“The leadership team used to spend so much time being reactive instead of proactive,” according to Janet Jones, Senior Director of Dairy Farmers of America.
This was primarily due to a lack of comprehensive information and centralization. Just to create daily reports, for example, two business analysts were assigned to manually collect and organize data from multiple separate applications and systems. Supervisors were not sure how to prioritize their time effectively, there was no way to ensure inbound contacts were routed to agents with the right skillsets, and customer service was not meeting current expectations of personalization. Similarly, determining agent availability was also a manual process of coordination through internal chat conversations.
Coaching was heavily dependent on on-site supervisors physically listening in on agent conversations or on sifting through limited audio only recordings. The process of determining where supervisors could offer direction and to whom was therefore not very systematic.
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
A radical change of venue
Like many contact centers, the Dairy Farmers of America contact center was completely office-based. Supervisors could monitor interactions in person as they walked among the cubicles where agents worked. That all changed when Covid-19 hit and the organization had to immediately shift to work-from-home arrangements for their entire workforce. This dramatic change, affecting 100% of the 15,000 employees, made the lack of consistent, comprehensive visibility into agent activities abundantly and suddenly apparent to the organization’s leadership.
There was a need to monitor agent activity remotely and in greater depth, in order to ensure top-notch service. “Good enough is not good enough. We wanted to give the team any tool they needed to strive towards perfection,” Janet said, adding, “But I also think it’s really important for our team to see that we’re investing in solutions for them to be able to stay where they are. That is, by focusing on monitoring measurable data for excellent customer experience we are also making it possible for employees to continue working from home, which is a situation many agents have come to prefer.”
Dairy Farmers of America has been a NICE inContact customer for many years, during which time they had always seen a valuable return on their investment. The natural step was to build on that positive relationship with an eye toward a return that went beyond strict dollars and cents, including employee satisfaction and the best possible service levels.
03 THE SOLUTION
Insight into every keystroke and phone call
Dairy Farmers of America introduced CXone Supervisor into their contact center, changing the paradigm with a dedicated one-stop-shop to help supervisors track their team’s KPIs, monitor their agents and even coach and evaluate their performance real-time. It helps streamline supervisor workflows to drive efficiencies and provides business-critical insights to help teams reach key business objectives.
“The key for us is CXone’s unique ability to record and store both audio and screen activity no matter where the agent is,” explained Nicole Hibbard, Project Manager National Corporate Customer Contact Center. “We literally know every keystroke and hear every phone call, we know what they’re doing and their minute-to-minute availability.”
The centralized omnichannel visibility offered by CXone Supervisor includes real-time screen monitoring. Supervisors can also determine if an agent is active, available, involved in productive activity, and the like. The Dairy Farmers of America contact center is also using customized agent state in-app alerts, which automatically notify designated supervisors when an employee has been inactive for too long, saving time and effort in identifying adherence risks.
Live monitoring of both voice and digital interactions has given Dairy Farmers of America supervisors the capability to provide agents with real-time guidance when necessary. The CXone Supervisor “join” feature allows the supervisor to send a discrete message in real-time (indicating next-best actions or asking the agent a question), join in on a phone conversation, or even take over if the issue requires immediate escalation.
This capability makes coaching easier and much more impactful than a post-call recording or conversation. It is especially valuable for newer agents and for time periods when on-the-fly agent reskilling is urgently needed. With two different groups of agents— one in Michigan, another in Texas—Dairy Farmers of America can seamlessly and quickly help agents from one region pick up the slack in another in response to local spikes in activity or downtime without any need to change apps.
CXone Supervisor is also helping Dairy Farmers of America make more data-driven decisions regarding agent and team performance. The organization is using the solution to produce both consolidated on-demand customizable reports and ad-hoc agent evaluations, as well as automated detailed daily reviews of agent activity and KPI metrics.
04 THE RESULTS
With the right tools anything is possible
Comprehensive, real-time and centralized monitoring and performance insights with CXone Supervisor has led to several key benefits:
An increased number of calls, with total volume up 18%, which has produced an even greater jump in the number of orders entered by agents (31%).
Supervisors save time and effort on monitoring, coaching and performance assessments.
Contacts are automatically routed to agents with the right skillset, saving yet more time and personalizing the customer experience.
Contact center employee attrition is at 4%, a record-breaking low (contrasting with 17- 20% across the organization in previous years).
Supervisors save over one hour on each report produced
The contact center leadership believes a large factor in the great retention rate is the ability to seamlessly support remote work and maintain employee trust.
As Janet put it, “If you can provide employees a fully remote option, then they’ll do everything they can to keep their job. It also makes us more attractive as employers. Whereas we used to have about 10 to 12 people apply for open positions, we now have 500.”
Beyond remote work, a significant factor in the exceptional growth in retention is the increase in employee trust. No matter where they are, agents feel they are receiving more constructive feedback, real-time support and more relevant coaching from their supervisors. They are also actively connected to the team and benefit from a smarter distribution of the workload thanks to the CXone Supervisor agent reskill capabilities.
The contact center leadership team now has more time and resources available to consider what value-added projects can be undertaken taking advantage of CXone Supervisor’s capabilities. Recently, for example, they have initiated a special initiative to convert customers to online ordering.
“NICE CXone makes agents’ and supervisors’ lives so much easier!” Janet said, adding that, as a result, Dairy Farmers of America has raised the performance bar for agents now that the contact center has the tools to support them. With CXone Supervisor and comprehensive interaction monitoring, the organization has notified agents that they expect an average performance score per call of 95%, at least.
05 THE FUTURE
Free to be ahead of the curve
After implementing CXone Supervisor, the contact center leadership has been able to broaden their horizons and spend more time thinking strategically. This includes considering how they can continue to innovate and stay ahead of the curve in their industry with the help of NICE solutions.
In the meantime, Janet noted, “now that they’ve seen the fruits of the CXone implementation, people in the company are begging our team to take on new projects. It’s ironic, because just a few years ago the idea of centralizing supervision of the workforce, especially remotely, ran up against a brick wall.”
“Perfection may not be truly possible, but with CXone Supervisor we were able to come quite close—increasing employee performance scores to 95%.”
JANET JONES
SENIOR DIRECTOR
“Supervising our teams is so much easier now that it’s hard to remember how we even did it before CXone.”
NICOLE HIBBARD
NATIONAL CORPORATE CUSTOMER - CONTACT CENTER
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Dairy Farmers of America is a national dairy cooperative owned by nearly 11,000 family farms across the United States. The organization operates a network of dairy product facilities across the country, with $24.5 billion in annual sales and 65.4 billion pounds of milk marketed in 2022.
