Dell Technologies - Contact Center Leader of the Year
Company: Dell Technologies
Company Description: Dell Technologies is Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream, and VMware. We’re a collective force of innovative capabilities trusted all over the world to provide technology solutions and services that accelerate digital transformation. We help you thrive.Agility, faster decision making, and smarter innovation. When you partner with Dell Technologies.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Contact Center Leader of the Year
Nomination Title: Dell Technologies | Recognizing - Jagadish Bangalore, Senior VP Consumer Services
Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since the beginning of July 2017 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:
Jagadish Bangalore (Jags as he is popularly known), is a twenty-year Dell veteran, who has played leadership roles across manufacturing, supply chain, design, quality, business intelligence and technical support. So, when Jags took over the leadership of the Global Premium Technical Support Organization in 2015-16 as Senior Vice President Consumer Services, we knew this complex and challenging business would benefit immensely from his wide-ranging experience as well as his “never-say-die” attitude. We have seen a steady increase in performance across all metrics spanning quality and cost since 2015-16. The first year was spent in building a strong foundation for delivery and the period from July 2017 to date has been unprecedented from a Contact Center performance standpoint.
The Consumer Premium Contact Center is fraught with challenges and inherent complexities:
- Customer Expectations are constantly increasing and Service Experience is becoming a key differentiator
- Margins are challenged and hence new investments are not prioritized in this space. There is need for frugal-innovation to survive
- The scale is large (1.5M customer contacts per annum) across geographies (Americas, Europe, ANZ, China, India), channels (voice, chat, e-mail), languages (support in 12 major languages) and 1200 unique issue-types
- The workforce of ~2.5K is spread across multiple locations and are mostly early-in-career professionals. ~45% of the workforce move on to pursue other career options every year, either within Dell or outside – which means constantly hiring entry-level professionals from the market and upskilling them to deliver the threshold level of performance
Jags has been an inspirational leader for this team and his ability to motivate and push his teams to punch above their weight has been a big contributing factor to the immaculate delivery by this contact center.
The key operational tenets have been: Customer, Process, People with Technology and Innovation being the key enablers in simplifying our processes to help our customers and our people.
Jags was instrumental in driving improvements in all these areas (some illustrations below but not an exhaustive list)
Customer
-Customer Experience Scores are a part of everyone’s appraisal measures. To drive a philosophy of collective ownership, Jags institutionalized the approach of attributing customer feedback scores to every person who had an interaction during the customer’s journey
-Support Assist Resolution tool-kit which resides on-the-box was developed through feedback channelized by Jags’ team and that has led to a reduction in customer effort during resolution
People / Team
-Robotic Process Automation for dispatch creation and Scrub Automation for failure mode analysis are examples where we have been able to reduce the time spent by agents and support staff by ~15%, thereby allowing them to focus on more complex problems
-In order to engage and motivate our workforce, Jags has put in place many initiatives like Career Progression Program, an internally funded Academy for Self-Development and S.M.I.L.E. a unique fun-based employee engagement program
-Engagement has also been driven through Legacy of Good activities which add more meaning and purpose to the Workforce
Process / Business
-Automation through Support Assist (resolution tool on the box) has led to a ~50% increase in our First Call Resolution rates
-Early Warning Systems using machine learning techniques have helped us arrest customer dissatisfaction earlier in their journey which has seen a ~14% reduction in customer dissatisfaction and a 12% reduction in escalation rates
Results
-Customer Experience up from 87.1% to 89.5% (which has never been achieved in the past)
-70% of our customers gave us a Perfect-10 score
-D-Sat reduced from 7.2% to 6.3%
-First Call Resolution up from 40% to 62%
-10% reduction in defects related to troubleshooting
-12% reduction in escalations
-Contacts up 7% while spend down 2% due to optimization and efficiencies
-eNPS @ 60% (against industry benchmark of 35%)
-Tell Dell (360 internal feedback) scores in the Champion Quadrant
-27000 volunteer hours, 92% participation in Legacy of Good activities
-$360k volunteer rewards matched by Dell based on employee participation