Toyota Connected (TC) provides a comprehensive suite of telematics and vehicle mobility solutions to Toyota Motors North America, Mazda and Subaru. Toyota Connected’s Service Platform enables connected car technologies worldwide. The Service Operations organization consists of multiple call centers and back office operations located in Michigan and Canada.
Toyota Connected engaged with Call Center Optimization Group (CCOG) in 2017 to establish their Customer Service organization from the ground up. Toyota Connected was purely a technology company and did not know where to start on this effort. When CCOG began working with TC, we quickly realized three things. First, TC did not have any visibility into how the organization was going to service Toyota and Lexus customers. Second, they did not know who was going to service their contact center operation and they were 6 months behind schedule on deciding. Lastly, they did not have an internal team to translate the telematics requirements into contact center processes and training.
Our first task on this project was to quickly vet the contact centers that were in contention for the project. We led the due diligence process, collaborated with Toyota’s team on requirements, guided TC’s senior leadership on vendor selection, negotiated the contracts and directly managed the implementation and integration of the service provider. In parallel, we quickly built a highly effective, multi-discipline team of call center and service operations professionals. Within 2 weeks of TC’s request, we were bringing our team members to bear on the project and beginning our work. Our team of call center consultants collaborated throughout Toyota Motors North America and Toyota Connected, learning how the CORE services worked, defining the customer journey for each service, developing all of the foundational processes and procedures for the company, building a 6 week initial training program and delivering the training program to over 200 trainees in 2 sites (Detroit and Montreal). This has turned into a 2 year + partnership that we are proud to continue to support. Below, we’ve provided bullet points on some of our key achievements and highlights:
Responsible for judiciously leading (TC’s) service operations strategy over time to include growth, increases in scope and capability.
Established a multi-site, fully operational, 600 seat call center service organization in less than 6 months – meeting the very aggressive “go live” date
Designed and documented over 30 primary service processes, containing 237 individual use cases to service – Over 1,000 pages of material
Saved Toyota Connected over $40 million by negotiating very favorable rates and terms in the Master Services Agreement and primary Statement of Work
Facilitated 13, six-week training classes to over 200 trainees
Currently working to establish a new site in Mexico to support Latin America
Led the creation and implementation of the organization’s Quality Management program including the scoring methodology, Voice of the Customer components, reporting and data development, creation of an ongoing defect reduction culture using Six Sigma and LEAN principles and more.
The Call Center Optimization Group Team was recognized as Toyota Connected’s “Most Effective” team for 2019.
Envision EMI delivers a wide range of career exploration and leadership development programs to elementary, middle, high school, and college students. These programs are located at top colleges across the country and are taught by subject matter experts with customized curriculum designed for each program. Envision’s Office of Admissions historically has consisted of a combination of in-house and third-party call centers located in the mid-west and mid-Atlantic regions.
Envision engaged with Call Center Optimization Group (CCOG) in 2017 to evaluate the call center’s overall performance. Envision had leveraged a couple different third-party vendors in recent years in addition to a small in-house team to deliver their call center sales and support but were not seeing the results they wanted. Employee performance was inconsistent, attrition was higher than industry averages, and sales targets were not being met. CCOG was initially tasked to create a playbook for the organization to identify how to improve the overall performance of the internal call center. The process involved evaluating communication flow between marketing and Ops as well as assessing the existing workforce to ensure the human capital was aligned to optimize performance. Building the playbook involved interviewing people throughout the organization, reviewing the existing technology stack to ensure data flow and integrity, and numerous other milestone reviews with management.
There were several recommendations coming out of the playbook analysis which were presented to Envision:
Organizational Structure: The Call Center at Envision did not have the right organizational structure. We performed a deep dive assessment and made a number of recommendations which Envision completely adopted. Most notably, Envision did not have the right Operations Leader running the contact center and we recommended a change. CCOG assisted in the recruiting, vetting, and interviewing of the new Director of Sales who began in 2018. She helped drive the transformation of the internal sales team to consistently outperform Envision’s 3rd party providers. So much so, that Envision decided to bring the entire sales process in-house in 2020. Her success led to her promotion as a VP of Operations for the parent company (WorldStrides).
Operational Environment: Envision needed to create a successful contact center environment to improve sales. The in-house agents were on a different floor than the rest of the organization in a space which was not designed to be a contact center. CCOG recommended changing the layout of the workspace, creating a traditional open sales floor with more energy, transparency, and accountability than the previous fragmented workspace which was dark and depressing. We also suggested adding new computers and headsets for agents to facilitate a more streamlined interaction with customers and a better voice quality experience. At the same time the floor was configured with future growth in mind as the performance metrics indicated growing the in-house team would lead to more sales. This recommendation was followed by Envision and had an immediate positive impact on morale and sales.
Sales Goals: Envision’s agent incentive structure did not account for the tremendous seasonality of the sales cycle. This resulted in agents being overcompensated for meeting and exceeding sales goals during traditionally high transaction months and being penalized for months where transactions were slow. This led to Envision overcompensating poor performance is the busy months and losing agents to attrition in the slow months. CCOG worked with Envision to analyze historical sales trends and assign variable goals based on month. This had the benefit of ensuring agents had achievable goals every month and ultimately was part of the strategy that drove a 10% increase in sales conversion.
