How Aptive Drove Over $2 Million in Customer Retention with Cresta’s Real-Time AI
Summary
- $2.37 million in additional annual revenue in the 2 years since deploying Cresta
- 9% increase in save rate on cancellation calls
- Helped to refine and streamline playbook, increasing adherence over 10% in empathy and discovery
Challenges
Aptive Environmental, a leader in pest control services, faced significant challenges in their contact center operations, leading to inefficient and inconsistent processes that limited visibility across the organization.
Lack of Self-Service Capabilities: With limited investment in self-service options, customers were required to call in for assistance, adding pressure to the contact center. This reliance on live support increased operational costs and hindered customer experience (CX) at key touchpoints.
Inconsistent Call Handling: Without standardized processes, agents provided varying responses to common inquiries, leading to inconsistent service quality. As Evan Unick, Vice President of Customer Solutions, noted, “Even just asking a simple question like, ‘How do we schedule an appointment for a customer?’ would get 43 different answers.”
Limited Visibility and Inefficient Processes: Supervisors struggled to efficiently review calls, leading to bottlenecks in evaluating agent performance and improving customer service. According to Tiffany Goaslind, Customer Solutions Director, “We spent a lot of time just looking for calls…it was a granular process that got us nowhere.”
Retention Challenges: Aptive’s churn problem was exacerbated by a lack of real-time feedback and poor quality management (QM) processes, which weakened customer satisfaction and retention efforts amid a highly competitive landscape.
Solutions
Aptive turned to Cresta to resolve these challenges by implementing a platform of AI-powered functionality, empowering the entire organization with Agent Assist, transcription, real-time conversational intelligence, and more. This strategic move brought several improvements.
Real-Time Agent Guidance: Cresta equips agents with real-time prompts and suggestions, ensuring consistency and standardizing customer interactions across Saves and Renewals, which plays a crucial role in driving revenue and retention. A key part of this solution was guiding agents through discovery to understand why a customer wanted to cancel, then offering tailored solutions based on Cresta’s Hints. These Hints helped agents show empathy, ask the right questions, and present the most relevant offers in the correct sequence.
By identifying whether agents were presenting high-cost options first or starting with lower-cost alternatives, Cresta optimized the order of offers, maximizing the likelihood of retaining the customer while managing costs effectively.
Enhanced Quality Management and Performance Management: The implementation of Cresta AI allowed for consolidated call reviews and accurate transcription, enabling Aptive’s supervisors to monitor and provide feedback effectively and quickly. This real-time feedback loop has improved both agent performance and customer experience.
Standardized Playbook for Retention and Proactive Renewals: Cresta AI helped Aptive create and implement a standardized retention playbook, providing agents with a consistent framework to handle cancellations and retention efforts. This resulted in more effective save strategies and improved overall retention rates – to the tune of millions of dollars.
The impact of Cresta AI on Aptive’s operations has been substantial and far-reaching.<
Improved Customer Retention and Significant Financial Gains
Aptive’s save rate on inbound calls improved from a goal of 42.2% to an actual rate of 46%, highlighting the effectiveness of Cresta’s AI in getting every agent speaking the same language, and providing top-tier customer service.
As a result of this substantial increase in saves, Aptive has generated $2.37 million in additional revenue annually.
Increased Adherence to Key Behaviors
Agent adherence to empathy guidelines rose from 33% to 60% within two months and reached 79% by the fourth month. Similarly, adherence to discovery behaviors improved from 28% to 40%, eventually reaching 59% over four months. This resulted in more empathetic and efficient handling of customer calls, enhancing overall customer satisfaction.
Efficiency in Operations
Supervisors experienced a dramatic increase in efficiency, with the ability to review calls in under a minute, compared to the previous lengthy process. This efficiency allowed for more focused coaching and rapid implementation of strategic changes, as noted by Tiffany Goaslind, Customer Solutions Director:
“Our supervisor’s ability to type in a keyword and see how often their team is talking about that, their ability to review a call in under five minutes or actually under a minute, all of that is night and day from where we were.”
Data-Driven Decisions
Aptive’s ability to analyze and act on data in real time enabled more strategic and targeted customer interactions. Cameron Bristow, Quality Assurance Manager, noted that “being a lot more data-driven with Cresta has allowed us to adjust our approach and get more strategic, leveling up our customer experience.”
Enhanced Agent Experience and Performance
Agents responded positively to Cresta’s real-time guidance, which not only improved their QA scores and performance but also led to increased bonuses, creating a more motivated and engaged workforce. As Goaslind observed, “Our agents loved Cresta… they saw their QA scores go up, and their bonuses increased.”