SR.Teleperformance, headquartered in France and operating in 36 countries, is a worldwide leader in outsourced CRM, telemarketing, and teleservices. Teleperformance Netherlands offers CRM and telemarketing to clients in the Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg). It also carries out market research into the performance of call centers, using a combination of customer satisfaction surveys and mystery shopping programs.
Due to a number of technical difficulties, Teleperformance Netherlands' market research activities were often compromised by poor quality and incomplete data. Many key activities were time-consuming, error-prone, and required the skills of a specialist database programmer.
Teleperformance Netherlands implemented In2quest to simplify and speed up the production of surveys and provide more accurate data capture during telephone surveys and mystery shopping projects. Results are moved into PASW Statistics for analysis. Key findings are then pasted directly into reports produced in Microsoft® Word and e-mailed to clients.
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Implementing two integrated SPSS Inc. products has provided a much-needed performance boost to the Dutch company's innovative call center monitoring program. Using In2quest and PASW Statistics has enabled Teleperformance Netherlands to react quickly to client demands and deliver high-quality information, while overcoming a number of technical issues.
As specialists in all aspects of telemarketing and CRM, offering a new market research service to measure the quality of service delivery at its clients' call centers was a logical extension to its services. Using a twin-track approach, Teleperformance Netherlands combines mystery shopping with customer satisfaction surveys. This ensures that both sides of the equation are examined: Is the company delivering what it said it would? And is what it delivers making its customers happy?
In the mystery shopping phase, trained interviewers pose as customers with genuine reasons to phone the call center. They evaluate the extent to which the service received is as the client has determined it should be. In the customer satisfaction phase, actual customers are called and asked about their experiences and feelings.
The service was launched using an internally created computer-based system, linked to a relational database. This caused a number of worrisome problems. Setting up the data capture screens and survey scripts required the specialist skills of a database programmer, which delayed the start of new projects. When interviewing eventually started, there were more problems, according to Pieterjan Mols, market survey manager.
"What we noticed was that we were missing a lot of information because the agent did not know the answer and would skip over some questions; so the quality of the information went down. It meant a lot of mistakes in the fieldwork—and then there were problems with the database. It was difficult to know what you were looking at and, in any case, we had to wait until the end of the survey to find the mistakes. There was a lot of frustration." Teleperformance now uses In2quest as a small-scale CATI solution on anything between five and 20 networked interviewing stations. Customer satisfaction interviews are programmed as standard CATI interviews. A script is also provided for mystery shopping interviews, but instead of capturing answers, agents are prompted to enter their own evaluations and comments directly into the In2quest screen. PASW Statistics is used to analyze the data and produce a series of tables and charts to make it easy to see where call centers are performing well and where improvement or change is needed.
Mols saw a marked improvement in project quality after switching to In2quest. "Now we can monitor every step, and the data is visible immediately. If an agent makes a mistake, we can point this out or provide more training. What we have now is a perfect database, with no missing answers, and everything absolutely OK."
Now we can monitor every step, and the data is visible immediately. If an agent makes a mistake, we can point this out or provide more training. What we have now is the perfect database, with no missing answers, and everything absolutely OK.
— Pieterjan Mols
Market Survey Manager
SR.Teleperformance
Mols estimates that using In2quest and PASW Statistics has reduced the amount of time required for every project by 50 percent, with improvements at every step of the way. Building a new survey used to take two days: it now requires one, using In2quest. More importantly, he was dependent on the availability of a database programmer, which, in reality, meant waiting a week. Now he is completely self-sufficient. The half day or more he used to allocate to checking the data and making corrections is now down to half an hour. The data is now 99 percent complete, whereas before only 75 percent to 80 percent was collected; and, on some questions, this figure was even lower.
"Sometimes we have to react very quickly," Mols continued. "In the past, when a client called, we could not give an immediate answer because we had to rely on the help of a programmer. Two weeks ago, a client called on Wednesday with a new project, and on the Thursday he had the report: 150 interviews, imported into PASW Statistics, cut and pasted into a report in Word, then e-mailed to the client!"
Mols has found many other benefits. As In2quest is so much easier to learn, he has more people trained to set up projects, giving greater resilience to his operation. It took everyone several of days’ training and the experience of just three live projects to feel completely at ease with the program.
"For the agents, this program is very easy—dare I say, 'idiot proof.' They are very happy with the tool, and the screens look a lot nicer too."
As a result of these improvements, the market survey team has not only protected revenues that were under pressure, but has even seen them increase by 10 percent to 20 percent from existing clients. The time savings has considerably increased the capacity of the department for new work and has given them the opportunity to use the software for some of their outbound telemarketing work as well.
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