About the Client

Saorview is Ireland’s free-to-air digital TV provider.

The Challenge

The Irish Government was working alongside Governments across Europe to free up digital spectrum ready for the roll-out of 5G. This would directly impact the many of Saorview’s 650,000 customers across Ireland, who would lose signal and would need to carry out a retune of their device in ‘find’ the new signal.  This is a relatively simple activity, but the steps needed to complete it successfully varied by device. It was clear that no matter how well this change was communicated to users, it would generate a great deal of inbound customer contact for the broadcaster as customers came to use their boxes and discovered the lack of service.

Our Solution

ADEC Arise had been providing customer support on behalf of Saorview for 9 years, across voice, chat and email.  Service levels were currently high with low call abandonment and a short time-to-answer.  The ADEC Arise team needed to quickly assess the potential impact on the customer support function and come up with a solution to enable them to support the surge in volume of contacts that would inevitably happen as a result of this change, all whilst maintaining an excellent service experience for customers.

The ADEC Arise team had a large amount of data to use as part of their planning process, based on previous service changes that they had supported on behalf of Saorview, as well as the regular reporting data they used to manage the ongoing service.  Once the Data Insights Team had analysed the data, they were able to predict the level of contacts that customers might make. 

The projected increase in customer contacts would require the existing customer service team to be scaled up rapidly, requiring a significant investment by the client, not only in recruiting additional headcount, but in training and managing what would have been, in effect, a temporary workforce, for a relatively short period of time.

By working closely with the client, ADEC Arise was able to process map the types of queries they were likely to receive during the digital switchover and, in doing so, identified that over 60% of the contacts could be resolved by stepping customers through the retune process.  Once this had been identified, it was decided that an online ‘bot’ tool could be utilised, with the added benefit that customers could self-serve 24 hours a day via the Saorview website.  

The next step in the plan was to ensure that customers were encouraged to use this tool but in a way that made sure they felt supported – customers were offered the option to speak to an agent at every stage of the process for example.  Communication was incredibly important – ensuring language was as easy to understand as possible.  Once the solution was live, it was also critical that ‘dropouts’ were assessed continually so that issues with the process could be identified and resolved, ensuring that completion rates were constantly improving.  

At the same time, ‘live’ support was offered over extended hours, and those customers that called ‘out of hours’ were offered a call-back service.  As part of ensuring the best possible experience it was key that the process was designed to enable the customer to switch from the ‘bot’ to a live agent if they needed additional support. 

The ‘bot’ option was successfully deployed, providing support to customers who needed to retune their Saorview device.  All SLA’s were maintained, including call waiting time and abandonment levels, and the project was so successful that it actually reduced the cost-per-forecasted call by 55% from before the change was implemented, with the ‘bot’ handling over 50% of inbound enquiries about the platform change.  Customers were also able to access the online solution 24/7 – and many customers made use of this facility outside of standard agent availability hours.

“We really appreciate the fact that ADEC Arise is an innovative organisation -  their development of a custom chatbot solution that delivered 24/7 automated responses over Live Help during the 700MHz campaign meant our customers were well served during those large peaks in engagement.”

- Jim Higgins, Brand Compliance and Business Development Manager, Saorview