HSN

Challenge

Elevated and consistent customer experience

Millions of people now prefer the convenience of home shopping and one company at the forefront of this boom industry is America’s HSN (Home Shopping Network). St. Petersburg, Florida is home to its corporate headquarters, studio and broadcasting facilities and customer care center.

Staffed by 400 representatives, the customer care center is key to HSN’s success as explained by director of performance support Ricardo Weld: “The communication channels that we use at HSN to engage with our customers are email, chat and social, which includes Facebook and Twitter, but the most popular way for customers to communicate with us is over the phone where they can interact directly with representatives.”

HSN’s well-known slogan ‘It’s fun here’ is supported by a determination to create the best possible shopping experience.

“Our customer care teams support this mission by focusing on delivering an elevated experience to our customers. We concentrate on customer satisfaction, inspiring loyalty and helping celebrate the joy of shopping,” added Amy Mclaughlin, manager of the learning and development department. “Our customer care center is critical to HSN’s success because our sales and service representatives are the ones that are having the conversations with our customers. They are the closest to understanding what their needs are and to meeting those needs. HSN needs to ensure a consistent customer experience at every touch point.”

Solution

Highly integrated

HSN chose OpenText Qfiniti workforce optimization software to support its customer engagement mission. Built on industryleading call recording technology, Qfiniti delivers the advanced tools needed in today’s global, multi-site customer service centers. Offering a highly integrated, modular suite, Qfiniti includes tools for strategic planning, workforce management, call recording, coaching and e-learning, interaction analytics, surveying and more. Businesses can record calls for compliance management and selectively capture voice and desktop activity for quality assurance. Innovative built-in coaching, real-time assistance, evaluation, survey and training modules help ensure that the business delivers quality performance.

Qfiniti offers eight highly integrated products, each performing a specific and critical contact center management task or function. It can also be deployed with OpenText Explore advanced Voice of the Customer analytics to gain valuable insight from all customer interactions. The entire suite is engineered to operate seamlessly together, or the products can be deployed individually to solve the most urgent contact center management needs.

In St. Petersburg, HSN is using OpenText Qfiniti Advise for optimized agent evaluation and performance analysis, OpenText Qfiniti Observe, which records interactions for quality and compliance, OpenText “OpenText Explore helps us identify real-time feedback from our customers so that we can proactively address any concerns.” Sharon Bailey Vice President, Sales and Services HSN HSN increases customer care center efficiency Qfiniti Survey to conduct integrated customer satisfaction surveys and OpenText Explore to help identify call trends and customer sentiment.

“We use Qfiniti Advise to create all our quality evaluation forms for every interaction touchpoint, we’re using Qfiniti Observe to record the interactions and we also use Qfiniti Survey to solicit feedback from our customers and align that feedback with the measures that we have in place,” explained Weld. “OpenText Explore is actively used in our Voice of the Customer reporting and analysis.”

Providing advanced search and multi-channel analysis, Explore provides HSN with actionable insight into customer behavior available in near real time across all channels and touch points.

“We have been using OpenText Explore analytics for more than a year within HSN Customer Care and have been very pleased with the product. It helps us identify real-time feedback from our customers so that we can proactively address any concerns. Our focus is to continually provide an excellent experience for our customers and obtaining this type of VOC analytics is key to our success,” said Sharon Bailey, Vice President, Sales and Services.

Benefits

Ensuring loyalty

OpenText Qfiniti has enabled HSN to achieve its principal aim of bringing consistency to its customer interactions.

State-of-the-art workforce optimization technology delivered by Qfiniti improves operational efficiency, drives interaction effectiveness and improves agent engagement. It enables HSN to base strategic actions on a deep understanding of its customers, competitors and markets.

“We’ve been able to improve overall customer satisfaction in both sales and customer service. We’ve also been able to identify trends or opportunities related to the call length, as well as key behaviors that were affecting sales performance or efficiency,” said Weld.

Automated quality assurance processes provide both supervisors and analysts with highly efficient means to monitor and improve agent interactions in order to offer the superior level of service that HSN customers have come to expect.

The ability to conduct automated surveys linked to the specific service interactions can deliver direct and immediate feedback through email using a web-based survey, or post-call using IVR technology. The results of these surveys are linked directly to the specific call recording, email, or chat session, as well as to any performance evaluation related to the interaction.

Improving customer satisfaction enables HSN to achieve its wider aims, as outlined by Mclaughlin: “At HSN it’s critical that we establish our customer loyalty and really establish our brand at every opportunity. We do that by making sure that we keep our commitments to our customers and also by just keeping them at the center of every decision that we make.”

“HSN is a leading multi-channel retailer. We try to deliver a unique shopping experience by providing entertainment, unique brands and different personalities to sell those brands,” said Bailey. “Our corporate mission is to deliver the joy and excitement of new discoveries every day. One of our key objectives is to create an engaging customer experience, moving from transactional to a really great conversation with our customers that they enjoy.”