3rd Party Contract Negotiations: Envision had already chosen a new third-party call center vendor prior to engaging CCOG. CCOG was able to significantly help in the contract negotiation most notably by tying Envisions sales conversion goals to variable pricing vs. the flat production rate per hour pricing that the vendor initially proposed. These goals were backed by historical numbers at both the internal site and previous external vendor which made the negotiation less complex. Ultimately, the vendor never consistently achieved the sales goals and was not a good fit for Envision due to the complexity of the program. However, the variable pricing saved Envision over $300K during the 12-month span of this contract.
Return on Investment: Envision decided that due to various components, including a very complex business and sales model, that they would bring the call center 100% in-house. CCOG went back and reviewed sales by location and its impact on gross margin (not just cost) for the last four years. The data consistently showed that tenured, in-house agents performed better than any of the third-party vendors Envision had worked with. Post our 2017 and 2018 consulting engagements with Envision, their sales per agent improved by more than 10% and more importantly their gross margins increased over 20% or $4M annually.
Post our 2017 and 2018 consulting engagements with Envision, their sales per agent improved by more than 10% and more importantly their gross margins increased over 20% or $4M annually.
CCOG worked with Envision to analyze historical sales trends and assign variable goals based on month. This had the benefit of ensuring agents had achievable goals every month and ultimately was part of the strategy that drove a 10% increase in sales conversion.
CCOG was able to significantly help in the contract negotiation most notably by tying Envisions sales conversion goals to variable pricing vs. the flat production rate per hour pricing that the vendor initially proposed.
The variable pricing saved Envision over $300K during the 12-month span of this contract.
CCOG assisted in the recruiting, vetting, and interviewing of the new Director of Sales who began in 2018. She helped drive the transformation of the internal sales team to consistently outperform Envision’s 3rd party providers. So much so, that Envision decided to bring the entire sales process in-house in 2020.
CCOG recommended changing the layout of the workspace, creating a traditional open sales floor with more energy, transparency, and accountability than the previous fragmented workspace which was dark and depressing. We also suggested adding new computers and headsets for agents to facilitate a more streamlined interaction with customers and a better voice quality experience. This recommendation was followed by Envision and had an immediate positive impact on morale and sales.
“We hired Doug Deker from Call Center Optimization Group to consult with our Reservations Team about developing an omnichannel call center. Not only did Doug educate us about the tech capabilities we should be looking for in a new phone system, he also helped us develop an effective contact strategy for following up on hot leads. In just a short time, Doug familiarized himself with our business, listened to our needs, and created an engaging presentation that resonated with the entire team. We feel very lucky to have found Call Center Optimization Group, and we wouldn’t hesitate to use them again for future consulting needs.”
“We rely heavily on having highly trained admissions advisors to help support families in evaluating our career exploration programs. CCOG did an incredible job helping us to evaluate our operations, and delivered not just a set of cogent recommendations for improvement but also incredibly collaborative support in implementing sustainable change. Doug became a real part of the team and someone that we relied on significantly during a period of great organizational change.”
“Call Center Optimization Group provided the NYULH Finance Help Desk management team valuable insight into our call center operations. Their team documented workflows and procedures and shared best practices that allowed us to understand where we needed to improve. Partnering with CCOG was a great experience!”
“This morning I spoke highly of the work you did for Envision Experience and made sure everyone knew that you are so great we hired you twice.”
“Our business is highly seasonal in nature, and we needed help finding high-performing seasonal agents who could effectively listen to our customers’ needs and position and sell our complex solutions. CCOG quickly assessed our situation and identified an innovative solution to not only add experienced agents to our team but also curb costs. CCOG provided our business with an exceptional level of experience and a wealth of contacts in the industry, and in addition they were an absolute pleasure to work with. We could not have taken our call center operation to these new heights without CCOG’s tremendous help and support.”
“When I took over the Skylight call center, the culture was so negative and performance was awful. Service Levels were triple what they should have been, customer satisfaction was at an all time low, employee attrition was at 250% annualized and the call center was seriously hurting our company’s ability to bring on new business because of all of the customer complaints. I had to fix it quick and I knew I could not do it alone. That is when I called The Call Center Optimization Group. CCOG was in the boat with me all the way. They really cared about my success and ensured we were set up to succeed after their engagement ended. I will continue to use CCOG whenever I can and will recommend them to every peer I talk to.”
“Our call center was doing basic card activation for a large, pre paid card provider. This provider was our biggest and most profitable client. Almost without notice, they told us they were going to RFP the WHOLE business with most of the decision hanging on the operation’s ability to implement and execute on a new sales function. No one on our team had a clue how to drive a sales or value added service program. With the project, and really our center’s existence on the line, I found and decided to contact the Call Center Optimization Group for help. Steve came in, quickly assessed what we need to do, learned the product, wrote very effective sales scripts, optimized our human capital for sales and trained our team to do the job very well. Long story short, not only did we implement the program quicker than any other company that was responding to the RFP could, our results exceeded expectations and we ended up getting a 3 year extension. We definitely could not have done it without CCOG.”
Call Center Optimization Group was developed to aid businesses with their contact center operations. Whether large or small, your contact center is the heartbeat of your company’s customer experience and a critical component to your brand.
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