Lowell Nordics Slashes AHT by 25% while Boosting FCR and NPS

About Lowell

For over two decades, Lowell has been a leader in customized financial services. Their mission revolves around empowering people to conquer debt and effectively manage their finances. They prioritize customer satisfaction by offering innovative debt recovery and management services, helping clients regain financial control through expertise, transparency, and advanced technology.

Lowell’s tailored strategies based on individual circumstances pave the way for a sustainable financial future for their clients. Their unwavering dedication to providing ethical solutions and keeping client satisfaction at the core of their mission is exemplified by their proven success in the debt management industry.

The Challenge

Lowell Nordics conducted a comprehensive assessment of their customer service operations with the goal of improving various aspects of their contact center operations. This assessment identified three major issues:

1. The information used by agents was of poor quality
2. There was an increase in Caller Wait Times, due to staffing issues
3. They lacked a single source of truth, resulting in inconsistent processes

As a result, their Net Promoter Score (NPS) was in decline.

After some analysis and thoughtful consideration, Lowell Nordics decided to evaluate Knowledge Management Systems (KMS). They recognized the shortcomings of their SharePoint environments and saw the benefit of having a best-in-class knowledge management platform. Their objective was to improve their NPS and First Contact Resolution (FCR) metrics while ensuring a seamless experience for both staff and customers. They opted for an enterprise-grade KMS that would:

• Make life easier for agents, new hires in particular
• Allow knowledge managers to maintain the unique knowledge of each market while streamlining processes
• Provide operations with a modern, extensible platform that would support their future goals and align to other strategic technology investments.

The Solution

At the core of Lowell’s business success lies the ability to run a smooth and consistent payment collection process that doesn’t alienate debtors. The KPI’s most closely associated with this success are First Contact Resolution (FCR) and Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is why the ultimate goal of acquiring and deploying a KMS was to permanently boost these scores.

To achieve these goals, Lowell required a system capable of automating answers within Genesys Cloud. They also needed a comprehensive knowledge hub for the entire Nordics region that would support knowledge managers with usage analytics, purpose-built content, and robust content governance features. Last but not least, they sought to integrate a cohesive KMS experience into their existing tech stack, to provide agents with easier access to information, eliminating “shadow knowledge” and ultimately improving agent performance.

Implementation

Like many organizations, Lowell had concerns about implementing a new knowledge management system. Their concerns included: the time and energy required of their team to migrate content, ability to avoid project delays, and the effort required to manage change within their agent population.

To address these concerns, Shelf and Lowell ran an 18 agent pilot in Norway during the evaluation process. The pilot was specifically tailored to answer the following questions:

1. Can Shelf act as a single source of truth for all Operations content and put an end to Lowell’s knowledge silos?

2. Can Shelf be easily embedded into Genesys Cloud so agents no longer need to toggle across different applications to find the answers to customer questions?

3. Can Shelf’s agent assist leverage context from other systems to proactively deliver accurate answers to agents, without requiring them to search?

The answer to all three questions came back as a strong “Yes”. And from that point forward the parties worked together to transfer, format, and reorganize content for the Back Office, Front Office, and Invoicing Operations teams in an efficient manner. Shelf’s team of content migration specialists minimized the burden of this task on Lowell personnel which allowed Norway to deploy to its agent population in a matter of a few weeks. 

The Result

Lowell’s decision to partner with Shelf – the pioneer in enterprise Knowledge Infrastructure – has produced impressive results. Just six months after the launch of Shelf, Lowell Norway experienced a significant 111% increase in NPS scores, soaring from 26.1 to 55.2. In addition, FCR improved substantially, reinforcing the fact that Lowell selected the right Knowledge Management provider.

Furthermore, Shelf has successfully addressed the common challenges faced by new agents – errors, longer hold times – resulting in a better debtor experience. Serving as a comprehensive knowledge hub, Shelf has improved Lowell Norway’s operations by dramatically reducing average handle time (AHT) by 25% (from 8 to 6 minutes) all while reducing the time it takes to onboard and ramp new agents.

Continued Innovation and Collaboration

Lowell and Shelf are committed to a long-term partnership, continually collaborating on improvements and innovations. This approach ensures that Lowell remains at the forefront of customer service excellence, driving ongoing success in key performance indicators such as FCR, NPS, and AHT.

By leveraging Shelf’s knowledge management platform and maintaining a strong focus on customer satisfaction, Lowell strengthens its position as an industry leader in debt collection and financial management services. The ongoing partnership between Lowell and Shelf serves as a testament to the transformative power of technology and innovation when strategically applied with a customer-centric mindset.