Playing the Egg Game
- Increased Value in the Customer Experience

Executive Summary

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Egg is the world's largest pure online bank, with over 3.6 million customers.

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Egg has been continually measuring and monitoring customer attitude since 2002.

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Egg launched an initiative targeting a segment of its customers who were at risk of losing control of their debt.

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The key to success of this program has been the use of online surveys as a proactive relationship management tool.

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Egg has seen both an increase in savings of provisions for bad and doubtful debts, as well as a significant increase in the total value of accounts kept.

Egg, the UK's largest online bank, seeks to differentiate itself as a financial services provider and make a difference to its customers' lives by providing them the tools necessary to make informed choices about their finances. Egg defines "informed choice" as "sufficient and reliable information to choose between alternatives according to one's values." It perceives itself as its customers' partner in enabling and making such choices.

To reinforce the differentiation of Egg from other banks, the company focused on both technology and a strong customer focus.

Egg has been continually measuring and monitoring customer attitude since 2002. It has deployed commercially available software as part of an event-driven system that interviews customers at key moments of truth during the lifetime of their relationship with Egg.

With respect to Egg's call center operations, the company integrates insight gathered from these surveys as part of a "test and learn" program. Here, customer comments prompt analysis within insight workshops, in which management and team members work to generate actions within the call center. These are monitored by the quality team and through the next set of customer insight feedback.

For these studies and in its general measurement of customer experience, Egg has deployed the Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) software platform Confirmit.

The features of the product that have driven these benefits include:

The Confirmit Reportal® online reporting platform that delivers high-level results to business users, with the ability to drill down interactively into data to identify and manage anomalies in the business.

Rules-based escalation that delivers e-mail alerts to business owners when specified criteria have been met.

An open architecture that allows for two-way integration with Egg's back office systems. Egg pre-populates surveys with data contained in its CRM systems.

Customer Experience in Borrowing Management
Egg launched in April 2005 an initiative targeting a segment of its customers who were at risk of losing control of their debt. New management of the collections area within Egg formulated a change in strategy from being a "Collections Team" to becoming a "Borrowing Management" Unit. The goal of the new department was to help customers that were either in or approaching financial difficulty, gain control of their money through conversations that led to improved understanding and informed decisions.

Following a call to the contact center, customers are asked to quantify their experience of the call and their attitudes to both Egg and their financial situation. The surveys and the e-mail invitations arrive in context, pre-filled with information relevant to the call – the agent, date and time of the call and the subject discussed – so that customers feel cared for.

Any response indicating dissatisfaction automatically generates an alert to the call centre, resulting in a follow-up call to the customer to further resolve the issue.

The online surveys include open-text responses, providing the customer the opportunity to tell their side of the story. These are incorporated into the alerts and reports to management.

Response rates to the survey approach 10% with nearly 1000 customers per month sharing their views.

And affected customers now feel that Egg has made available to them the freedom and flexibility of its products. This is demonstrated in the surveys showing that they feel more in control of their finances since Egg began the program.

The key to success of this program has been the use of online surveys as a proactive relationship management tool as opposed to merely a random sampling of customers to hit a performance objective.

Further proof of the program's success is that Egg has seen both an increase in savings of provisions for bad and doubtful debts, as well as a significant increase in the total value of accounts kept.

Customer Experience at Dudley Call Centre
Egg built on the work performed within the Borrowing Management team by performing a more detailed statistical analysis of the data in order to understand how to proactively drive customer satisfaction.

At a newly opened centre in Dudley, the work focused on overall satisfaction with each call to the call center, with a deeper look at the underlying drivers. The results were surprising and equally illuminating.

As with other customer touch points, Egg routinely surveys its customers upon completion of calls to its call center in Dudley. A significant portion of these surveys is focused on agreement with statements on a 5-point scale, in addition to a question on overall satisfaction. These statements are intended to provide an understanding of the drivers of the overall satisfaction score.

The company has noticed in the course of reporting the results to management that simply looking at the monthly trend provided a look that could be somewhat ambiguous. The overall average response to a question, perhaps about how knowledgeable an agent was, might shift very slightly from month to month, while the percentage of people who agree strongly with the statement might vary to a higher degree. How does one interpret such data?

The Customer Insight team made the assumption that the key driver in the decrease of satisfaction was the length of time of call queues before speaking to an agent.

A regression analysis of the data showed that the statement, "I quickly got through to a person," actually correlated least closely with overall call satisfaction.

What was clear was that customers clearly valued their time, and response to the statement, "Made me feel my time was well spent," correlated most highly with overall satisfaction.

Of the four statements that correlated most closely to customer satisfaction, three are directly under the control of the call centre agents.

Given that these statements can be controlled with proper agent training, the next step was to understand the effect that increasing the level of agreement with these statements would have on overall customer satisfaction.

The result was that increasing 50% of people's agreement with the statement by one box then the overall satisfaction score can be expected to increase from 56.6% to 63.4%. Similarly, increasing 50% of people's agreement with the statements "the agent was helpful," "knew what they were talking about," and "understood what was important to me," should increase overall satisfaction to 62.8% - 63.9% from 56.6%, an increase of over 11%.

ROI - Value Delivered to Egg's Business
The impact to Egg's business has been staggering. The focus on acting as its customers' partners rather than as a collection agency has demonstrated improvement in all areas.

The resulting savings for the borrowing department have doubled or more by most value measures.

One further effect of Egg employees playing the game has been a significant increase in morale among members of the Borrowing Management team, demonstrated though a decrease of 40% of absenteeism over the period.

Conclusion
Egg takes its relationship with its customers very seriously.

This is evident by the integral use of customer insight to help Egg's teams deliver the right message to their customers, and a focus on measuring and monitoring satisfaction, testing new conversations based on the insight received, and deploying the successful conversations across the call centre and digitally via egg.com.

The result has been a significant improvement in savings of debt provisions, and value in accounts kept with Egg, a clear benefit both to the business and to its customers.

Playing the Egg Game
- Increased Value in the Customer Experience

Technology Audit of Confirmit

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Playing the Egg Game- Increased Value in the Customer Experience

Technology Audit of Confirmit

Confirmit News

Learn More

Playing the Egg Game
- Increased Value in the Customer Experience