Here is a case study that shows how one global organization is using text analytics and real-time automation to streamline its contact center’s email triage to reduce manual case reading and enhance routing, allowing its agents to focus more on customer care.
Company Overview
Founded in 2006, Xero Limited, NZE: XRO, is a New Zealand-based software company that develops cloud-based accounting software used by small and medium-sized businesses. The company provides business owners and their advisors with real-time visibility of their financial position and performance in a way that’s simple, smart, and secure. Xero has over 1 million subscribers in more than 180 countries.
The Situation
Based on the principle that small businesses are highly sensitive to shifts in their balance sheet and cash flow, Xero is committed to offering subscribers the ability to monitor financial performance in real-time and provides them with unlimited, round-the-clock customer support.
In 2016, the company implemented the Salesforce.com Service Cloud, which Xero relied on to create assignment rules for incoming customer service inquiries.
“One of the benefits of using Service Cloud is its out-of-the-box functionality,” says a Xero representative. “It allowed us the ability to create assignment rules so that we could route incoming customer service inquiries to the appropriate agent queue depending on their support need.”
This functionality was sufficient in terms of identifying key words to use to assign and route cases to queues, but required considerable time to manually analyze which key words should trigger which assignment rules. After ending up with nearly ninety assignment rules across thirty queues, Xero quickly realized there was room for improvement. In many instances, cases were getting assigned to an incorrect agent queue or getting routed to a general queue, which required additional manual review and cost.
Xero was determined to find a solution that would help them get more cases to the right people.
The Challenge
“Prior to implementing Service Cloud, we had a number of key members on our customer experience team who were responsible for ensuring that our queues were cleared of cases that were incorrectly assigned,”said a lead business analyst for the company. “This involved a lot of cost, time and resources to move these cases. When we moved from our previous case management solution to Service Cloud, our operation for assigning cases to a queue and then to an agent was all done manually.”
Even with the help of Service Cloud’s native assignment rules, Xero’s Customer Experience team still required considerable resources to monitor their queues 24/7 due to the inaccurate results of their rules.
Xero was intent on finding a solution to classify incoming customer service emails more effectively and using automation to resolve more cases so that their service agents could spend less time reading and routing cases and more time improving the customer experience.