Ventrica and Houseful deliver a transformation CX programme
For Houseful (Zoopla), Ventrica transformed CX operations - boosting efficiency, reducing costs by 30% and enhancing engagement through innovation and people-first design.
- Case studies
Ventrica partnered with Houseful (Zoopla), one of the UK’s leading brands, to design and deliver a transformation programme that will enhance the customer experience, improve employee engagement and reduce the total cost to serve. Following a TUPE transfer of 60 plus advisors we are supporting Hosueful’s goal to become the UK’s premier property destination and the preferred partner for estate agent professionals.
The challenge
Houseful’s customer service operation was formed from a series of company acquisitions where the retained support structure was maintained as an isolated, independently running team. This led to them running three mid-size teams across two locations in London and Cornwall supporting software, portal and consumer, each with different requirements and with varying levels of technical and operational complexity. As such, the team included highly skilled technical engineers able to provide not only a response to a query but to also fix the problem.
Their customer service teams lacked standard processes and operational frameworks which could drive efficiency, and their siloed nature meant they didn’t benefit from shared-learnings. Zoopla had made substantial investments in contact centre technologies but lacked the internal skills to fully leverage their capabilities. Teams were understaffed in some areas whilst over capacity in others, leading to high stress levels, inefficiencies and a poor customer experience. Team members, often with long tenure, were disengaged as evidenced by consistently low employee net promoter scores. Most importantly, the team lacked management guidance and support and were not benefitting from best-practice enhancements to the service.
After a competitive tender process Ventrica was engaged to develop a more efficient and cost effective support organisation that delivered on Zoopla’s three core objectives:
- Enhanced customer experience
- Improved employee engagement
- Reduced cost to serve
Our solution
As a first step we undertook a rapid review consultancy programme, brokering the knowledge and experience that Ventrica has in the design and development of customer experience solutions. This involved process reviews, access to operational data and KPIs, 1-2-1 sessions with the in-house staff including their technology teams, customer journey mapping, and an audit of their technology platforms including communication channels, knowledge base and automation.
Following completion of the project we agreed that all customer facing staff across their technical, finance and general support teams would transfer to Ventrica. An extended TUPE consultancy was led by Ventrica specialists resulting in the transfer of 60 employees.
Running concurrently with the staff transfer we launched a transformation programme focussed first on stabilising the service, and then managing a series of optimisation projects that include AI/Bot support, improved knowledge and onboarding for customers and advisors, deployment of new channels and channel switching, and new productivity measures such as workforce management and data insight.
Underpinning our solution we have agreed a commercial model based on the Total Cost of Ownership whereby a fixed and reducing monthly fee is changed based on a pre-agreed headcount. This is true risk/reward where our financial performance is tied to the efficiencies we introduce.
The results
Within three months of the staff transferring to Ventrica we have already achieved significant improvements to service delivery as a result of new Zendesk developments, and improved resource management and operational governance:
- Call abandonment reduced by 75%
- Tickets resolved within five hours increased by 65%
- Costs reduced by 30%