results we need.”
Judith Stevich, Customer Care Manager, Contact Energy
“We took 1 minute off the average call length, within 3 months.
“I am far more engaged with my people. I actually feel like I’m making a difference and I enjoyed the training process. While there were sceptics in the beginning it’s now part of the culture. The culture was good before, but now it has a buzz, it’s even better.”