Two people with headsets working at computer desks, engaged in conversation, in an office setting.

360insights empowers agents and boosts NPS with 8x8 and Awaken Intelligence

34

Point increase in survey response rate

85+

NPS

2-week

Reduction in agent onboarding time

Overview: 360insights is a partner engagement and business optimization company, enabling brands to better influence, manage, and engage with their complex channel ecosystems. The company offers a suite of channel solutions, including a SaaS-based platform that empowers brands to fully orchestrate their complex partner networks and optimize their promotional spend on MDF/Co-op, rebates, promotional allowances, SPIFFs, and rewards.

"8x8 Co-browsing immediately changed the quality of our customer service around walkthroughs. It made it easier for the team to deliver the best possible assistance."

John Davies

Director of Contact Center Systems, 360insights

Combining incentive management and ecosystem orchestration with a powerful data analytics engine, 360insights serves more than 300 of the most recognizable brands around the world, across multiple industries, helping them grow their indirect business.

The Challenge: Fluctuating call volumes, training new hires

360insights manages customer-facing incentives, like rebates or cash back, as well as performance incentives for salespeople. The company runs a contact center for both recipients of incentives as well as the brands who offer them.

Throughout the year, 360insights’ contact center sees seasonal peaks in call volumes, especially around the holidays when sales volumes are at the highest. During those peak times, the company needs to be able to scale up its agent workforce to handle the demand and still provide a great customer experience. It can be challenging as agents need to turn around calls quickly, yet still provide high-quality service.

However, training new agents can pose a challenge, especially as the company provides a clear path to promotion for the agent role. 360insights needs to onboard a new hire quickly and enable that agent to access the right information to present customers in order to do their best work and be eligible for promotion.

Luckily, 360insights is an 8x8 customer, using 8x8 Contact Center, 8x8 Work, and a number of other 8x8 products and features. “8x8 helps us solve the age-old challenge of driving both efficiency and quality, blending them together in the same environment,” says John Davies, Director of Contact Center Systems at 360insights.

The Solution: Empowering agents to do their best work

To optimize agent efficiency, 360insights aims to get information in front of the agent as quickly as possible, and then deliver it to the customer in a way that the customer can easily understand. One of the 8x8 Contact Center features that agents’ have found most useful is 8x8 Co-browsing, which enables agents to assist customers remotely via a shared browser.

With 8x8 Co-browsing, agents can talk a customer through a task while observing their screen, or take control of the cursor to demonstrate how to perform the task. “8x8 Co-browsing immediately changed the quality of our customer service around walkthroughs. It made it easier for the team to deliver the best possible assistance,” says Davies.

Another important 8x8 tool for 360insights has been customer surveys. This allows the company to gather valuable customer feedback after every interaction, so that it may continually improve service levels and increase customer satisfaction and retention. This data also helps to recognize and reward agents who receive positive feedback, thus supporting the company’s agent promotion program. Davies says, “8x8’s customer feedback mechanisms give us a lot more confidence and the ability to correlate our NPS to our actual delivery on more than just a small sampling of calls.”

360insights further supports agent growth with the 8x8 Quality Management tool, which helps supervisors deliver targeted, collaborating coaching for performance improvement. It enables the company to get to know its agents’ strengths and weaknesses, so it can route calls to the agents to provide the best service for the customer, and the best growth opportunity for the agent. It also helps supervisors scale up a new agent’s call volumes as they grow into the role.

A top challenge for agents has been the ability to pull up information quickly. Awaken, a SellWith8 partner, offers an 8x8 integration that allows agents working with 8x8 Agent Workspace to use Awaken's Creovai solution to get next-best-action recommendations, and real-time guidance. This way, agents don’t have to navigate their way through the knowledge base or other systems, which can take precious time while the customer waits.

“With the Creovai call flow, it’s so much quicker for an agent to get information, do a good, solid troubleshoot, and finish the call faster without having to change anything about the delivery of the call itself,” says Davies.

The Creovai integration also improves the training process by simplifying tools and helping agents learn basic contact center principles, call structure, and effective customer interactions. It reduces the time it takes to train agents by eliminating unnecessary steps and streamlining agent experience workflows.

The Results: Greater confidence and trust

Since 360insights has been using 8x8 to improve the agent and customer experience, the company has seen a number of benefits. One is clearly measurable in NPS scores. “Prior to us coming on board with 8x8, we got a survey response rate of about 3%,” says Davies. “So it was very difficult for us to say that our NPS was 85+ with any confidence because the sampling was so low. With the introduction of 8x8’s post-call survey tool, we now put the survey in front of about 90% of our customers. And we get about a 37% response rate and still maintain a 85+ NPS score. We’re very proud of the customer care we’re able to deliver.”

Awaken’s Creovai integration has improved training times for agents at 360Insights. Previously, when onboarding new agents it would take 13+ weeks to get the team fully functional on the phones interacting with customers. 360Insights can now boast fully trained agents in just 10+ weeks by simplifying the process and guiding agents to the next-best-action.

For 360insight’s customers, 8x8 Analytics provides data and insights that help customers understand how well their program is running, so that future decisions can be made on what programs work, what programs benefit customers, and drive customer loyalty.

Finally, the entire 360insights organization has a communication platform that supports its company values of listening, learning, and ultimately trust. Davies explains, “In every single interaction that we have with every single person, be it an agent, customer, or manager, living by our values sets an environment of trust that allows everybody to be successful.”