Nomination for Best Community Happiness Center Award
1. Strategy and Principles
Mansions’ strategic initiatives are the programs that help us and our clients to accomplish strategic objectives. One of the main strategic objectives is to retain our customers by satisfying their continuously changing needs related to service quality, service delivery, and the quality of products we deliver to them.
The arrival of the COVID19 pandemic followed by the chain of COVID-related global events has significantly changed the business landscape leaving no businesses un-affected and Mansions is not an exclusion. Within our organization, we had several workshops with the key management personnel brainstorming on the development of the new strategies and new focus points that would help us to satisfy our clients making them happy. Below are the key points of our new strategy:
2. Standards and Innovation
During years of managing communities and clients’ accounts, we noticed that one of the most critical success criteria is effective communication. Our company’s value proposition is ‘Customer-focused, driven by solutions’ assumes frequent, personal, proactive, and transparent communication through effective and simple communication channels.
For us to measure the effectiveness of our communication we measure the following parameters:
3. Systems and Metrics
Our strategy implementation included multiple steps that allowed us successfully integrate our software-driven solution with our service delivery model. The steps included:
- Converting all our land-line offices and building telephonic infrastructure into a virtual telephonic network.
- Assigning virtual phone numbers to every building/department and communicating this to all our clients and stakeholders like services providers, government entities, etc.
- Designing an Interactive Voice Menu (IVR) for every number that would include options for the callers e.g. Customer Service, Technical Service Requests, Accounting, etc.
- Measuring the volume of incoming calls, recording the calls, and measuring various other parameters like duration of the call, nature of requests, etc.
- Re-designing our internal business processes for all the standard services provided by our company and programming them into CRM software to make these processes fully automated.
- Integrate our newly built virtual telephonic infrastructure with our CRM aligning customer requests with our internal business processes.
Our inbound analytics tools help analyze incoming calls and requests through web forms to effectively allocate incoming requests, store customer history, and synchronize data with our CRM. This minimizes human error when processing requests using an automated notification tool. An IVR (Interactive Voice Menu) is used to help a caller to complete their requests quickly and effectively and convert them into tasks for our internal processing. The tasks are distributed to the right departments based on the nature of the request.
Once information about the calls is gathered, the statistics and reporting tools allow us to get in-depth data on every phone call to and from our business. Get detailed information using parameters like: “operator name,” “customer phone number,” “date of call,” “call duration,” “call status: received or missed,” whatever is important to us to measure the efficiency of our services.
Any phone call can be listened to or downloaded for further observation. Track calls for a specific employee or the entire office. Make informed business decisions regarding customer service and much more.
For example, we can sort the calls by duration, waiting time for a customer’s response on the line, the fact of an employee’s response, by the number from which (or to which) they ate calling, hours and days, distribution scenario.
Using the reports, we can evaluate the quality and density of processed calls, find problems when receiving calls, and ways to eliminate them. For example, whether it is worth making changes to the staff, how best to distribute the workload, and whether the customer service strategy needs to be revised.
Re-thinking and re-designing our internal business processes allowed us to simplify and streamline them minimizing the time for processing customers’ complaints.
CallGear + Bitrix24 is a CRM integration, combining end-to-end analytics with integrated CallGear communication channels and virtual PBX (Private Branch Exchange). This tandem creates a single workspace for our call center, community management department, accounts department, and administration and happiness department. Bitrix24 part provides the following features: automatic creation of Leads and Tasks from initial requests, transfer to a personal manager/department, history and context of previous requests, and call listening. It provides the following features for the administration and happiness department: end-to-end analytics from each community, chats, inquiries, and targets.
Our administration and happiness department monitors our employees’ and departments efficiency using advance Bitrix24 analytics.
Each employee’s efficiency can be further evaluated in detail by looking at the number of tasks (complaints) processed, completed, and overdue.
4. Effectiveness and Evidence
Our main objective is to satisfy our customer’s needs and maintain customer happiness at the highest level. As discussed above, we recognize that effective communication with our customers, optimized response time, delivery of quality response are some of the most important parameters to monitor to keep our clients happy. Our customized solution helps the company maintaining interaction with our clients automatically processing their requests and complaints.
The chart below illustrates the results of incoming calls/service tickets count from various clients (buildings) that are converted into management tasks and processed by our back-office.
From the chart above seen that the number of complaints from various clients is uneven which helps our management team adequately distribute our company resources to effectively address all the complaints.
The chart below shows how the incoming calls and service tickets are distributed without the right use of analytics. It is seen the workload assigned same tier employees is not balanced creating employees’ time utilization and effectiveness issues.
The chart below shows the optimized solution that Mansions was able to achieve after redistributing the calls and service tasks with the help of the new software solution.
The right call load distribution helped us to balance employees’ workload associated with the customer service allowing our employees to conduct better service without spikes and extensive workload.
The chart below illustrates the results of the optimization of our internal business processes that allowed us to reduce the time before the call is answered (call answer waiting time).
The quicker the call is answered, the less our clients spend waiting for our staff to accept their complaint. The less time our clients spend waiting, the more satisfied or happy they become with our services. Improving overall waiting time also helps to optimize our employees’ time making it more efficient. The less time it takes to answer the call, the more calls our company receives hence capturing more requests and complaints per unit of time.
Implementation of the new software solution allowed us to reduce the number of lost calls, calls that were previously not captured by our management team causing some important issues to slide away from our attention. Capturing 100% of the calls is the ideal scenario, however, a reduction of 23% in lost calls within 90 days is considered as a good result. Chart 5 below illustrates the results before and after the implementation of our new strategy solution.
Having our customers reaching us whenever they need to is paramount for us. Reducing the number of lost calls number by 23% significantly increases the number of accepted requests and complaints allowing us to serve better by resolving a larger number of our requests and thus making our customers happy.
Considering that we lose some calls does not always mean we can’t process our customers’ requests. Having CallGear IVR connected to Bitrix24 CRM we can still capture the lost calls requests by identifying the customer’s IDs and processing them through our CRM.
Chart 6 above illustrates the results achieved by the implementation of the combined CallGear and Bitrix24 solution which reveals an improved performance in processing the lost calls. Out of all the lost calls we were previously processing 74% leaving 26% of calls completely lost and not attended by our management team, but by connecting CallGear to our tailormade CRM we improved this number by 14%. Implementation of the new solution allowed us to improve the number of unprocessed calls hence capturing more clients requests and complaints. Although we still lose about 12% of all the missed calls, we believe this number will be significantly reduced over the next six months. Capturing clients’ requests and complaints from their first approach is a great indication of the excellent customer service which make our clients satisfied and happy with our performance and makes our management team more efficient.
5. Business Continuity and Resilience
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is having an unprecedented and unpredictable impact on the world’s economy. The pandemic has driven the world toward adapting to the current circumstances regardless of the business, sector, or industry. And Mansions is not an exclusion.
We realize that technology has allowed for extensive growth in almost every human interactive field in the last few decades. The use of information sharing and communication technology by customers is very significant in today’s era of the global market. We also realize that the technology and IT solutions are the only hope for bringing the services level back on track.
Incorporating state-of-the-art technology into our client communication and business processes will permit Mansions to reduce the gap, caused by the pandemic, between us and the clients allowing our clients to remain in clause reach with our service teams, as well as it will create an opportunity for our management teams to effectively serve our clients by addressing their needs quicker and more efficient than ever before.