Highlights:
- Streamlined operations: Consolidating disparate customer service communication tools into a single unified environment has significantly improved the team’s efficiency.
- Improved visibility: With Contact Center’s detailed reporting, Swanson’s customer service managers have more real-time visibility into call volume and trends than ever.
- Enhanced employee engagement and customer satisfaction: Using Contact Center’s Workforce Engagement Suite has helped the company improve agent engagement and its already excellent customer experience.
An award-winning natural-health company
Founded more than 50 years ago with a mission to provide pure and effective natural-health products at affordable prices, Swanson Health has more than delivered on that promise. Today, Swanson is one of the most trusted makers of vitamins, nutritional supplements, and other wellness solutions.
Across thousands of customer reviews on TrustPilot, for example, the company maintains an astonishing 4.7-out-of-5 average star rating—placing Swanson on the review site’s shortlist of “Excellent” companies.
Swanson has also earned dozens of industry awards—from such publications as ConsumerLab.com and Global Health & Pharma Magazine—for developing innovative, high-quality products. But the company is equally proud of its many industry awards for outstanding service—including, most recently, being named “Customer Service Department of the Year” at the 2021 Best in Biz Awards.
In fact, it was the company’s ongoing commitment to continuously improve the customer experience that led Swanson to RingCentral.
A communications solution capable of supporting a world-class customer service team
Emma Grotluschen, Senior Manager of Customer Service, notes that Swanson maintains an 85 NPS score for customer support—among the highest of any company in any industry.
But as Emma notes, one area where her team knew it could improve efficiencies—and, by extension, employee engagement and the customer experience—was with its IT communications infrastructure.
“We were using five or six different IT solutions to power our customer service department—different platforms for phone calls, customer chats, emails, etc. And because those services weren’t talking to each other, we weren’t seeing the holistic team data that our supervisors and agents could use to create a better customer experience.”
A trusted technology partner helps find the ideal solution
To help with their search, Emma’s team engaged IT partner Network & Technology Solutions Inc. (NTSI). The company’s owner, Sajid Guauri, explains: “Swanson asked us to present several options based on their specific goals—consolidating systems into a single environment, moving communications to the cloud, improving reporting and analytics capabilities, providing an admin dashboard the company could manage itself, and a few others.”
“NTSI did a great job narrowing the field of UCaaS and cloud contact center solutions for us, clearing away all but the best contenders based on what we needed,” says Emma. “And in every category that mattered, RingCentral kept popping to the top of the list.”
RingCentral Contact Center helps improve customer service efficiencies
Migrating Swanson’s 150 customer service agents onto the cloud-based RingCentral Contact Center platform allowed Emma’s team to streamline the department’s workflows by bringing all their core communication channels—phone, live chat, and email—into a single integrated environment. But, Emma adds, the platform provided several other benefits.
“Because all our customer channels are now connected in one cloud platform, we can easily adjust our teams and queues based on skills and call volume—adding an agent who’s covering a phone queue to a chat queue as backup, or the other way around. That’s allowing our supervisors to make each of these channels more responsive and efficient than ever.”
Swanson’s customer service department is also leveraging Contact Center’s Workforce Engagement and Quality Management tools to create even more workflow efficiencies, Emma explains.
“With our old system, we had to maintain our employee schedules in a spreadsheet. Now that we have RingCentral, our supervisors can do it all in their Contact Center environment, and it’s so much easier to build those schedules based on agents’ skills, areas of focus, and work hours.”
Emma also notes that another key benefit of RingCentral was moving Swanson’s customer service operation from onsite to the cloud. “This was our first time ever operating remotely,” she says. “RingCentral Contact Center’s cloud-based tools—the softphone that lets agents log in and take calls on their desktop computers, and the detailed reporting that lets our supervisors manage their teams from anywhere—allowed for a seamless transition to us becoming a remote service department.”
As for Contact Center’s Quality Management planner, she adds: “We can automatically assign new agents to supervisors to review their work, a capability we never had before. We can also easily create surveys, update the questions, and review agents’ scores anytime online. It lets us generate a wealth of data and gives us so much flexibility in how we view and analyze it. If I want, I can pull a report just showing how every agent has scored on question number five.”
Contact Center’s Recording feature proves a game-changer
Finally, Emma points out, the Call Recording capability in RingCentral Contact Center has delivered enormous operational benefits to the company’s customer service operation.
“Now that we can automatically record every call in RingCentral Contact Center, our supervisors have been able to review three times as many agents’ calls as before. That means we can give supervisors more context to assess performance and give our agents more relevant and detailed feedback, leading to greater agent engagement. All of these things work together to support our main goal—creating an excellent customer experience.”
Originally published Feb 24, 2022
