A leading provider of business information services, Thomson Reuters products include highly specialized, information-enabled software and tools for legal, tax, accounting and compliance professionals combined with the world’s most global news service—Reuters.

Contact center leaders wanted to understand how the introduction of remote agent onboarding and training, due to COVID-19, was affecting their business. Using Calabrio Analytics, they identified calls with long and multiple hold times, then worked to identify the reasons behind the call holds, with the goal of eliminating them.

Leaders started by analyzing a group of new agents participating in onboarding and product training while completely remote.

First, they tapped Calabrio Analytics to identify which of the calls completed by new agents had long and/or multiple holds, then they used Calabrio Desktop Analytics to understand exactly how the agents handled these particular scenarios.

Revealingly, contact center leaders discovered the new agents:

• Maintained an average handle time that was significantly above target; and
• Relied upon team members—instead of the proper resources—for the assistance they needed to answer customer questions while callers waited on hold.

To resolve the issues, contact center leaders built a virtual training program focused on troubleshooting and using the proper resources to efficiently find answers.

Thomson Reuters’ new program allows its Tax & Accounting Professionals business unit to potentially save up to 3% of its contact center’s annual operating budget.

In addition, contact center leaders witnessed a significant, measurable increase in the number of times new agents utilized programmer resources and additional critical thinking skills to answer customer questions.