Swanson Health

This natural-health product leader is making its award-winning customer service even better with RingCentral Contact Center

Region

Americas

Company size

400–4,999

Industry

Healthcare

SwansonVitamins.com

Products used

80,000

customer service calls handled per month with RingCentral Contact Center

more agent calls reviewed by supervisors, using Contact Center's Workforce Engagement Management

customer service technology platforms consolidated to 1

We’re a company with an 85 NPS score, so it’s not easy to find ways to improve our customer service operation. But RingCentral Contact Center helps us do just that. With the automatic call recording, our supervisors tripled the calls they can review. The callback option lets us give customers more choice and convenience. And the reporting capabilities help us continually monitor and improve our performance.

Emma Grotluschen

Senior Manager of Customer Service

A leader in natural health products for half a century

In the crowded field of natural wellness products, Swanson Health is a name that has earned the trust of millions of people around the world.

The company is one of the longest-operating providers of vitamins, supplements, and other wellness solutions—celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2019. Swanson also regularly wins awards for innovation, product quality, and customer service.

To cite just a couple of the most recent examples, Global Health & Pharma Magazine named Swanson 2021’s “Best Natural Health Vitamins and Supplements Company in the US,” and the company took home the 2021 “Customer Service Department of the Year” prize at the Best in Biz Awards.

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Looking for ways to improve on a world-class customer service operation

For Swanson, customer service is more than a department—it’s a commitment. Finding the right mix of natural health products, especially among the 20,000 items on Swanson’s website, can be difficult. That’s why the agents on the company’s award-winning customer service team take their time and listen to each customer’s requests before guiding them to the right products.

Emma Grotluschen, Senior Manager of Customer Service, explains that her team is continuously looking for ways to make the customer experience even better. That’s what led them to RingCentral.

Engaging a trusted technology partner for help

As they often do, Swanson’s management team turned to the company’s IT partner, Network & Technology Solutions Inc. (NTSI), for guidance.

NTSI Owner Sajid Ghauri explains, “Swanson asked us to present several options based on their specific goals: consolidating systems into a single unified environment, moving communications to the cloud, improving operational efficiencies, enhancing reporting and analytics capabilities, making agent training more efficient, and providing an admin dashboard the company could manage itself without needing outside IT support.”

We were using five or six different IT solutions to power our customer service department—different platforms for phone calls, customer chats, emails, etc. NTSI did a great job narrowing the field of UCaaS and cloud contact center solutions for us, clearing away all but the best contenders based on what we needed. And in every category that mattered, RingCentral kept popping to the top of the list.

Emma Grotluschen

Senior Manager of Customer Service

Creating massive operational improvements with RingCentral Contact Center

As Emma notes, one of the first operational benefits Swanson experienced after moving to RingCentral Contact Center was the ability to transition its entire customer service team to working remotely—something the company’s previous system didn’t support, and which became essential almost immediately, due to COVID.

“RingCentral Contact Center was so intuitive that we were able to get our agents set up on the system when they were just getting settled into working from home. The softphone solution on agents’ desktop computers was so easy to figure out, and the reporting in Contact Center was so detailed and gave us such visibility, we had a seamless transition in the middle of all the pandemic confusion even though Swanson never had a remote customer service operation before.”

With RingCentral Contact Center, Emma notes, Swanson also solved one of its major challenges. The unified solution integrated each of the customer service department’s core communication channels—phone, chat, and email—making it easier than ever for agents and supervisors to serve customers no matter how they choose to make contact.

“Migrating our 150 agents to RingCentral Contact Center was great from a consolidation standpoint, but it did more than cut down the number of apps our agents have to keep an eye on. Because all our customer channels are now connected in one cloud platform, we can easily adjust our teams and queues based on skills and call volume—adding an agent who’s covering a phone queue to a chat queue as backup, or the other way around. That’s allowing our supervisors to make each of these channels more responsive and efficient than ever.”

During the pandemic, demand for our health products skyrocketed, meaning call volume spiked. But because we had RingCentral Contact Center, we had skills-based call routing, the ability to easily adjust call queues on the fly, and detailed reporting that let us see when we needed to provide more coverage in different areas. That meant our agents were able to deal with much higher call volume, serve more people–and still deliver excellent service.

Emma Grotluschen

Senior Manager of Customer Service

Leveraging Contact Center’s workforce engagement tools

As Emma explains, her customer service team is finding enormous value in Contact Center’s Workforce Engagement suite, specifically the Workforce Management, Recording, and Quality Management modules.

“With our old system, we had to maintain our employee schedules in a spreadsheet. Now that we have RingCentral, our supervisors can do it all in their Contact Center environment, and it’s so much easier to build those schedules based on agents’ skills, areas of focus, and work hours.”

Emma’s team is also finding ways to improve agent performance with the Quality Management module in RingCentral Contact Center.

“The Quality Management planner has been a game-changer for us. We can automatically assign new agents to supervisors to review their work, a capability we never had before. We can also easily create surveys, update the questions, and review agents’ scores anytime online. It lets us generate a wealth of data and gives us so much flexibility in how we view and analyze it. If I want, I can pull a report just showing how every agent has scored on question number five.”

In fact, Emma points out, the Quality Management module is also helping to improve the engagement and job-satisfaction levels of Swanson’s customer service agents. “With our old system, the agents couldn’t see details on how supervisors were scoring them, so they didn’t have helpful feedback telling them how to improve. Now, it’s all there, detailed guidance on each aspect of how their supervisors are measuring their performance, so our agents know where to focus.”

But the customer service team found its most significant operational improvement, Emma notes, with RingCentral’s Recording feature.

“Now that we can automatically record every call in RingCentral Contact Center, our supervisors have been able to review three times as many agents’ calls as before. That means we can give supervisors more context to assess performance and give our agents more relevant and detailed feedback. All of these things work together to support our main goal—creating an excellent customer experience.”

Using RingCentral Contact Center is actually helping us make our agents happier and more engaged. The detailed feedback available to agents in the Quality Management module means they can see exactly how their managers are scoring their work. And with the Recording feature, our agents can even listen to a call to review it against a supervisor’s score. All this is leading to our agents feeling like the scoring process is fair and that they have clear direction on how to improve their performance.

Emma Grotluschen

Senior Manager of Customer Service

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