Mobile phones are no longer a luxury. Providing wireless services has become a booming industry and mobile phones can be found in the purse or pocket of nearly everyone you meet, young or old. With so many wireless providers to choose from, the ability to offer the latest technology coupled with superior customer service is critical to a provider’s sustainability.

Headquartered in Elizabethtown, Ky., Bluegrass Cellular Inc. offers cellular and digital network services such as mobile office, picture messaging, mobile Web service and downloadable games, ringtones and other applications to both private individuals and businesses in more than 38 counties across Kentucky. The company also offers Internet service. Keeping up with technology and providing quality customer support is Bluegrass Cellular’s main priority.

Company Background

For Bluegrass Cellular, being able to respond quickly to customers’ needs and issues is fundamental to the customer experience and the company’s sales growth. At the heart of its customer service efforts is Bluegrass Cellular’s contact center, which employs 65 agents who manage the 65,000 inbound calls the company receives each month, in addition to making thousands of outbound calls. Following the purchase of Bluegrass Cellular’s products and services, the contact center serves as the main line of communications between the company and its customers. The contact center handles customer questions, account changes, billing, dispute resolutions and technical support. The effectiveness of Bluegrass Cellular’s contact center is a major reason for the company’s high customer retention rates, satisfaction and loyalty.

What has made the agents successful is the quality of training and ongoing motivation they receive on the job. To enhance agent training and maintain its high level of customer service, Bluegrass Cellular decided to implement solutions that would make it easier for managers to monitor and record all agents’ calls. The ability to play back calls would allow managers to enhance their current training and quality management efforts, while providing agents with constructive feedback.

“We receive a large volume of calls each day, and the ability to record and monitor all inbound and outbound calls is critical to helping us maintain our high customer service standards,” said Robin Fentress, group manager, customer support for Bluegrass Cellular. “We recognized that call recordings would allow us to collect more information from our interaction with our customers, as well as continue to help our agents improve, strengthen our contact center and further support our customers. The additional information we collect through the recordings would help us to identify trends, quickly resolve concerns or issues and enhance our agent training.”

Business Challenge

Bluegrass Cellular’s contact center received approximately 65,000 inbound calls each month without the ability to record for compliance purposes, dispute resolution, quality assurance and agent training.

Solution

Bluegrass Cellular evaluated a number of call recording and monitoring solutions and based its final decision on several key requirements, including call recording quality, security, success rates, cost and the system’s ease of use. Following the evaluation, Bluegrass Cellular selected CallCopy as its call recording solution provider and deployed cc: Voice, a component of CallCopy’s cc: Discover suite of contact center solutions.

“With our growth, our president, Ron Smith recognized the importance of deploying a comprehensive call recording system to support our focus on customer service,” said Fentress. “As this was our first time deploying a call recording system, it was important that we found the right solution for our company. With this mindset, our management team was fully engaged in the evaluation process, and all were instantly impressed with CallCopy. CallCopy’s client services team was excellent, and they made sure our installation process went smoothly. They were eager to answer any questions and quickly addressed any concerns, which made us confident that we made the right choice.”

cc: Voice is a flexible call recording solution, easily configurable to meet a company’s recording needs, including 100-percent recording of all inbound and outbound calls. The reliable application is an automated server-based solution, which eliminates the need for agents to manually engage or disengage the recording process. In addition, call recording is achieved through integration with Bluegrass Cellular’s existing Cisco PBX telephone system. cc: Voice is built on an open infrastructure, allowing it to seamlessly integrate with all of Bluegrass Cellular’s existing contact center applications. With CallCopy, Bluegrass Cellular is able to maintain its own servers and networks, while CallCopy’s server sits behind its firewall.

A few months after the installation of cc: Voice, Bluegrass Cellular’s Internet Services group, led by Melvin Gregory, wanted to ensure that its agents were following proper troubleshooting processes and using the appropriate diagnostic tools during customer calls. The flexibility provided by CallCopy’s cc: Discover suite allowed the Internet Services group to achieve this by deploying cc: Screen, a screen capture component that integrates with cc: Voice.

CallCopy cc: Screen allows Bluegrass Cellular to combine audio and video recordings of agent activities to ensure optimal workflow and capture correspondence with customers via e-mail or instant messages. With cc: Screen, the company can identify which agents are the most efficient with individual desktop applications, and use their screen captures to coach and train the rest of the staff to reach optimal performance.

With CallCopy’s solutions, Bluegrass Cellular has complete control over what it records via the phone or on the screen. CallCopy’s security features allow the company to restrict playback on certain portions of calls and restrict which employees are authorized to listen to which calls. Call and screen recordings can be initiated based upon specific business rules and criteria, and Bluegrass Cellular can also record on-demand. cc: Voice and cc: Screen capture recordings in such a way that they can be easily used for quality monitoring, sales and third-party verification, dispute resolution and as coaching and training tools for Bluegrass Cellular’s agents.

Results

Since deploying CallCopy cc: Voice and cc: Screen, Bluegrass Cellular’s mobile services and Internet services groups have raised the customer service bar even higher. The company has engaged in a robust quality management program that allows managers to monitor more calls, and provide one-on-one coaching and more detailed feedback to agents.

Response times have improved, and disputes are resolved faster and more efficiently. Today, 100 percent of inbound and outbound calls are recorded, and audio and video recordings are stored for auditing and quality management purposes.

“The screen recordings are used as training tools to identify problem areas and improve the performance of our group’s 14 Internet agents,” said Gregory. “The ability to capture both audio and the video recordings helps us to identify areas for improvement within our workflow processes, as well as where additional agent training would be valuable. Overall, CallCopy is having a tremendous impact on agent performance and customer service.”

CallCopy’s call audit reports and scores provide Bluegrass Cellular with a manageable way to confirm quality, and managers can now export call and screen recordings into secure folders to transport to other departments for training and customer resolution purposes.

“Not only is CallCopy’s call recording system affordable, reliable and user-friendly, it has also enhanced our customers’ experience,” said Fentress. “Our agents can now play back their calls and identify where they can improve, while our supervisors are able to monitor more calls to measure performance rates, provide agents with feedback and reward success. In this business, better trained agents equal more satisfied customers.”

Fentress added, “CallCopy’s solutions have had a positive impact on how we manage our agents and contact center, and our managers have more tools at their fingertips than ever before. They can review recordings, quickly input scoring online, research disputes and retrieve call information all from their desktops.”