To ensure members receive the world-class service AAA promises, eight virtual quality assurance (QA) analysts and one QA manager continually evaluate over 800 busy agents and provide input on member experience research and process improvements.

After AAA’s QA team discovered via Calabrio Speech Analytics that the calls members made from highways maintained the lowest quality score of all calls and took substantially more time for agents to resolve, leaders quickly set out to find out why and fix it. After all, highway calls posed significant safety issues for both members and AAA technicians, making it imperative to resolve these calls faster, not slower, than others.

They promptly formed a cross-functional team and identified four focus areas for improving the processes associated with the highway-caller experience:

• Member and technician safety
• Location capture and logging
• Member satisfaction
• Operational efficiency

Now it was time to pinpoint — then fix — the inconsistent ways agents interacted with members stranded on highways who called for help.

Using Calabrio Desktop Analytics, the AAA Northeast cross-functional team tracked which available internal resources its agents relied upon when assisting those callers.

One of the key discoveries made by the team revolved around the Global Positioning System (GPS) locator agents had at their disposal: instead of using it, agents often resorted to asking members irrelevant questions about their location because they weren’t well-trained on how to use the GPS tool and how long it would take to use it.

To minimize the amount of time AAA members and technicians spent alongside the highway, AAA leaders identified — then eliminated from the required call flow — four unnecessary questions agents were asking callers.

And, to increase usage of the GPS locator tool, contact center leaders partnered with AAA’s training team to launch a new GPS toolkit for agents that features expanded instructions on how to use the GPS locator, as well as helpful tips on how to accurately log the calculated latitude and longitude into AAA’s call system.

By using analytics to improve several key processes, AAA Northeast made its operations more efficient and its members’ highway emergencies safer for everyone involved. The AHT for all calls decreased by 14 seconds, while the AHT for highway calls shrank by a whopping 53 seconds.