Case study > South Africa | Netherlands
E-commerce Retailer
Challenge
As a result of the global pandemic COVID-19, our partner faced an unprecedented increase in customer demand. As a result, they needed to rapidly scale up their capacity. A lot had to be done in a short period of time:
- Negotiating and finalising contract terms.
- Scaling up the workforce to 750 employees within eight weeks.
- Agent onboarding and virtual training.
- Setting up and implementing a QA programme based on COPC standards.
- Customer service fees were too high with a process that was not standardised.
- No sales took place through service touch points. There were no established customer journeys and turnover was too high.
- Scalability of low-cost English was a recurring problem and the quality of CSAT was poor due to lack of native language skills/resources.
Solution
- Negotiated and signed contract; including costing & governance.
- Implemented ramp up plan of 100 customer service representatives weekly to reach – required headcount of 750 within 8 weeks.
- Onboarded and virtually trained customer service representatives via videoconferencing from central training team based in South Africa, across geographies, in South Africa, Colombia, and the Philippines.
- Designed and implemented a QA program based on the COPC© methodology.
- Sourcing from South Africa included the deployment of customer journey mapping teams, COPC certification of our OPS leadership team, specific recruitment initiatives towards sales from service channels, and implementation of native speakers only.
We conducted thorough pre-hiring tests through our onboarding academy and adopted the Harambee recruitment model as well as stringent language assessments.
Results
- Rapid Entrepreneurial, flexible and nimble approach enabled success.
- Activated campaign in a 7-day window.
- Our ability to act quickly allowed us to win Voice in addition to Chat and Email.
- Handled 1 Million Customer contacts in Q1’2020.
- Achieved this with a fully activated BCP as of 1st of March 2020, servicing from Work From Home with no service disruption at any time!
- Costs to serve were significantly lowered (~30%).
- Costs to serve were significantly lowered (~30%).
- Quality of Service / CSAT improved significantly (~15%).
- Sales from service improved and gained global acceptance.
- Impressive learning curve impressive (ahead of existing partners while still in a major ramp up phase).
