Webinar: How Spark saved time and improved response handling using Mail Manager from Logicalware

Webinar Agenda

• Introductions

• Presentation from Trevor Geraghty, consultant on contact centre & customer service transformation to Spark Energy

• Questions & Answers

• Further Questions, Comments & Wrap Up

Introductions

Host – Iain Swanston, Sales & Customer Service Expert

Presenter – Trevor Geraghty, customer contact consultant to Spark Energy

Logicalware Account Manager – Daniel Parker

Logicalware Product Manager – David Lough

How Spark save time (up to 90% ) whilst delivering improved service for customers

BACKGROUND

• Established in 2007, with objective of offering competitive energy tariffs to rental tenants, property management firms and landlords in the UK

• Grew 35% in the last year alone

• Over 200 staff based in the Scottish Borders

Spark in 2013 (date pre MailManager)

• Growing number of clients

• Multiple email addresses manually allocated to agents

• All emails treated equally, no ability to prioritise without reading emails first

• High volume of staff handling enquiries

• Lack of ability to monitor responses, or view agent performance

• Growing response times

• No ability to track customer enquiries

• Outgrowing standard email

• No real-time view of measurements against service level agreements

Spark in 2013 cont.

• Service model that was expensive to scale

• Reporting was all historical and time consuming

• Frustration amongst contact centre colleagues due to their inability to pass on relevant information to the wider business

• Opportunities missed as there was no prioritisation of messages

• Increasing staff costs due to volume and management of enquiries

• Damaging brand reputation which was built around Customer Service

• Made job role more challenging and manual

What was needed to move forward

Spark were seeking a solution that offered improvements in productivity, better management & reporting and delivery of the Spark 5 star customer service levels.

PRODUCTIVITY• First contact resolution• Bespoke build of solution to automate the handling of scheduled events such as

meter reads • Agent prompted with pre-populated template responses for speed and consistency

of quality• Active and waiting messages• Automated responses

MANAGEMENT• Forecasting Accuracy• Adherence to Schedule• Average age of query• Customer call frequency• Measurements against service level agreements

SERVICE• Call centre status metrics• Service level response time

Solution to Challenges

• All public-facing email addresses brought into one place where staff could be trained and managed

• Incoming enquiries routed into product and function specialists e.g. Customer Service, Complaints, Meter Reads, etc.

• Full history of enquiry available within ticket, including any attachments, reassignments of ticket and history of filters. This enables a full audit trail of prior actions on the ticket

• Spark now now have a variety of processes including which have dramatically improved customer service handling

Spark Energy Process Automation

Spark Energy Process Automation

Spark Energy Process Automation

Business Impact

• The automation of processes within the Customer service department for emailed meter reads have led to the 90% decrease in manual handling

• This has happened while volume of enquiries increased dramatically

• Scalable solution in place which can grow with the business

• No additional technical resource required as usage of Logicalware MailManager increases as Spark have grown

• As consumer behaviour has changed, Logicalware have adapted MailManager to meet this

Product Roadmap

• Spark needed a supplier that would work closely with them and would develop the product based on their needs both now and in the future

• MailManager is a mature product, tried and tested for 11 years

• Continually evolving via a Customer User Group: for example, the addition of Social Media which was launched in 2014

• Innovation continues with live Chat and greater integration into business critical software such as ecommerce platforms, ordering systems, databases, CRM

Questions & Answers

Question 1: Technically, how would I start using MailManager, and is it difficult to set up?

Answered by Trevor:

“From my perspective, that was the beauty of it. The ability to re-route and get email making their way into the MailManager tool only took minutes of activity. So that was excellent, that was really simple to set up. Getting up and running overall was a very easy process”.

Question 2: Does setting up MailManager require input from the IT Department?

Answered by Trevor:

“Yes of course, in terms of a simple involvement. Typically the guardians of the email servers or email routing in organisations would sit within the IT department. What’s quite neat about the application in the case of MailManager is the organisation’s data integrity still absolutely continues in the sense that all the customer email goes through the existing processes that it currently has. The email is then forwarded on to the intelligent mode that sits within MailManager. MailManager adds a layer of intelligence and a layer of manageability to it, but it’s not an exercise that requires any form of new hardware or equipment, it’s an easy process”.

Question 3: Who holds my data? And what happens if the software goes down? Do we lose the data?

Answered by Daniel:

“The data is all still held by the customer because it’s being forwarded from your email server into our software so you’ll always hold it. But we will also hold a copy in our secure AWS servers which we don’t access at any point unless you request us to. Additionally, if you ever chose to leave us, you have the right to all the data held”.

Question 4: How secure is the data if it’s a cloud based solution?

Answered by Daniel:

“It is completely secure, like I said, it’s on the AWS Servers which are very secure. Additionally, we have SSl certificates in place and match all the industry standard requirements”.

Question 5: Why would I use this for Social Media?

Answered by Trevor:

“Firstly, whether a customer calls you, emails you, sends you a text message, live chats with you or any other mechanism, I think we recognise that all of the are simply requests. The customer is making a request of us. In some organisations Social Media is sat within a specialist team who are maybe marketing the brand. However, more and more and more individuals have a personal dashboard of Facebook and Twitter. If a customer chooses to interact directly through Facebook and Twitter, to me it’s just another request. People are already taking a view that they are dealing with a lot more direct requests through social media, and MailManager is just processing them through a queue, through a single touch point, a single hub, resulting in the business being in a position to report on them “.

Question 6: Do you think more and more businesses are seeing a value coming out of Social Media? Do you think now tools such as MailManager are now able to measure the ROI of Social Media?

Answered by Trevor:

“Absolutely, I think what was fundamentally changed is that there are certain demographics where even email isn’t there communicative method of choice. Many people only have an email address to act as an anchor point for heir social media accounts. Social Media’s not a start up environment, it’s a grown up environment, and organisations need to be in a position to respond to that. There are some horrific statistics out there regarding the number of social media enquiries or requests that are not answered and not dealt with, and the brand implications of that and the reputational implications of that are very very significant for an organisation. If somebody's having a rant or giving a valid complaint it’s important that the business is seen to deal with it in a professional manner”.

Question 7: With regard to reporting, and validation, and audit trails, what has been your experience?

Answered by Trevor:

“Everybody in the sector will be aware that with the exception of odd times of the year, the UK Press has a fascination with the utility industry. The prices involved, the customer service involved, it’s a high profile and highly regulated environment. Therefore, we need to be in a position where we can count, measure and manage ever single interaction we have with our customers. Not just because we want to provide five star service to all our customers, but also because we want to be in a position where if somebody questions or want to view specific information we can bring up those relevant interactions and show that we’ve done our absolute level best to look after and service our customers”.

Wrap Up And Next Steps

If you’re confident you’re able to automate your customer journeys and business processes, then feel free to get started with a Free Trial via the website www.logicalware.com

We will be in contact in the next 24 hours with a recording of the Webinar for you to share internally and discuss any next steps you feel would be appropriate.

www.logicalware.comdaniel.parker@logicalware.com

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