Case Study: Sekure Merchant Solutions Reduces Agent Attrition

The Organization

Sekure Merchant Solutions is a provider of merchant processing solutions. Servicing over 20,000 businesses monthly, Sekure has experienced substantial growth of 300%+ over the last 10 years.

Their business requires significant outbound calling activity, with almost 120,000 calls a day made across multiple locations. Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, and founded in 2006, Sekure is on the forefront of leveraging technology to improve productivity and operational efficiency and to turn their culture into an employee-centric environment.

Motivation for Change

Sekure’s continual focus on looking for ways to revolutionize operations led them to the booming trend of incorporating game mechanics into the core of the call centre.

They set out to determine the best game mechanics solution provider by looking for a vendor who met the highest standards in product robustness and effectiveness, had deep roots in the call centre industry, was feature rich to avoid product fatigue, included machine learning, and had a strong coaching and learning management system component.

After vetting the major vendors in the market, Sekure chose the Alvaria WEM Suite and Alvaria Motivate.

The Alvaria Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) Suite gives organizations the tools they need to maximize efficiency, monitor, improve and reward agent performance and reduce turnover. The WEM Suite adds employee-centric agent experience capabilities such as game mechanics. This results in the most powerful comprehensive workforce engagement solution in the market.

The Alvaria WEM Suite includes:

Alvaria Performance

A high-performance contact centre management and reporting tool used to collect, correlate and display information relevant to each user’s role and responsibilities. This flexible tool can quickly reveal valuable new insights by enabling the tracking of personal and group performance vs. goal using a wide range of metrics with data sourced from many contact centre systems.

Alvaria Quality

Assess quality of voice and text-based customer interactions drawing from multiple sources of quality including supervisors, QA analysts, customers and others. These features help enterprises enhance customer satisfaction, improve agent effectiveness and comply with increasing legal requirements and security concerns.

Alvaria Workforce

Easy-to-use forecasting, planning, scheduling, employee self-service and real-time management tool that ensures every employee and supervisor is productive, engaged and delivering an exceptional customer experience at the lowest cost.

Alvaria Motivate

Increase productivity and reduce employee turnover across all generations – from Boomers and Millennials to the fast-growing Gen-Z workforce. Transform daily routines into rewarding rivalries that give everyone a reason to do their best.

Conquering Agent Attrition by Elevating the Employee Experience

Call centre dynamics are always changing – that has been the nature of the beast all the way back to the “switchboard” era. In recent years the pace of change seems to have intensified, from regulatory requirements to technology advancement to the employee spectrum itself.

There is also an increasing amount of data available to power operational decision-making. Modern-day call centres seem to have found the sweet spot to managing the tide of changes by ensuring they are optimized on all fronts.

Even with the myriad of changes within today’s call centres, the highs and lows associated to the call centre business are still very familiar. This is especially true when it comes to the factors that affect business economics. Top and bottom line alignment remains the guiding light to most organizational agendas.

Frequently, budget meetings are dominated by how managers plan to grow the “top line”. However, the deep, dark element to focus on is the silent bottom-line killer: agent turnover. Nobody likes to touch this, mainly because it is so hard to fix. That is, until now.

Read on to learn how one organization leveraged game mechanics to creatively reduce employee attrition across the ever-changing generational spectrum and used those recouped savings to fuel their growth.

“I looked at all the major gamification providers and Alvaria Motivate was by far the best solution we found in the market. Their product is the most feature robust and they totally understand the call centre industry” Matt Coffey, General Manager, Technical Projects, Sekure Merchant Solutions.

The Challenge

Sekure Merchant Solutions launched Alvaria Motivate in their corporate headquarters, the home to over 250 agents.

The initial challenge presented to Alvaria was multifaceted: to provide an intuitive solution to increase operational efficiency, improve agent and supervisor productivity on critical key performance indicators, enhance transparency into critical organizational goals across all employee levels, and expand their existing ultra-competitive activity with more options.

However, their number-one goal was to assist in reducing agent turnover.

In order to benchmark results and provide a business case for future gamification expansion, Sekure’s management team provided historical data on agent turnover from their WFM platform. Additional data such as critical agent and manager activity KPIs, productivity metrics and agent onboarding time were all provided.

The Solution

Alvaria Motivate prepared five unique interfaces, comprising one TV Leaderboard application which broadcasts results and competitions, recognizes achievements, and delivers ad hoc ticker tape messages across 16 individual screens throughout the call centre.

Additionally, Alvaria created four distinct user interfaces that align features to each level of Sekure’s organizational hierarchy.

The core of the game mechanics solution was to clearly and quantifiably display goals for each agent, team and supervisor through unique KPI scorecards. These goals were the catalysts to driving foundational decisions to leverage game mechanics and affect a desired behavioural outcome.

To assist in boosting outcome efforts, all KPI scorecards leverage machine learning by tapping historical data to forecast an agent, team or supervisor’s likelihood of achieving their goals. These scorecards also link to coaching and a learning management solution to tightly tie real-time agent output to teaching.

In ensuring Sekure’s ability to amplify their ultra-competitive and rewards culture, the Alvaria solution was stacked with competition game mechanics that tied both monetary and non-monetary rewards. Sekure’s management identified an internal game master who thoroughly understood the call centre goals and was empowered to leverage game mechanics to ensure those goals were achieved.

Profitability & Productivity Benefit

The impact of Alvaria Motivate was profound. Revenue and profitability broke record highs. Within three months, Sekure Merchant Solutions was achieving greater revenue and profitability than ever before.

Revenue Graph from Alvaria Case Study

Sekure’s KPI focal point revolved around two main agent activities: Leads Generated per agent and Lead Conversion.

Efficiency Benefit

Management efficiency skyrocketed and immediately dropped hard dollars to the bottom line. Sekure calculated they were able to save 1,500 management hours.

What made the efficiency gain possible:

• Supervisors hit their team goals 40–60% more often.
• Reduced deployment costs by $35,000.
• First day on the job exit interviews asking if the new hire understood their goals skyrocketed from a rate of 45% to 90% after implementing Alvaria Motivate.

Agent Retention Benefit

However, nothing was as significant as the impact Alvaria Motivate had on agent turnover – a staggering net effect of 62%. This was in large part due to leveraging WFM data and Alvaria Motivate.

Alvaria Case Study Agent Retention Graph

The Results

DEFEATING THE AGENT TURNOVER BEAST

“It all starts with our clients establishing the goals they want to achieve,” says Brett Brosseau, Alvaria Vice President, WEM Product Marketing. Sekure Merchant Solutions, under the leadership of Matt Coffey, GM of Technical Projects, did just that. They established their macro key performance indicators and intelligently distilled them down to data points that were critical for agents to achieve.

Sekure wanted to ensure there was focus on critical management activity as well. By layering multiple interfaces across the entire employee hierarchy, the company was able to leverage the full spectrum of game mechanics to ensure maximum organizational engagement.

The ultimate result was certainly top-line results that were captured in record-breaking sales and revenue. Sekure was also able to impact critical operational targets, allowing it to substantially reduce agent turnover and make immediate sustainable contributions to their bottom line.

“I wouldn’t attribute our success to just one aspect of Alvaria Motivate. Their solution came at us from so many angles, which is why I believe the success we had – and continue to have – is sustainable.” Matt Coffey, General Manager, Technical Projects, Sekure Merchant Solutions

This case study has been re-published by kind permission of Alvaria

Author: Guest Author