How America’s top telecommunications company used Cresta to close the sales gap between BPO partners

About

Cresta teamed up with the largest wireless carrier in the United States with 120.9 million subscribers and product divisions ranging from wireless phones and services to home internet. As a large, customer-focused organization, they employ thousands of customer service representatives as well as several BPO partners to supply excellent service across their dozens of teams.

Challenges

The company uses multiple BPO partners, all coaching and operating in silos. With no visibility into the variability of those operations and no controls to ensure consistency across partners, the telecommunications company was left with more questions than answers when they identified a large sales performance gap. They wanted to drive revenue-boosting behavior change and maintain consistent sales messaging. That wasn’t possible with their legacy tool, so they teamed up with Cresta.

Solution

When the telco partnered with Cresta, the initial focus was to improve revenue per chat (RPC). Within the company’s fiber-optic home internet, TV, and digital voice division, Cresta Agent Assist and Cresta Coach were deployed to support chat sales for home internet. Though the division has 400 agents in total, Cresta first rolled out 30 agents during a testing period.

After a hugely successful A/B pilot that reduced AHT by 10% and raised RPC 4% for the 30 agents testing Cresta, the company was excited to expand to all 400 agents. Six months later, the telco opted to onboard a second (larger) sales chat team. This time, it was 1000 agents.

With Cresta Coach, they finally had real-time visibility into BPO agent performance. By tracking and analyzing 100% of agent-customer conversations across BPO partners, Cresta Coach enables leaders to compare and contrast the partners on multiple chat level indicators, a mechanism they use to drive consistency.

With this increased visibility, managers can review team performance as well as individual adherence to key behaviors. Thanks to tools that empower managers to design custom coaching plans, Cresta Coach helps improve sales behaviors and increase RPC.

And the support extends to the conversations themselves. Cresta Agent Assist guides agents through processes in real time with hints, suggested responses, smart compose, and more. This helps agents scale consistent messages across divisions.

Results

Cresta Agent Assist

The first team to implement Cresta has seen about a 4% increase in RPC for sales chat. In April of 2022, they found that agents who adhered to one key behavior (assuming the sale) achieved a 50% higher conversion rate. Agent Assist provides real-time hints and suggestions so behaviors like these are reinforced and become second nature.

“Agents who have better overall hint engagement really have better [Gross Add] percentage. Gross Add is adding a line to your plan. Cresta is really helping out in terms of maximizing the sales from the conversations“
– Manager of Operations

Cresta Coach

Pockets of bottom-performing partner locations were identified, allowing leaders to roll out specific coaching plans to drive improvement. They’ve achieved so much success with Internet and Consumer Wireless that they are now in the process of deploying Cresta to a third chat team.

“I look at the data all different ways … I look at it at the site level, the agent level, the code level … I look at it all. But I definitely like this view because that means I can say, okay, this agent is 4%, or whatever. So what do we [need to] do to focus on this one agent?”
– Operations Manager

“… It makes it really easy. I mean, it’s an awesome coaching tool.”
– Leader of Partner Strategy

Cresta’s Real-Time Intelligence platform constantly learns and improves. As the telco expands use of Cresta Coach and Cresta Agent Assist to additional teams, the impact on core KPIs will grow in kind.

See Cresta in action