Retail Industry
From Contact Center Assessment to Operational Transformation
Customer Experience & Service Delivery: How a comprehensive contact center assessment uncovered customer and operational friction, established a prioritized transformation roadmap, and helped move critical improvements into execution.
The Challenge
A leading retail organization experiencing rapid growth needed a clearer view of how effectively its contact center was supporting customers, employees, and the broader business.
Leadership wanted to understand where the current service model was creating unnecessary customer effort, where operational practices were falling short of leading standards, and which investments across people, process, and technology would have the greatest impact.
NRG was engaged to evaluate the current-state customer experience and contact center operation and identify opportunities to improve service delivery, scalability, operational efficiency, and customer experience. The assessment included customer experience, operational processes, technology, organizational design, and change management.
The Strategy
NRG began with a comprehensive assessment of the contact center, combining operational analysis, stakeholder discovery, customer experience insights, and industry best-practice benchmarking.
The work was then expanded into detailed consumer journey mapping across phone, chat, email, and digital experiences. NRG analyzed existing customer satisfaction data and conducted mystery shopping across the client and key competitors to understand not only where friction occurred, but how customers experienced it throughout the journey.
The work surfaced:
- Customer pain points and drivers of effort
- Moments of truth across critical customer journeys
- Channel and process inconsistencies
- Opportunities for improved self-service
- Training, quality, and knowledge-management gaps
- Technology and operational dependencies
- Opportunities to improve organizational structure and accountability
NRG then translated these findings into recommendations designed around impact, implementation effort, dependencies, and timing—creating a roadmap that connected immediate improvements with longer-term transformation priorities.
The Execution
Rather than ending with an assessment, NRG continued working with the organization to move priority recommendations into action.
Initiatives included:
- Redesigning the quality program around behavior-based performance
- Building a centralized knowledge-management approach and single source of truth
- Redesigning new-hire training using a blended learning model
- Supporting organizational design and strategic workforce planning
- Establishing a framework for vendor evaluation and management
- Defining opportunities and direction for future self-service improvements
The result was a connected transformation program in which insights from the initial assessment and customer journeys directly informed operational changes. The Capstone shows these initiatives progressing across 2022 and 2023 rather than existing as isolated projects.
The Impact
The engagement created both a strategic roadmap and measurable operational improvements.
Results included:
- 30% reduction in employee onboarding time
- 10% vendor cost reduction associated with efficiencies from the redesigned training program
- Employees able to find needed information in the new centralized knowledge resource 85% of the time
- More than 1,000 consumer contacts evaluated through the redesigned quality methodology
- A defined roadmap showing where and how to improve self-service, enabling more cost-effective investment decisions
- Employee engagement within the Customer Engagement team reaching 94%, up from 86%
- Improvement across most categories of the Employee Satisfaction Survey, including clarity of direction, resources and support, and performance management
“NRG did a great job facilitating the information and helping us redesign training in a way that increased agent empowerment and reduced workload for leaders. They took a complex, information-heavy program and made it easier for agents to absorb and for trainers to teach. This work filled a gap we’ve had for a long time and created a foundation we didn’t have before.”
– Contact Center Leader, Retail Organization
experience + excellence
Turn Customer Experience Insights Into Operational Improvement
We help organizations move beyond identifying contact center problems—connecting assessment, customer journey insights, prioritization, and execution to create measurable improvements across people, process, and technology.
