Two Birds, One Stone: How Eastern’s Digital Channel Expansion Lowered its Cost of Service & Improved CX

How does a BPO increase contact rates by 79% and lower their cost per transaction by $6?

By finding a partner invested in their long-term success and adopting technology from a one-stop shop instead of a patchwork of different applications from different providers. Here's how LiveVox's data-driven approach to omnichannel has helped drive faster digital transformation yielding greater insights into customer campaigns.

The challenge

Getting people to pick up the phone these days continues to be a challenge for contact centers, and no one understands this better than Eastern. They needed to expand into the digital world and adopt an innovative platform that could increase connections, lower overhead, and deliver on service goals.

Eastern's digital transformation journey

Eastern Account System has over 30 years of proven success in handling customer service, delinquency, and collections needs for clients. Their first-party contact center (E-Center) hosts a variety of projects from small boutique programs to large-scale initiatives for customer service applications, product support, initial engagement, fundraising, customer acquisition, and sales and delinquency management.

Matt Schuster, VP of Strategic Planning at Eastern, was faced with a dilemma when contact rates were dropping as consumers were declining phone calls. 'Over the last 2 years, we've noticed people answering their phones less and less. A lot of this has to do with not answering unfamiliar numbers, but beyond that, we realized that text messaging was becoming a preferred method of communicating. In order to cover all the bases, we wanted to be able to offer clients the ability to reach their customers through more than one channel. That's what began our shift to omnichannel.'

In prioritizing digital transformation, Eastern was ready to embark on a path to minimize customer effort, increase first contact resolutions, and remediate sources of agent frustration such as limited cross-training opportunities that hampered their ability to learn how to handle multiple functions as well as working in departmental silos. As a prestigious firm pioneering advancements in call center software adoption, Eastern had an awareness of the landscape they were entering into before evaluating LiveVox. They knew what opportunities existed, and, most importantly, they recognized their own areas in need of improvement. Shifting customer demands presented new obstacles for Eastern. 'In addition to changing attitudes toward voice calls,' Schuster notes, 'People also want to be able to resolve their issues quickly - no one has the patience to wait on hold, and they shouldn't have to.'

The BPO decided to embrace the opportunity and meet customers where they are - by text message. The organization wanted to modernize its software infrastructure to create a seamless, consistent experience while maintaining the level of service clients and customers alike have grown to expect. Eastern was looking for a partner invested in their long-term success. 'We wanted to find a one-stop-shop for the latest call center technology rather than cobbling together a patchwork of different applications from different providers.' They also needed to ensure they adopted a platform that offered the highest caliber of regulatory compliance and included TCPA-approved outreach methods.

The solution

In order to adapt to changes in consumer engagement behavior, Eastern shifts to digital channels to extract greater value and more revenue for clients by implementing an omnichannel platform. The goals were ambitious:

• Improve customer experience
• Increase contact rates
• Decrease cost per interaction.

The results

With LiveVox's Unified Data Model that layers channels over a foundation of customer data, Eastern was able to create a frictionless link between digital and non-voice channels, ensuring a unified and effective experience across all channels while enabling consumer preference management capabilities. Eastern has expanded its omnichannel offering by increasing its LiveVox usage from primary voice to include both campaign-driven and transactional SMS.

Share this story

i

i

i

Keep Up-To-Date on the Latest Contact Center News

Subscribe to our newsletter and stay current on all the latest technological advances in the contact center space.

About LiveVox

LiveVox is a next-generation contact center platform that powers more than 14 billion interactions a year. We seamlessly integrate omnichannel communications, CRM, AI, and WFO capabilities to deliver an exceptional agent and customer experience while reducing compliance risk. Our reliable, easy-to-use technology enables effective engagement strategies on communication channels of choice to drive contact center performance. Our battle-tested risk mitigation and security tools help clients maximize their potential in an ever-changing business environment. With 20 years of cloud experience and expertise, LiveVox's CCaaS 2.0 platform is at the forefront of cloud contact center innovation. Our more than 500 global employees are headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Atlanta; Columbus; Denver; New York City; St. Louis; Medellin, Colombia; and Bangalore, India.

To learn more, visit www.livevox.com or call one of our specialists at [phone].