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"Giva has helped us reduce our total cost of ownership by approximately 70% with their cloud approach, easy administration, intuitive design, and only 1 hour of training.
- Doug Duggan, Director of Customer Service, LifePics

LifePics's Results Using Giva's Cloud Call Center & Customer Service Software

The Giva Service Management Suite™, including Giva® CustomerService ™ and KnowledgeManager™ was deployed in the cloud as their call center solution. The Giva Service Management Suite provided LifePics with a:
  • 70% decrease in call time due to intuitive design
  • 70% increase in effectiveness in working with the development department
  • 70% increase in number of calls captured due to intuitive design
  • 50% increase in call center team productivity using dashboards
  • Spend just 20 minutes/week generating reports with actionable information
  • 40% increase in customer satisfaction
  • 80% increase in speed of providing input to the development department
  • 70% decrease in total cost of ownership (TCO)
  • 60% increase in productivity at senior management meetings
  • 60% increase in call center department productivity
  • 50% increase in effectiveness of call center leadership, training and mentoring

About LifePics

LifePics, an online digital photo printing web site serving over 7,000 clients and thousands of consumers, gives customers the freedom to save, store, share, and print photos anytime and from anywhere. The photo imaging service is a one stop shop for photo books, calendars, greeting cards, personalized gifts, photo sharing and storage, and a variety of mobile phone photo applications.
About LifePics
We are now capturing over 70% more calls than in the past.
We have reduced consumer call times on average by 70%.
Our overall call center productivity has increase 60%.
- Doug Duggan, Director of Customer Service, LifePics

LifePics Case Study

Doug Duggan, Director of Customer Service, LifePics

The Challenge

We support approximately 7,000 clients and thousands of consumers that use our unique cloud based photo imaging services. Although our services are intuitive and easy-to-use, there are challenges in supporting such a large base of nontechnical consumers and retailers, where the industry norm is high turnover requiring constant retraining. Providing technical support in this environment can be an enormous challenge during holiday periods where call volumes can be elevated over 500%. Before Giva, we were not able to accurately measure the performance of the call center. It felt like we were flying blindfolded.
Furthermore, we had difficulty providing useful information to our development department for feature changes or bug fixes since we could not provide enough of quantitative data on problems with our application. We could only provide our hunches and anecdotal evidence of possible problems. Of course, sometimes the problems were obvious and straightforward. However, with our complex application the issues are often much more nuanced and difficult to accurately identify quickly. With such an active and highly utilized cloud application time is of the essence in fixing problems.

