Realtor.com, a prominent real estate platform in the United States, has embarked on a strategic initiative to revolutionise its contact centre operations through the adoption of advanced automation technologies. The company, which plays a vital role in connecting consumers with real estate professionals, experienced significant challenges with its existing call review process. Historically, less than 5% of calls made by agents were evaluated, largely due to a manual and subjective quality assessment that varied across different contact centre leaders.
In an effort to enhance quality assurance, the organisation has embraced a change in mindset, rebranding its quality team as the Voice Intelligence team. This shift was highlighted by senior manager of revenue enablement, Dustin Emmerich, who noted the necessity of obtaining deeper insights into customer interactions to facilitate better decision-making. "We knew we needed to be smarter, to be able to look at our interactions and gain insights to empower the business from them,” Emmerich remarked. This sentiment was echoed by Brent Albarado, Director of Voice Intelligence, who further articulated the objective, stating, “We needed to understand the customer experience more in depth.”
In November 2023, Realtor.com implemented NICE Interaction Analytics to overhaul its approach to call quality scoring. This innovative solution automates the analysis of calls, providing supervisors with clear metrics and evaluation templates that aid in delivering consistent coaching across the organisation. The integration of technology allows for objective scoring on compliance and soft skills, significantly improving agents' ability to understand their performance over time. Emmerich described the result of the implementation as transformative: “With NICE, there’s one place to click and see all of your scores and listen to all of your interactions.”
The rollout of these technologies was carefully managed, beginning with quality professionals who were trained to use the new systems, followed by front-line leaders. This phased approach ensures that agents received comprehensive training on the tools before their introduction, facilitating a smoother transition. “Now we can show them that when people follow our advice they’re super-successful 75% of the time, instead of following their path and succeeding just 20% of the time,” Albarado stated. The shift in dynamic has led to increased productivity and engagement within the contact centre.
As a result of these changes, Realtor.com has already recorded several benefits, including enhanced legal compliance reporting and improved agent performance visibility. The auto-suggestions feature of the call evaluation system has proven accurate, verified at 95%, signalling a substantial reduction in manual review workload while allowing quality professionals to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Looking ahead, Realtor.com is not stopping with its current advancements. The company plans to explore wider applications of NICE Interaction Analytics and Enlighten AI across different departments. According to Albarado, the aim is to discover new behaviours that drive revenue, as the organisation is keen on utilising more open-ended conversations during calls to enhance customer interactions further. There are also plans to engage in a new large language model (LLM) AI project, Enlighten Gen-Insights, which promises to synthesise actionable data in response to complex queries tailored to the brand’s specific needs.
In summary, the enhancements in AI-driven automation within Realtor.com’s contact centre mark a significant turning point in how the organisation evaluates and engages with customer interactions. The ongoing explorations into further applications of this technology highlight a commitment to leveraging new tools in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
Source: Noah Wire Services