Bluegreen Vacations: Using Speech Analytics to Improve Customer Experience
Company: Bluegreen Vacations
That its name conjures deep blue ocean water and green landscapes is certainly no accident. Bluegreen Vacations offers vacation ownership to approximately 213,000 club members, called owners, who use their points to stay at 67 Bluegreen Club and Club Associate Resorts in locations that include Florida, the Smoky Mountains, and Branson, Mo. Members also have access to an exchange network of more than 11,000 resorts and other vacation experiences, such as cruises and hotel stays, worldwide.
bluegreenvacations.com
Business Challenge
While Bluegreen Vacations receives many customer calls annually, it saw “spikes in call volume we couldn’t predict,” says Adam McCord, Bluegreen Vacations’ quality analytics manager. Executives knew that finding the reasons behind those spikes could help the company better meet owners’ needs. They asked customer service agents for thoughts on why calls dramatically increased at certain points, but feedback proved too vague. At that point, the company decided to implement speech analytics software in hopes it could help explain sudden upticks in the number of calls.
Vendor of Choice: CallMiner
Though the provider of speech analytics technology includes “call” in its name, it recently expanded its software capabilities to include more channels of customer conversations, including chat, email, texts, social media, and surveys. Customers now have so much to say across so many channels that analytics solutions are needed for voice-only contact centers as well as for other customer-engagement channels, according to the company’s website.
Callminer.com
The Problem in Depth
Bluegreen Vacations provides flexibility and choice to its Vacation Club owners by creating timeshare alliances to expand owners’ vacation opportunities. After customers have purchased ownership, their contact company point is the Bluegreen main customer call center in Indianapolis. There, customer service representatives help match owners with destinations, navigate the company’s website, make reservations, and solve other customer issues. When call volume spiked, agents would have a hard time meeting call demand.
Executives recognized that there was a gap and took the necessary steps to fine-tune the process. The route they chose was to use interactive voice response and website messages to address the reasons for the calls and preemptively answer caller questions. But the company still could not predict the sometimes-dramatic upswing in the number of calls because it couldn’t pinpoint the reasons for them.
Bluegreen Vacations decided to experiment with speech analytics software, which would turn calls into text files and could then be mined for word repetition and patterns. Those words could hold the clues to the questions and concerns voiced at the times call volume was higher than normal.
“We knew speech analytics was a way for us to go in and pull up calls and find out right away what was going on,” McCord says. “Speech analytics would help tell the story.” The company also suspected it could find further efficiencies by using the software to help train customer service representatives, analyze the calls by high- and lower-performing reps, and create customer surveys.
In 2010, the company implemented CallMiner as its speech analytics software choice.
The Solution
While Bluegreen Vacations looked at several providers of speech analytics software when it began its search, McCord’s team chose CallMiner because his team could customize the software for a number of different types of reporting jobs that would help find customer service efficiencies and create a better overall experience, McCord says. “It’s a very dynamic tool,” McCord says of the software. “There are several different ways you can use it for speech analytics.”
What’s more, members of McCord’s department could set up the technology themselves to perform all the tasks they required of it. “I can do everything 100% on my own,” he says. “I can reach out for help to CallMiner but internally I control everything I want to do. I don’t want to rely on emailing back and forth asking, ‘Is this how you build this?’ I’d rather just do it on my own.”
Related Articles
The NWEA sought a way to streamline oral evaluations to save school districts time and money while still ensuring students are on track.
22 Oct 2018
One of the biggest challenges of call-centers is making sure customers have a good user experience—and more of than not, that comes down to the interaction they have with your agents. If there is a language barrier—or even if the agent has a heavy accent that your majority of callers have trouble understanding—that can cause user satisfaction problems. Allianz wanted to find a way to solve that problem.
03 Oct 2018