Case Study: Retail
Social media response time cut by 95% for global quick-service restaurant
Leveraging agent feedback, HGS identified priority cases and enhanced efficiencies
95% Response time reduction from Q4’20 to Q2 FY22
1.7M Social media cases handled in H1’22
38% Faster response time than industry average
Client background
The client first engaged the HGS social media team in 2017 to provide customer care. The team was split into three tiers, each handling the following:
- Tier 1: Frontline issues for the majority of customers
- Tier 2: Reviews on the two app stores and responding to any care issues raised in those
- Tier 3: Promotional campaign support, and responding to fans of the brand who had reached out with a positive comment or were not otherwise complaining about an experience
Business challenges
An overwhelming number of care cases
The client’s stated goal was to respond to each person within four hours, but agents were responding at an average of 66 hours during the fourth quarter of 2020.
A limited budget
The staff to handle cases that quickly was projected to be about 400% of the current staff, which the client couldn’t fund.
Low-priority mentions
A significant portion of the social media mentions were random comments, jokes, parody, or otherwise irrelevant content. Each of those mentions required coding, taking time away from true care issues.
Solution strategy
Identify low-priority cases
Through a very robust agent feedback process, the team identified several different opportunities for more quickly processing lower priority cases, which in turn allowed them respond to actual customer issues faster.
Create automated processes
With direction from the HGS team, the platform vendor created automated processes (macros) that allowed an agent to code similar types of cases all at once rather than individually.
Expand team globally
The client trusted HGS to grow the team with social media experts offshore in order to help meet the service level agreement.
Results
As we developed more of the automated processes, we saw a significant change in service level with no increase in staff.
Then, in January of 2021, when the client leveraged HGS’s offshore social media experience with just a 12.5% increase in spend, we more than doubled the team size from 18 to 40.
Notably, simply doubling the team size would not have been enough to drive the improvements in response time that were realized. We also significantly increased the productivity of each person on the team through various automations, allowing us to accomplish with 40 agents what originally was forecasted to require 80.
Chart by Visualizer
The most impressive part of this accomplishment was how much response time was reduced with a relatively small investment. In addition, although case volume in the first half of 2022 was among the highest in the industry at over 1.7 million, response rates were 38% faster than the industry average. For the first half of 2022, this client saw results among those leading in the industry.
| KPI | HGS Client | Industry Average |
|---|---|---|
| Overall Response SLA | 4 hours | 15 hours |
| First Response SLA | 1.5 hours | 24.5 hours |
| AI Predicted CSAT | 48 (49 was the highest score) | 45 |
All industry average KPI values were provided by Sprinklr, HGS’s social management platform provider.
95% Overall response time reduction from Q4’20 to Q2’22 (66 hours to 3.2 hours)
88% Response time reduction in Year 1 from 66 hours to 8 (with only 12.5% more spend and diversifying into lower-cost labor market)
60% Response time reduction from 8 hours in Q4’21 to 3.2 hours in Q2’22
1.7MSocial media cases handled in H1’22 (among the highest in QSR industry)
38% Faster response time than industry average, despite extremely high case volume
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