RCN Case Study

The Organization 

RCN provides U.S. based customer service and industry-leading High-Speed Internet, all-Digital TV and Phone services for residential, small/medium and Enterprise business customers. RCN’s advanced digital services are delivered through proprietary, state-of-the-art fiber-rich network and supported by 100% U.S.-based customer service. RCN’s primary service areas include Boston, Chicago, New York City, the Lehigh Valley, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. 

Motivation for Change 

To better serve their customers, RCN’s contact center shifted focus from being a process-based environment to focusing more on the customer experience and the productivity and efficiency of their front line employees, RCN’s contact center agents. Key to this initiative was measuring and monitoring agent and contact center performance. Inability to effectively aggregate performance data however, was preventing RCN from achieving this objective. While the data was readily available, it couldn’t be collected together in a consistent, cohesive manner or be communicated properly. Previously data was housed in a half dozen data bases and organized manually on spreadsheets. The format of the reports was difficult to understand and distribute to the contact center team and supervisors frequently misinterpreted the reports or found material errors rendering the quality of the information inaccurate and inconsistent. In addition, RCN wanted a strong emphasis on agent quality control by evaluating agent performance and capturing real-time customer feedback to provide insight on both business issues and contact quality. 

Desired Solution 

RCN wanted one system that could bring all the contact center information together so they could effectively manage their agents and empower them to deliver exceptional customer experiences. They desired near real-time analytics on their key performance indicators to speed decision making and improve their target performance goals. 

Why Alvaria 

RCN selected the Alvaria Workforce Engagement Management Suite, Alvaria Performance, and Alvaria Quality. Alvaria Performance aggregates all the contact center data enabling RCN to view and understand employee achievement then take immediate action if necessary and Alvaria Quality monitors and improves interaction quality. RCN knew Alvaria Performance and Alvaria Quality could consolidate contact center data from their interaction management environment, their Alvaria Workforce solution and other back office optimization systems, to create a comprehensive scorecard. 

The Results 

The RCN contact center can now fully embrace the new agent-centric culture of the company and focus on the customer experience with the insights they get from Alvaria Workforce. Today, all contact center personnel have Alvaria Performance and Alvaria Quality results on their desktop with near real-time reporting of key performance indicators. Metrics are available in a dashboard for every member of the contact center to view. Nearly every agent metric has improved since the Alvaria Workforce deployment: Although RCN tracks many metrics with Alvaria Performance, not all are communicated to the agents as to not inundate them with non-vital information other than what is best for the customer and what the agent can control. For example, RCN tracks average handle times but only communicates that metric to supervisors so that agents don’t feel rushed to get off the phone.  Other areas where Alvaria Performance has helped RCN include measuring and tracking customer retention rates. RCN can see the impact that rate increases have on the customers and they can compare those numbers to previous rate increases to monitor the impact. In addition, due to the increased accuracy of the reports with Alvaria Performance, RCN’s finance team went from doing 85-90% adjustments in agent commissions every week to now doing only 5%, decreasing their weekly workload by 20%. 

Alvaria Quality has allowed RCN to view what areas of the call need to be improved upon by identifying common deficiencies among most of the call center agents. As a result recurrent training efforts are more effective and are focused on driving quality. 

The investment in Alvaria Workforce made RCN agents more accountable and responsible and instilled a competitive nature within the contact center ultimately helping RCN improve its NPS scores (customer satisfaction) by 41 points in just three years.