The Rank Group uses Vonage’s Conversation Analyzer to improve and rate customer conversations accurately

When The Rank Group, one of the UK's leading gaming and entertainment businesses, made the decision to elevate its customer experience to an industry-leading level, it had to switch its customer service function from an outsource model to an in-house model.  

“Historically, the business were entirely focused on cost when serving a customer,” recalls Customer Experience & Innovations Manager Mark Donnelly. In the new model, customer experience would become the primary focus. 

To support this change in strategy, The Rank Group opened a contact centre in Sheffield, UK for its customer solutions group and chose Vonage Contact Center (VCC) as their telephony partner. According to Donnelly, Vonage was the right choice “because it was a cloud-based product that was quite agile and allowed us to easily adapt as the new contact centre in Sheffield.”

VCC’s native integration with Salesforce also enabled The Rank Group to leverage the investment it had already made in the Salesforce CRM platform. 

Improving agent behaviour and customer satisfaction with Conversation Analyzer 

Recorded calls were a standard practice for The Rank Group even in its old model, but with Conversation Analyzer, the Vonage speech analytics tool, they were able to generate call data and derive actionable insights like never before. “We can access call recordings directly from a call activity within Salesforce that sits within a case or within a customer record,” Donnelly explained. 

“Conversation Analyzer allows us to take that to the next level, and what's really exciting for me is that what Conversation Analyzer is doing is it's taking that call recording and it's turning it into structured data. So once I've got that structured data, what I can do with it is pretty much endless,” said Donnelly. 

The data from Conversation Analyzer allows The Rank Group to understand the real-time behaviour of its agents on a deeper level. Are they putting customers on hold unnecessarily? Do they allow long silences to pass? Are they having the right discussion about the right topic for the given customer? These are the types of valuable insights that Conversation Analyzer unearthed.

Making call quality scorecards more accurate 

“The traditional metrics of the contact centre around quality — a tick box checklist of a quality scorecard — seemed to be less relevant every time we looked at it,” said Donnelly.

He found calls scored at 100% that were not necessarily the right conversation for agents to be having with a customer at the given time. “If you look at the customer feedback following that 100% scored contact, the customer went away unhappy with the way that we'd handled it,” he said. 

For better accuracy, Donnelly and his team developed a very basic scorecard  that measured what they believed to be the two most important things on any customer contact: the behaviour of the agent and the sentiment of the customer following that contact. The formula for the revised scorecard was simple: if the behaviour of an agent is negative during the contact and the sentiment of a customer is negative after it, then that call rates a zero. If the customer feedback is positive and the agent behaviour is positive, then that's a 100% call.

Where The Rank Group Can Take CX next

“The other part of my job title from customer experience is innovation,” said Donnelly. “And that's the part that I always get really excited about. Where can we go next?”

With the structured data available for use with Conversation Analyzer in Salesforce, Donnelly contemplated the possibilities for enhancing The Rank Group’s customer experience even further. Can they use that data instead of relying on chatbots to talk to their customers? Can they use it to free up agent time so they can have more conversations with customers? Can they use that structured data to pull out topics within a conversation and put them into a basic note structure so that when an agent finishes a conversation, they can immediately take the next contact and everything else is done for them?

With Vonage Contact Center and Conversation Analyzer, The Rank Group has innumerable opportunities for CX innovation.