TS Solutions Case Study

TS Solutions (TSS) is a North American telecommunications infrastructure provider, offering internet service, VOIP phone services, wireless broadband for rural residents, and home television services. Founded in 1998, TSS serves over 300,000 residential customers.

TSS presents itself as particularly customer focused, offering numerous options that are atypical in the industry, such as service agreements with no long-term contracts and strong opposition to data usage caps. TSS has also been involved in multiple high- profile actions related to protecting online privacy rights.

TSS chose Nextiva for a technology upgrade in 2020 due to Nextiva’s strength in process automation, open APIs, and rapid low-code/no-code deployments. Nextiva has enabled TSS to enhance customer care and proactively engage with customers— all while increasing agent efficiency.

TSS exemplifies the opportunities and challenges that service providers present to contact center platforms. Customers are no longer content with service providers that don’t know who they are when they call. And they’ve even come to expect that these companies will reach out to them proactively.

Nextiva is a perfect match for TSS’ needs and use cases due to Nextiva’s strength in automation and API-rich architecture. Together, Nextiva helps TSS deliver next-generation customer care while turning every member of the team into a super-agent.

TSS sought to migrate from its legacy contact center system to a third-generation platform in order to introduce automation and increase efficiencies.

The team has invested heavily in proprietary internal monitoring systems related to network health, uptime, and connectivity. Additionally, they have proprietary CRM systems, collectively called WIP. Agents and field workers access WIP via tablets. These systems drive their NOC operations and are a critical element of TSS’ overall customer experience strategy. TSS employs WIP to provide agents and customers with more detailed and up-todate information on service status compared to TSS’ competition.

TSS needed a contact center platform that could:

• Make, take, and disposition calls from tablets
• Use SSO login
• Integrate with WIP and other back-end systems such as billing, CRM, etc
• Employ secure IVR transactions for PCI compliance and secure credit card capture
• Update agent displays with a customer’s service status

Beyond providing its customer service agents with enhanced data during customer interactions (chat and voice), TSS’ also needed a platform that could perform proactive notifications. These use cases included:

• Sending proactive notifications on a customer’s channel of choice (voice, email, SMS)
• Initiating mass automated outbound notifications (i.e., agentless campaigns) for service disruptions

Nextiva employed several key capabilities that met TSS’ requirements for proactive notifications.

IO Workflow Engine – Automated Outbound Notifications

• Nextiva’s Workflow Engine allows for TSS’ NIP, CRM, and billing tools to access a webhook on Nextiva’s platform. This REST API endpoint enables TSS to pass parameters indicating which customers should be notified, what channel they prefer to be contacted on, and what core use case the notification relates to (outage in a customer’s area, an upcoming bill due date, or payment has been received successfully, for example).
• Customers are contacted on their channel of choice, with email and SMS notifications using custom text variables to personalize messages.
• Customers who elect to receive voice notifications will hear a personalized message.
• The configurations were done once and are now able to be triggered many times, with custom variables passed from TSS’ CRM to personalize the messages.
• For example, in the event of an outage, Customer A (who prefers SMS or email) may receive a message saying, “Hi John, we’re experiencing an outage in your area. Our technicians are on site and we expect a resolution in 2 hours.” Customer B, who prefers voice, would receive an automated outbound call that plays a prompt after answering with the same message read out to them.
• Customers on any channel can request a callback from a live agent by responding to the SMS, clicking a link to a callback in the email, or responding an IVR prompt by entering DTMF tones on their phone.
• These workflows were configured in Nextiva’s no-code workflow engine, a drag-and -drop tool allowing complex multi-step workflows to be designed, tested, and deployed very quickly and without extensive professional services engagements.
• Once a customer has been notified, the TSS CRM is updated with information about the reason for the notification.

Nextiva’s Dynamic Scripting – Adding Context to Interactions

Nextiva’s Dynamic Scripting is an agent display that offers customized, contextual layouts with interactive buttons, menus, and text entry fields. This replaces traditional scripting tools and displays CRM and other data in simple, customizable panels that change depending on context.

• Callbacks
  • If a customer requests a callback after a notification from TSS, the agent who receives the outbound callback workitem can see the notification status without having to look through CRM records. Additionally, the agent will see custom scripting text to offer a high-touch customer experience.
  • For example, an agent getting a callback might see a script that says, “Hi Mr Smith, it looks like we let you know about an outage in your area that we’re working on. Is that what you’d like assistance with right now?”
  • An agent can also offer customers a follow-up call once the issue has been resolved. Alternatively, supervisors who may have received escalations can schedule follow-ups to drive higher CSAT scores.
• Inbound inquiries after notifications
  • An agent handling billing, who gets an inbound call from a customer, might see an Action Matrix that shows a summary of a customer’s payment history, any balance due, and an indication that the customer received a notification about an upcoming payment.
  • The script in the Action Matrix might say, “Hi Mr Jones, are you calling about your upcoming payment of $55.18 due on May 23rd?”
  • That same agent could then process a payment using Nextiva’s secure IVR in a single click without leaving the Action Matrix screen.
  • Agents could sign customers up for other automated notifications and payment reminders, all from a single screen.