Asurion Case Study

The Organization 

For more than 20 years, Asurion’s innovation and dedication to delighting customers has made it the preferred provider of technology protection to wireless carriers, retailers and device manufacturers. Asurion’s 17,000 global employees support its 280 million consumers. The company’s solutions include premier support which enables consumers to fully utilize their digital devices and products; applications to protect privacy and provide security; and rapid replacement of lost, stolen, damaged, or malfunctioning devices. When a product is missing or simply doesn’t work properly, Asurion solves the problem with people and processes at work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, speaking six languages, across any device, platform, or provider. 

Motivation for Change 

Asurion was finding a good balance between providing exceptional customer experiences and achieving their strategic business goals. However, traditional methods of communicating with agents about administrative matters were consuming too much time and actually causing agent satisfaction to decline. Agents were missing opportunities for voluntary time-off (VTO) and overtime (OT) because they were receiving the notifications too late to take advantage of them. Further, the contact center was spending significant amounts of time receiving and approving requests for schedule changes from agents. This was largely due to Asurion having no effective way to communicate with agents in real- time, using agents’ preferred contact channels. 

Desired Solution 

Asurion began to look for technology solutions that could keep their contact center staffed to match call volumes, easily respond to agents’ requests for schedule changes, and communicate to agents in real-time using their channel of choice. The major considerations in evaluating workforce solutions were ease of use, anytime access for agents and the ability to issue proactive notifications. 

Why Alvaria 

Asurion was using the Alvaria Workforce solution to ensure they had the right agents in the rights places at the right time. When Asurion began talking with Alvaria about Alvaria Inform, they were thrilled to learn that Inform could meet and even exceed all their needs around pro-active notifications initiated by key workforce management events. After deploying Inform, Asurion could send out proactive push and desktop notifications via SMS and email, and Asurion contact center management and their agents alike began benefitting from having control over notification preferences. The agents then started using Alvaria Workforce Mobile to respond to these notifications. Alvaria Workforce Mobile is an easy-to-use smartphone app that empowers agents to self-manage their schedules remotely from smart phones and tablet devices while they are “on the go.” 

The Results 

Asurion and Alvaria’s Professional Services team (APS) worked together to build out the solution to meet Asurion’s specific needs: agents do not receive notifications when they are in the contact center, agents are in control of their preferences and can select the type and time of notifications they want to receive, and the contact center can also set business-rules to determine which agents receive the notifications. The combination of Alvaria Inform and Alvaria Workforce Mobile gives contact center agents more freedom and flexibility with their schedules – and at the same time helps Asurion meet the needs of their customers by having a fully staffed contact center.  Asurion has seen great success in their roll-out of the Alvaria solution. To educate agents and encourage them to use the system, Asurion hosted training roadshows on-site, incorporated training into onboarding, and utilized the resources of the marketing team to help communicate the value of the Alvaria solution to agents. 

These initiatives have resulted in: 

Increasing weekly toward their goal of 80%+ of agents engaged in mobile/email/SMS One unit is already seeing 84% engagement with 2,500+ agents VSA covering Voluntary time off (VTO), Overtime (OT), Absent, Leave of absence (LOA ) average of 35,000 notifications a week with a posted weekly high of 47,000 Since implementing the Alvaria solution, Asurion has experienced increased agent satisfaction, lower absenteeism, increased OT and VTO fill rates, reduced administration workload from dialing agents, decreased administration time from workforce management teams entering exceptions, and gained the ability to quickly communicate to the agent population during emergencies.