SupportZebra - The BPO Innovating Towards Better Customer Experience

About SupportZebra

SupportZebra is a Philippine-based Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company founded in 2001 with just 15 employees. The business has now grown to over 600 employees. Their services cater to US-based businesses looking for back-office support, RPOs, content moderation, tech support and customer service.

SupportZebra has a range of clients from small start-ups to larger more established clients, many of which have grown with the business. SupportZebra’s expertise lies in helping start-ups to scale faster with customizable options for their specific needs by beginning the engagements with 3-5 agents. This gives the start-ups new to outsourcing, the opportunity to experience the benefits of the SupportZebra service and feel comfortable growing. Some of SupportZebra's medium clients began this way and now have 50-60 agents working on their business. SupportZebra also services several larger clients with around 120 agents or more.

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The Challenge

SupportZebra initially sought a new solution due to a specific need for an existing healthcare client - TelemedRN.

A US-based business, TelemedRN operates a 24-Hour medical answering service for hospice & home-care patients that coordinates care with healthcare providers and medical professionals.

SupportZebra provides Registered Triage Nurses that are trained to provide clinical assessment, judgment, implementation and evaluation of the plan of care. Moreover, SupportZebra participate in contributing to quality assurance across hospice and home health coverage. 

While onboarding several new registered triage nurses for TelemedRN, SupportZebra later realized that their incumbent system had challenges that needed to be fixed when dealing with something as time critical as patient care.

Supervisors were unable to access the system remotely. - The incumbent system would not allow SupportZebra to put agents into a ‘Do Not Disturb’ status remotely. The result was that calls were still coming in, but they were not always promptly answered. This issue was a critical failure when dealing with patients needing to speak to a nurse or healthcare professional.

Inability to monitor live calls  - Because QA and Trainers could not monitor live calls, they couldn't give agents timely feedback and training to improve the patient experience.

Different tools for each channel (voice, emails, and SMS) - Agents constantly switched screens to manage different communication channels and fulfill their daily duties, making them less productive.

Not able to implement After Call Work (ACW) - Follow-up in the healthcare industry is critical, especially when it is to do with patient notes. Unfortunately, the incumbent system had no way to implement an After Call Work; hence things got missed.

These specific issues were the catalyst for SupportZebra to look for a new solution for their client TelemedRN.

The Solution

During the vendor evaluation process, Dino Flores, Innovations Director at SupportZebra, met with several vendors, including Amazon Connect. Because he wanted an out-of-the-box solution ready to go, AWS referred Dino to AWS Software Partner, Local Measure and their solution Engage.

After reviewing both Amazon Connect and Engage, Dino realized that there was a more significant opportunity for SupportZebra. And that was to differentiate itself in the BPO space as an innovator focused on helping its customers deliver better customer experiences rather than compete in the race to the bottom on price. As a result, SupportZebra decided to implement both Amazon Connect and Local Measure's Engage due to several factors, including:

• Amazon Connect and Engage consumption pricing best fits TelemedRN and other SupportZebra clients rather than a license model.
• Engage is an omnichannel out-of-the-box solution (Voice, Chat, SMS, Email, Social)
• Fully Scalable solution that makes it easy for SupportZebra and its clients to quickly scale up and down as required.

Currently, Agents are using the Engage solution for TelemedRN to triage out-of-hours nursing services by answering calls, documenting notes and making outbound calls for follow-up. In addition to Quality Assurance, Team Leads and Managers can monitor calls and the queue in real-time.

Although initially, Local Measure’s Engage solution was for the specific requirements of TelemedRN, it led to a better long-term outcome for SupportZebra, due to it being more cost effective for other clients.

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Why Local Measure

"When Local Measure introduced Engage, I really liked the look and feel of the interface. Then an entire team met with me to understand the scope of the use case and deliver the best solution for us and our clients. So, that was a great experience." - Dino Flores, Innovation Director, SupportZebra.

Due to their desire to innovate, it was important for SupportZebra to choose a platform that could help them with TelemedRN and other clients facing similar challenges, especially the ability to implement multiple channels out of the box.

In addition, instead of having different clients on different platforms, the added benefit of now reducing complexity by consolidating reporting and training across their organization will free up time for agents and supervisors as they migrate other clients across to Engage for Amazon Connect.

The Results

• Reduced Average Handling Time - Reduction in Average Handle Time = 30%-50%
• After Call Work (ACW) Implementation  - Implemented After Call Work with disposition codes. Agents are more mindful of sending reports within 5 minutes of ending a contact.
• Better Training and Timely Feedback for Customer Service Teams - Due to a hybrid model, call monitoring is done remotely. This feature helps the Team Lead and Trainer provide timely feedback.
• Call Recordings - Easier to track and pull up call recordings. Supervisors, QA and Trainers can listen to calls real time making it easier to onboard and guide new agents remotely and mentor low performers to provide best of class service
• Visibility of Agent Availability- If agents are experiencing downtime, Admin/Supervisors can remotely change their status.

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The Future

SupportZebra wants to continue to innovate well into the future as their unique business model focuses on making life easier for its agents and delivering a better customer experience for its clients.

In the case of its agents, SupportZebra has set-up and welcomes a hybrid model that allows agents to work from home as well as onsite. Critical to this is the secure and cloud-based platform of Engage and Amazon Connect.

The ability to quickly understand and meet client needs without the need for expensive internal technical resources means that SupportZebra can focus on innovating and delivering bespoke solutions to provide the best possible customer experience. They feel confident they can deliver on this and continue to grow due to the strong partnership with Local Measure and AWS.

SupportZebra has begun using Local Measure and Amazon Connect to leverage the ability to auto-summarize calls and automate manual tasks. SupportZebra is excited to continue to scale GenerativeAI capabilities to additional contact center clients to drive efficiencies in case management, knowledge management and self-service.  With one customer, we’ve already been able to bring down average handle time by 29% and increase average order value by 18%. Local Measure and AWS have been an invaluable partner in helping us securely drive automation use cases using AI, resulting in savings for our client and a better overall experience for the end customer. - Nathan Yap, CEO, SupportZebra

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