Time Warner (Charlotte)

"Often times our customers wind up offering us solutions to our business challenges," said Nancy Sykora, vice president of customer operations. "We regularly review customer calls from the NICE recording system to understand what it is our customers are telling us. I can't have total performance management if I don't know what our customers are saying and feeling about us."

Time Warner Cable Charlotte is using NICE's 100% recording and Quality Monitoring solution to recall and playback its interactions with customers. The company is leveraging the valuable business intelligence contained within these calls to improve bottom-line business performance and increase customer satisfaction.

Business Intelligence Leads to Business Performance Management

According to Sykora, she listens to customer calls every day. "I randomly select calls each day and listen for any customer concerns or hot issues," she explains. "I listen to the tone of the customers' voices and the words they choose to learn the reason behind their call."

She continued, "If you listen for the right things, you can even identify valuable marketing and business intelligence from the call." Customers call into Time Warner Cable Charlotte for product support, to make purchases and more. The company also makes outbound telemarketing and collections calls. All of these interactions offer the company a rich source of information that can be shared company-wide to improve performance.

"I often share something I've learned from one of the calls with our Marketing, Sales and even Technical Operations people," she added. "From the technical side, knowing what's going on out at our plant is imperative to us. During bad storms, for example, we have customers calling in and alerting us to service interruptions due to lightening. Often times the customers themselves wind up alerting us to problems as they occur, before we've detected the issue."

Boost in Customer Satisfaction

"Since the NICE system has been up and running, we've seen customer complaints go way down and customer service go way up," said Sykora.

"We almost never receive complaints about poor customer service."

The NICE recording and Quality Monitoring system has allowed Time Warner Cable Charlotte to enhance its agent training. Sykora explains, "The system has also allowed us to do very powerful agent training." Supervisors sit down with their agents and review select calls to evaluate performance. "Once our agents have the opportunity to hear for themselves how they're interacting with customers, they learn a great deal from it."

The company has seen a significant increase in the number of calls it is able to monitor for quality assurance. "We can monitor many more calls now," said Sykora. "Our review process is much more efficient for our quality supervisors. Now I can know what calls our supervisors are listening to. I can regulate their calibration to make sure they're not just listening to every fantastic call, for example. I want to be sure they're picking an appropriate sampling of calls to record so we can continue to deliver world class customer service."

About Time Warner Cable Charlotte

Time Warner Cable owns and manages the world's most advanced, best-clustered cable television operations, with 90 percent of its 10.8 million customers in systems of 100,000 subscribers or more.

It is one of the largest providers of 24-hour local television news channels including New York 1 in New York City, and News 14 Carolina in Charlotte.

It is a division of Time Warner Inc., the world's first Internet-powered media and communications company whose industry-leading businesses include interactive services, cable systems, publishing, music, TV networks and filmed entertainment.

The Charlotte, North Carolina Division serves over 389,000 customers in 11 surrounding counties.