KPN and Telecats win CustomerFirst Partnership Award

For over 10 years KPN and Telecats have been working together to continuously innovate and improve customer service for joint customers and KPN Customer Service itself. Since last year we have changed the way we work together: from a customer-supplier relationship to a partner model in which time-to-market and innovation are paramount. We work together in one scrum team, working in sprints on innovation, development and improvement.

KPN’S CUSTOMER SERVICE department is the point of contact for both private and business customers. Millions of KPN’s customer contacts take place by phone and increasingly via digital channels such as live chat and social media. This makes customer service an important source for KPN when it comes to improving service. In order to continuously improve KPN’s service to the customer, we are constantly looking for smart ways to surprise the customer. KPN has a clear technological vision. KPN is on it’s way to ‘conversational service’ in which, in addition to automating the dialogue, it also aims to apply as much intelligence and resolving power as possible. An important step was the very successful implementation of speech routing with partner Telecats.

Speech routing allows customers to state a question in their own words. 90% of all questions can be classified correctly using speech recognition, resulting in far fewer calls being transferred. This has a positive effect on both customer and employee satisfaction. With the help of speech routing, we have set in motion a movement within KPN Customer Service where we no longer route a customer contact directly to an available customer expert only, but directly direct it to the best solution. This can be a customer expert, but also a voice driven self-service tool, a reference to a specific online page, or a live chat if the call center is busy.

By routing calls using speech recognition, real-time information is also available on possible trends and the most frequently asked questions. In addition to the standard daily, weekly and monthly reports, voice recognition provides insight into customer service per subject.  This collaboration in the past year has proved to be successful because:

• Speech routing with CTI saves 30 seconds AHT per call;
• The number of redirected calls has been reduced by 20%;
• Self-service capacity in the VRS has increased to 15%;
• The new collaboration resulted in significant savings over the past year; and
• The objective of not affecting the NPS was also met, increasing by 17 points over the same period.

Martijn Franssen (KPN)
Telecats innovative solutions are technically in line with the future architecture needed to implement KPN’s digital strategy. There is a real “cultural fit”. Telecats radiates a flexible, modern approach in everything. The obtained results are proof of this unique collaboration. With a clear voice for Customer Service in this collaboration, the customer has become the basis of innovation in the field of customer contact. KPN and Telecats place the Customer First!”