1. Introduction

    This leading home security company specializes in-home monitoring systems in the United States. They offer simple home security solutions to homeowners and have for the past 20 years. The security company’s utmost goal is to provide an unparalleled customer experience but found themselves struggling in this area. They needed to lower operating costs, improve their customer experience, add additional complex service queues, and offer bilingual support to an increasing bilingual customer base.

  2. The Challenge

    The company had both in-house agents as well as an automated system they relied on for customer support. The in-house agent team proved to be very costly for the company and did not offer the efficiency needed. The company also relied heavily on an automated system that did not provide adequate customer support. They also struggled with high operating costs and a dissatisfied customer base that had grown frustrated with the level of customer support provided. The company had also recently acquired two security companies, which expanded their customer base significantly and needed to add new soft collections, troubleshooting, and tech support.

  3. Solution

    To provide the level of customer service needed, the Security company began to investigate other options by reaching out to outside vendors. Although they had never worked with an outside vendor for customer support, they were hopeful a new partnership would meet their business needs. The security company was immediately impressed with the high level of support they received from Centris.

    Centris agents were required to handle a variety of calls such as:

    • Customer service - including billing inquiries, taking payments, updating accounts, and fielding general billing questions

    • Cancel dispatch - contacting local authorities to cancel dispatch for false alarms

    • Technical Support - level 1 trouble-shooting support for customers’ physical equipment.

    • Customer Retention - assisting existing customers who were considering canceling service.

    • System moves - walking customers through a step-by-step relocation process. This was a 75+ step process that required an extended customer call.

    • Inbound soft-collections - performing collection calls to customers behind on payments.

    • Customer Surveys - providing eight different customer surveys including customer satisfaction, onboarding, loyalty, due diligence, outbound, and inbound surveys

  4. The Result

    By working with Centris, the security company was able to eliminate the high cost of agent training and agent payroll. Centris provided a large team of bilingual agents cross-trained in different queues. The Centris team provided 24/7 live customer support, covering the difficult but essential graveyard shift. The Centris team was also able to handle new customer leads and technical support calls while decreasing the number of transfers to the supervisor queue that the automated system had previously generated. Centris delivered a much higher level of customer satisfaction resulting in increased customer retention. As Centris agents took over customer support, they found many customers were calling to cancel their service. Once the Centris agent helped the customer, many customers decided to keep their service with the security company. In addition, Centris conducted more effective market surveys for the security company that revealed a higher level of CSAT and a decrease in cancellations.

    After a few short months, they also realized the positive impact the partnership was having on their business. By partnering with Centris, the security company was able to significantly reduce their operating expenses by about $1 million per year in agent wages. Their CSAT scores consistently ranked about 15% higher compared to their internal agents and their customer retention improved as well.

  5. Summary

    Centris agents efficiently handled all of the additional customer support queues to support the growth of the security company. Customer feedback consistently reflected a high level of customer satisfaction and increased customer retention. Through their partnership with Centris, this home security company reduced operating costs, provided a higher level of customer support, and improved customer retention.