The Solution

Deploy in days / Train in 1 hour
Our call center has been transformed with Giva. In the past we were not able to measure the performance of the call center. Now, we have changed our company into a metrics and performance based culture. I can more closely monitor so many more operational areas that influence our customers' experiences. We make decisions with certainty and review actionable information and we no longer manage with anecdotal evidence.
We were able to start using Giva only after a few days of set-up discussions. It was very simple to get started and immediately increase our productivity with the new tool. As we grow, we can incrementally utilize new features and functions with little effort.
We are now handling calls faster since Giva is so intuitive and easy to use. We are able to quickly document calls and resolve problems with less time and effort. Giva only requires a few clicks to open and resolve service requests. This has directly translated into higher customer satisfaction due to shorter call times. We estimate that we are now capturing over 70% more calls than in the past.
We have reduced consumer call times on average by 70%. A service request is immediately created from a form by the consumer, if a live chat session does not solve the issue. The agent has immediate access to the service request as they begin speaking in person on the phone. This has increased customer satisfaction dramatically. We are also considering using the customer facing Giva knowledge base to assist with self-help to lower call volume. This will be an enormous benefit especially around holidays.
One of the many advantages of Giva's cloud call center solution is that we can access it 24x7 from anywhere. Inclement weather is a fact of life in our region of the country and it is nice to know that our call center team can access Giva without the complexity of VPNs or other remote access options.
Highly customizable without programming or consultants
All the set-up and administration in the Giva call center application is point and click with no programming or script writing. We have full control over all administration, so we do not need Giva's assistance to do any set-up or customization. For example, we are using the customer satisfaction survey and associated reports. It was very easy to set-up and also generate immediate business results. After an issue is resolved to our customers' satisfaction, Giva automatically sends an email survey based upon an algorithm we determined to make sure no customer receives too many surveys in a specified time increment.
After the survey is completed, the results are automatically integrated into a number of reports. We also receive real-time notifications of low ratings according to thresholds that we established. This allows us to take immediate action to rectify any dissatisfaction. For example, a consumer may not be satisfied due to something beyond our control such as a product that is not offered by a specific retailer. In those cases, we can refer the consumer to an alternative retailer and thereby create a very high level of satisfaction with little effort. The key is that we receive real-time notifications from Giva so we can take immediate action. This work flow automation was very easy to set-up and customize to our exact requirements. It allows us to rapidly turnaround negative situations and increase satisfaction. In this area alone, Giva has helped us increase customer satisfaction by over 40%.
The customer satisfaction survey feedback loop also identifies training issues with our agents who may be new or inexperienced in certain areas. We are integrating call scripts into Giva to make sure that our agents are following standard operating procedures and providing uniform answers. These call scripts also help new agents quickly come up to speed while they are actually handling calls. The call scripts were easily added to Giva in a single administration screen and then immediately available to all agents.
Giva has helped us reduce our total cost of ownership by approximately 70% with their cloud approach, easy administration, intuitive design, and only 1 hour of training. Our IT department is busy growing, managing and maintaining our core digital photo application. They do not want any disruptions or defocus of maintaining a noncore business application.
Robust, fast & painless reporting for higher quality decision-making
We can now measure the performance of our call center team. We have metrics to measure team and individual performance. As a result, overall call center productivity has increase 60%. Giva reporting is extremely intuitive and easy to use. With just a few clicks, I can get the exact reports that I need with little effort. Each report template has a specific purpose and they are very easy to modify with standard report filters. I can also build my own templates with just a few clicks. I can generate, save and share multiple versions of the same report template and also convert to it to a CSV or PDF file and email it to anybody inside or outside of LifePics.
With the reports and dashboards, we have created a much more data driven company culture. As a result, there is a much higher level of trust between senior leaders, the call center and the development department. I can also lead the call center with data objectivity and determine the high performers as well as those who need coaching. I have increased my effectiveness as the call center leader by approximately 50% and I am now a better leader, trainer and mentor.
I can view all the metrics and KPIs on my dashboard or quickly access others in my favorite reports. It is very easy to keep updated on major issues with our retailers or consumers. We can subdivide problems into the component issues with a high level of granularity for prompt addressing by development. Previously, we could not accurately track the exact specifics of problems that our customers had with our web site. Unfortunately, this directly impacted our revenue so it was a very important business process for us to resolve. Now, we have a much higher level of certainty that we have properly identified and categorized customer issues. We can then prioritize the issues based upon how much they impact revenue and provide guidance to the development department to set priorities to generate the highest ROI from our resources. This new business process increased the certainty that our revenue generation is maintained and customer experience is always being improved.
With Giva reports it is very easy to find a "smoking gun" that is causing some customer dissatisfaction or even a "needle in a haystack" causing only a small amount of distress, but which may snowball into a more significant issue. Often, both of these kinds of issues are not obvious unless carefully tracked and the details analyzed over a large number of calls. Since our retailers and customers are not technically savvy, they do not always have the skills to accurately indicate the exact nature of the problems on the web site. Our agents just document what they can from a call and then we can analyze large volumes of calls with Giva reports to piece together the real issues.
We can then take these well documented issues to our development department as a top priority since we have a high volume of data to back up the problem. The development department knows exactly what to fix and they spend less time trying to replicate an issue and more time actually fixing the issue. We have a fairly fast development cycle releasing new code on almost a daily basis. Giva helps us rapidly perform this business process over and over again in short cycles.
Overall, the call center is now working 70% more effectively with our development department. The call center's relationship with the development department has radically improved since we have much more creditability. We can get their time and attention since they know that we have reports of bugs, defects and usability issues. They are very committed to an exceptional customer experience.
The Giva dashboards have increased the call center's productivity by over 50%. We are now carefully measuring the SLA time-to-respond and the SLA time-to-resolve on each issue identified so no issues are left unaddressed. There are a lot of different dashboard views that are possible to easily configure. Each call center agent and development engineer can have their own personal dashboard views.
Our meetings with senior management are 60% more productive as a result of having outstanding real-time reports that can be run very quickly. We can provide faster and more comprehensive senior management updates with metrics and KPIs, so our meetings require less time with increased senior management confidence in the call center team.
I spend only 20 minutes/week generating metrics, charts and analytics to lead the call center and the information quality is outstanding. I also provide summarized reports to senior management with drill down capability. I can easily post reports on our Microsoft Sharepoint® management portal.
We have increased the speed of providing input to the development department by approximately 80% using Giva reporting. We have been able to quickly identify bugs as well as beneficial usability enhancements so we can quickly improve our cloud application in a shorter amount of time. We can perform tradeoff analysis on possible enhancements such as the relationship between increasing the size of a button and generating additional revenue.
Outstanding Technical Support
We have had 100% uptime using Giva's cloud call center application. Giva technical support is absolutely outstanding. We get our questions answered very quickly and thoroughly. The support team always follows up with us to make sure that any issues are solved to our complete satisfaction. They also solicit our feedback with a customer satisfaction survey.
We love the constant flow of feature improvements that we get from Giva. They ask us for our feedback and have created an open forum with their customers. Our Account Manager makes sure that all of our needs are taken care of and that we are getting the most of the entire suite of products that we purchased. We are extremely happy with Giva.
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