Vivint Finds Service Success with RightTime

Vivint provides home security, energy management, and automation services to more than 675,000 customers in the United States and Canada. The 400 agents in its customer service and retention groups support multiple products, but still have their share of downtime, a drain on productivity at most contact centers.

But not at Vivint. Since installing the Intradiem intraday management solution from Intradiem (formerly Knowlagent) in October, the Provo, Utah–based company has found time to deliver the training agents need to handle the company's various offerings and rapid release schedule, while maintaining service-level commitments and staffing levels.

Within five days of introducing intradiem, Vivint delivered 2,400 training and coaching sessions, all during idle time.

Use of Intradiem has increased every month since. In April alone, Vivint used roughly four hours of downtime per agent to complete 4,000 tasks and deliver 12,000 training sessions.

Average call handling time has decreased by 5 percent. The company has seen dramatic increases in its "fixed on the phone" metric, which measures the agents' ability to address the callers' issues during the initial conversation.

Prior to the implementation, Vivint's agents typically received one training session per week, and it was hard to tell which agents had completed particular sessions. All new hires were segmented out for training, and the rest of the session was filled in with "anyone we could [take] off of the phone during overstaffed periods," recalls Tim Izatt, Vivint's director of customer service.

"Before...it was extremely difficult for us to deliver the amount of training and coaching our agents require," he says. "We spent a lot of time worrying about how we'd get everybody off the phone for training, how we'd get the information to them."

Intradiem offers dynamic monitoring of call volumes and service levels to find and defragment idle time. Task indexing and management lets call center managers compile a library of tasks to be completed, tag them for certain metrics, and prioritize the agents to handle them.

Vivint supplements the scheduling tool with call recording technology from NICE Systems to help assess agent performance during customer interactions.

Now Vivint can take what was unproductive time to offer agents the information they need to be more effective. "We provide lots of performance-based refresher training, product-specific training, company and team communications, and call recording reviews. Agents are selected for training based on business type and current pain point areas," says Izatt, a former contact center agent. "The level of content we are able to deliver to agents is more in line with the complexity of our products, which...translates to more efficient and higher-quality customer interactions."

The benefits go beyond that, though. "Our agents are more highly utilized, but they're not tapped out," he states. "We have a performance-based pay scale, and people quickly realized that this tool helped them increase their pay."

Izatt says the implementation went off without a hitch, largely because Vivint's executive team quickly came to see "the value this tool could bring.

"Bringing in the executive team or all of the key stakeholders early in the process helps when implementing these programs," he suggests.

The Payoff

In the month of April alone, Vivint used the intraday management tool from Intradiem to do the following:

• complete 4,000 tasks outside of the normal call center routine;
• deliver 12,000 training sessions; and
• reclaim roughly four hours of downtime per agent.

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