The Home Depot Creating the Best CX For Customers
While you have many goals as a call center leader, ultimately, you want to create the best experience for your customers.
Satisfied customers keep coming back, they refer your business to their friends, and they can become a more powerful brand advocate than even the best advertising campaign. So how do you ensure every person a customer interacts with is performing to the best of their ability?
For Karen Lane, a Customer Care Supervisor at Home Depot, the answer is easy: AmplifAI.
Recently, AmplifAI team member David Arellano sat down for a call with Karen to discuss what drives her team’s success. You can listen to their entire 12-minute conversation here.
The hidden cost of preparing useful feedback
Supervisors must continuously work with their associates if they want each contact center representative to perform at their highest level. For Karen, this meant weekly one-on-one feedback meetings with each team member.
Preparing for these weekly meetings was incredibly time-consuming. Karen said it often took 30 minutes or more to review reports and fill out forms before the meeting. Multiply that time by the number of associates. Then, add on additional time for creating and sending follow-up materials.
You’re looking at a significant chunk of the supervisor’s workweek – and that’s not even taking into account the meetings themselves. Think of what else they could accomplish with that extra time.
Better coaching in less time
Just a month or so before the pandemic hit, Home Depot leadership invited Karen to try AmplifAI. Always on the hunt for opportunities to improve customer experience, this would be a good way to test out its effectiveness against their teams without the product.
Karen walked through the essential metrics to her team, and she invited AmplifAI to listen in to some of the agents’ calls to get an even more comprehensive view of the customer experience.
After being introduced to the platform, Karen's first thought was, “I don’t ever want AmplifAI to go away!"
AmplifAI revolutionized the way Karen approached her one-on-ones with her team. Instead of investing hours pulling performance reports to prepare for her Monday meetings, she now had on-demand, real-time access to her associates’ metrics at all times.
Besides being a time-waster, the old way of handling these weekly meetings didn’t always encourage great conversations between managers and their team. Now team members have constant access to their stats and metrics, and they know what to expect when meeting their manager.
Plus, the old process of handling performance follow-up forms could get messy. Often these papers ended up shoved in a drawer or tossed in a trash can, making it challenging to identify and track improvement over time.
With everything now stored in AmplifAI, associates can see, access, and review the results of all their one-on-ones in a straightforward dashboard – and so can the managers.
Agents are even more efficient while working from home
Like many companies, the pandemic sent a large portion of Home Depot’s employees home, including the customer care department. While there was an adjustment period, Karen says that being at home, she’s even more connected to her agents.
Besides her weekly one-on-ones, Karen can dedicate at least 30-45 minutes every day to speaking with her agents. The addition of AmplifAI has also removed a lot of the time agents wasted waiting for direction from their manager since agents can immediately see what they’re doing well and where they need improvement without waiting to speak to a supervisor.
But beyond workplace performance concerns, the team can connect on a more personal level. Karen leveraged many of the other tools within the AmplifAI platform. For instance, the wellness check feature was beneficial to understand how agents were dealing with the pandemic and to ask how they were doing with the transition to being at home.
“Since we’ve been home, we talk more,” Karen says. “It’s more quality time that we get to spend together.”
Because Karen’s department hasn’t suffered any changes since before the pandemic, upper leadership has announced that the customer care team is self-sufficient and can keep working from home. Karen accredits a large portion of that success to the use of AmplifAI.
Fostering engagement and competition
Teams will always have top and bottom performers, no matter how great the manager or coach is. Increasing the number of top performers and decreasing the number of bottom performers is a constant, ever-evolving struggle.
Previously, customer care associates could only see their performance results. But with AmplifAI, agents can compare their scores with the rest of the team and even the rest of the department.
These AmplifAI dashboards and scorecards gamify workplace performance. This taps into our human need for competition – the excitement of looking at the list and thinking, “Sharon’s ranked number 6? Well, I know I’m better than Sharon.”
Karen says she is consistently the number one supervisor for usually three out of four quarters. She attributes this success to having the right tools to show her team members where they’re at and provide constant suggestions to drive improvement.
“If you don’t know where you’re at,” Karen says, “How do you know where you want to go?”
Improving voice of the customer through call reporting
While there are several important metrics for the Home Depot care team, she says the top one right now is analyzing the Voice of the Customer (VoC). For Karen’s team, the VoC survey looks at two things:
- How does the customer feel about the agent who assisted them?
- How likely is the customer to shop at Home Depot again?
It’s always important to know how the customer leaves the conversation feeling. Home Depot wants to ensure the client left with the best possible customer experience they could have received.
Karen’s team is now leveraging the call recording feature to analyze customer cases. Now that these call reviews can be documented and detailed within AmplifAI, it’s streamlined the process.
What’s the best benefit of AmplifAI? The people!
Deciding to purchase new software or tools for your company is tricky, so we asked Karen what she would say to someone considering AmplifAI for their environment. We expected her to talk about the reporting dashboards, the library of additional tools, or even how it’s improved her relationship with her team members.
And while all of those areas are important, when she spoke with her colleagues, Karen said the thing she’s loved most about AmplifAI was the team.
From the beginning, the AmplifAI team has been a true partner working to help Home Depot achieve its goals. Karen says everyone she’s worked with at AmplifAI has been authentic and genuine in their support.
Plus, they’ve always provided quick responses to any messages Karen and the team have had about the product. “Even if most of the questions end up being user error on my part,” says Karen.
When you decide to purchase a platform and spend a lot of money, it’s essential to know you have someone ready and willing to help you at every step along the way.
While it’s not always possible, Karen says it means a lot to know the AmplifAI team is receptive to suggestions for improvement like adding additional reports or adjusting the behavior of specific actions.
"It’s a win-win all the way around"
While Karen says anybody would be pleased with the type of service they get from AmplifAI, they should also feel confident that leadership will be happier because they save time. Plus, “Your agents will be well-informed,” says Karen, “And who doesn’t want to take care of their associates?”
Happier leadership, better coaching for management, and more knowledgeable care agents – AmplifAI is a win-win for everybody.
