The organization
Sekure Merchant Solutions is a leading provider of merchant processing solutions. Servicing over 20,000 businesses monthly, Sekure has experienced substantial growth of 300%+ over the last 10 years. Their business requires significant outbound calling activity with almost 120,000 calls a day made across multiple locations. Headquartered in Montreal, Canada and founded in 2006, Sekure is on the forefront of leveraging technology to improve productivity and operational efficiency and to turn their culture into an employee-centric environment.
Motivation for change
Sekure’s continual focus on looking for ways to revolutionize operations led them to the booming trend of incorporating game mechanics into the core of the contact center. Sekure set out to determine the best game mechanics solution provider by looking for a vendor who met the highest standards in product robustness and effectiveness, had deep roots in the contact center industry, was feature-rich to avoid product fatigue, included machine learning, and had a strong coaching and learning management system component.
Why Aspect
After vetting the major vendors in the market, Sekure chose the Aspect Workforce Enterprise suite.Workforce Enterprise gives organizations the tools they need to maximize efficiency, monitor, improve and reward employee performance and reduce turnover. Enterprise can include Aspect League, which adds employee-centric experience capabilities such as game mechanics. This results in the most powerful comprehensive workforce engagement solution in the market.
Aspect Workforce Enterprise includes:
Aspect Performance
A high-performance contact center management and reporting tool used to collect, correlate and display information relevant to each user’s role and responsibilities. This flexible tool can quickly reveal valuable new insights by enabling the tracking of personal and group performance vs. goal using a wide range of metrics with data sourced from many contact center systems.
Aspect Quality
Assess quality of voice and text-based customer interactions drawing from multiple sources of quality including supervisors, QA analysts, customers and others. These features help enterprises enhance customer satisfaction, improve employee effectiveness and comply with increasing legal requirements and security concerns.
Aspect Workforce
Easy-to-use forecasting, planning, scheduling, employee self- service and real-time management tool that ensures every employee and supervisor is productive, engaged and delivering an exceptional customer experience at the lowest cost.
Aspect League
Increase productivity and reduce employee turnover across all generations – from Boomers and Millennials to the fast-growing Gen-Z workforce. Transform daily routines into rewarding rivalries that give everyone a reason to do their best.
“I looked at all the major gamification providers and Aspect was by far the best solution we found in the market. Their product is the most feature robust and they totally understand the contact center industry.” - Matt Coffey, General Manager of Technical Projects, Sekure Merchant Solutions
The challenge
Conquering employee attrition by elevating the employee experience
Contact center dynamics are always changing – that has been the nature of the beast all the way back to the “switchboard” era. In recent years, the pace of change seems to have intensified, from regulatory requirements to technology advancement to the employee spectrum itself. There is also an increasing amount of data available to power operational decision making. Modern-day contact centers seem to have found the sweet spot to managing the tide of changes by ensuring they are optimized on all fronts. Even with the myriad of changes within today’s contact centers, the highs and lows associated to the contact center business are still very familiar. This is especially true when it comes to the factors that affect business economics. Top and bottom line alignment remains the guiding light to most organizational agendas. Frequently, budget meetings are dominated by how managers plan to grow the “top line.” However, the deep, dark element to focus on is the silent bottom line killer: employee turnover. Nobody likes to touch this, mainly because it is so hard to fix. That is, until now.
Sekure Merchant Solutions launched Aspect League in their corporate headquarters, the home to over 250 employees. The initial challenge presented to Aspect was multi-faceted: to provide an intuitive solution to increase operational efficiency, improve employee and supervisor productivity on critical key performance indicators, enhance transparency into critical organizational goals across all employee levels, and expand their existing ultra-competitive activity with more options. However, their number one goal was to assist in reducing employee turnover.
In order to benchmark results and provide a business case for future gamification expansion, Sekure’s management team provided historical data on employee turnover from their WFM platform. Additional data such as critical employee and manager activity KPIs, productivity metrics and employee onboarding time were all provided.
The solution
Aspect prepared five unique interfaces, comprised of one TV Leaderboard application which broadcasts results and competitions, recognizes achievements, and delivers ad hoc ticker tape messages across 16 individual screens throughout the contact center. Additionally, Aspect created four distinct user interfaces that align features to each level of Sekure’s organizational hierarchy.
The core of the game mechanics solution was to clearly and quantifiably display goals for each employee, team and supervisor through unique KPI scorecards. These goals were the catalysts to driving foundational decisions to leverage game mechanics and affect a desired behavioral outcome. To assist in boosting outcome efforts, all KPI scorecards leverage machine learning by tapping historical data to forecast an employee, team or supervisor’s likelihood of achieving their goals. These scorecards also link to Coaching and a learning management solution to tightly tie real-time employee output to teaching. In ensuring Sekure’s ability to amplify their ultra-competitive and rewards culture, the Aspect solution was stacked with competition game mechanics that tied both monetary and non-monetary rewards. Sekure‘s management identified an internal game master who thoroughly understood the contact center goals and was empowered to leverage game mechanics to ensure those goals were achieved.
Profitability & Productivity Benefit
The impact of Aspect League was profound. Revenue and profitability broke record highs. Within three months, Sekure Merchant Solutions was achieving greater revenue and profitability than ever before. Sekure’s KPI focal point revolved around two main employee activities: Leads Generated per employee and Lead Conversion.
Efficiency Benefit
Management efficiency skyrocketed and immediately dropped hard dollars to the bottom line. Sekure calculated they were able to save 1500 management hours.
What made the efficiency gain possible:
- Supervisors hit their team goals 40-60% more often.
- Reduced deployment costs by $35,000.
- First day on the job exit interviews asking if the new hire understood their goals skyrocketed from a rate of 45% to 90% after implementing Aspect League.
Employee Retention Benefit
However, nothing was as significant as the impact Aspect League had on employee turnover – a staggering net effect of 62%. This was in large part due to leveraging WFM data and Aspect League.
Defeating the employee turnover beast
Sekure Merchant Solutions, under the leadership of Matt Coffey, GM of Technical Projects, did just that. They established their macro key performance indicators and intelligently distilled them down to data points that were critical for employees to achieve.
Sekure wanted to ensure there was focus on critical management activity, as well. By layering multiple interfaces across the entire employee hierarchy, the company was able to leverage the full spectrum of game mechanics to ensure maximum organizational engagement. The ultimate result was certainly top line results that were captured in record-breaking sales and revenue. Sekure was also able to impact critical operational targets, allowing it to substantially reduce employee turnover and make immediate sustainable contributions to their bottom line.
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