Saved Revenue
Increase in Save Rates
Increase in NPS
How do you go from a small family business to hundreds of millions in revenue? According to one of the largest flooring companies in the U.S., the key is an effortless onboarding experience backed by a world-class customer experience. How? Through conversations between people, coming straight from the call center.
Every day, this company’s contact center handles many thousands of calls. Throughout this business’s journey to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, leadership always looked for ways to improve their call center operations. Why? Because improving call center operations, even a little, meant better onboarding and customer experiences, which translated into more revenue.
While trying to push their call center’s performance and effectiveness over the top, this company found Balto. Leadership saw Balto’s unique speech analytics technology, powered by A.I., and decided to give it a try.
The Challenge: Starting with Sales
Before Balto, the company used traditional sales training and coaching methods to help reps increase their saves rates. Managers listened to a small portion of calls and then sat 1:1 with each rep to coach and retrain them on any issues. Every day was like a game of “Whack-A-Mole”: as soon as one rep was properly re-trained, another rep would have the same issue.
Leadership identified that boosting their saves rate was a priority. When listening to agents’ calls, they heard many opportunities for agents to be more consistent and efficient at handling concerns. Some reps were great at handling objections. Others were not.
Leadership at this company saw a huge opportunity to use Balto to boost their sales and customer service teams. Ultimately, they started the first pilot with their sales team because it was easy to calculate if Balto drove ROI with a metric called saves rate.
The Pilot
Leadership wanted to test if Balto could increase saves rate. So, they gave a random handful of reps Balto and kept the rest of their team off Balto. With Balto’s one-click install, it was easy.
“After one month with Balto, the saves rate increased by 26.1%. In the first 3 months, Balto helped save $3.2 million dollars.”
– Contact Center Technology Leader at Leading Flooring Company
Then, leadership started tracking results with Balto’s robust data dashboard. After one month with Balto, save rates increased by 26.1%, netting $3.2 million dollars in revenue.
What did Balto do to drive these results? Hear it from the customer: “Balto transcribes the call in real-time and coaches the agent based on what it sees. It is a tool that helps us speak with a unified voice and keeps all of our agents really focused on the task they have on hand.“
The customer experienced the impact of speaking with a unified voice and staying laser-focused on improving what mattered most. Seeing these results, the flooring giant expanded Balto to their full sales team and piloted Balto for customer service and QA.
Expanding to QA & Customer Service
After their hugely successful Balto pilot with their sales team, the company’s leadership wanted to expand. QA and Customer Service were obvious choices.
“With Balto, there was a 144% increase in agents asking for customers’ email addresses, a customer NPS score up 600 bps year over year, more consistency, and less frequent escalation calls.”
– Contact Center Technology Leader at Leading Flooring Company
Before Balto, only about 1% of calls were monitored, and employees didn’t know how their calls were scored until it was too late to make changes. As the Contact Center Technology Leader at this company has said, “Coaching before Balto was a series of mentor roles. We had agents that walk around the call center, helping agents during calls.” The process was failing both employees and customers.
So leadership at the flooring giant gave hundreds of customer service agents Balto in hopes of ensuring quality and having better conversations.
Within 6 Months of Using Balto, the QA Was Completely Automated.
Now, every call is scored automatically on the most important criteria. On top of automatic scoring, managers receive real-time alerts (as calls are happening) when agents miss something important. Managers know exactly which calls and which agents need help in the moment. There are more saved calls because of the personalized coaching at scale. With personalized coaching for every rep, agents make far fewer mistakes.
Agents began to show huge improvements across the board. There was a 144% increase in agents asking for customers’ email addresses, a customer NPS score up 600 bps year over year, more consistency, and less frequent escalation calls.
“One of the things Balto’s really helped with is escalation calls. Helping in real-time rather than calling over a supervisor,” said the Contact Center Technology Leader. “There are still escalation calls where a supervisor is called over, but it happens far less frequently. First off, it’s a better experience for the customer. Second, it makes the customers feel like the agent not only cares but is capable of taking care of them. The other aspect of it is that it helps the agent be confident because they already have the information. It gives them a lot more confidence that they’re not alone taking the phone call, but there is something there with them.”
Results that Make Waves
Giving agents confidence improved their performance. But was Balto just providing confidence? The Contact Center Technology Leader continued with a story, “We did a review with one of our agents, and she had been a consistently good agent but not a top performer. She was always mid to low in terms of closes. And so we brought Balto in and in that first year, after doing that, her conversion rate literally doubled, which was shocking because nothing else had changed.”
“We did a review with one of our agents, and she had been a consistently good agent but not a top performer. She was always mid to low in terms of closes. And so we brought Balto in and in that first year, after doing that, her conversion rate literally doubled, which was shocking because nothing else had changed.”
– Contact Center Technology Leader at Leading Flooring Company
With Balto, it wasn’t uncommon to see agents do twice as well as before. The flooring giant saw low and mid-tier reps outperform top performers. Most importantly, everyone in the call center projected the same consistent voice on every single call. Customer onboarding and experience flew to the next level.
“I just can’t think of anything that’s more valuable to any company,” said the customer. “If you have more than 3 employees, you have a better chance that two of them will answer questions differently. The value is in the customer experience.”