How Westward360 improves productivity by 20% with Dialpad Ai

Is there anything quite as stressful as sorting out living situations? Whether you’re looking for a new place to live or dealing with landlords, it can be a nerve-wracking situation. The last thing anyone wants is poor communications making things worse. So if a property management business can help make the experience easier for customers with better communications, they should.

That’s why it was important for Westward360 to have a modern communications system that could grow with the company. With an off-shore team in the Philippines and a core team in Chicago, they needed to be able to stay connected and keep their contact center running smoothly.

For Jude, Westward360’s Business Operations and Intelligence Manager, that meant a lot of juggling while overseeing the customer service and customer experience team. His first goal? Get his team the tools they need to provide customers with the best experience possible.

That required a real estate phone system and contact center solution of the highest caliber.

We also spoke to Brawley Reishman, Westward360’s Chief Technology Officer, about how their team leveraged the right technology to provide their team with the flexibility they needed, and improved productivity by 20%.

“Great from the get-go.”

Staying connected with each other from wherever they are was of utmost importance for Westward360’s team. “We have a pretty mobile workforce that needed a more flexible phone system. We also didn’t want to worry about moving physical phones if we moved office locations in the future,” says Brawley.

While the team considered a few competitors, Dialpad came out tops thanks to its modern and feature-rich platform. “We were impressed with Dialpad’s product roadmap. Dialpad was a great overall fit for us,” says Brawley.

It didn’t take long for Westward360 to switch to Dialpad. Even though the team was on landlines before, porting over the numbers was almost surprisingly quick (well, surprising if you’re not familiar with Dialpad and how seamless porting numbers can be).

While Jude was bracing for all sorts of issues companies usually face when transferring numbers over, they just didn’t have any this time. No issues, no disruptions.

Afterwards, the team quickly picked up on how Dialpad works and hit the ground running.

“Dialpad has a very low learning curve. Very easy to pick up without any formal training to figure out how to use it. The usability was great from the get-go,” said Jude.

The contact center gets untangled with a super easy-to-customize phone tree

After switching to Dialpad, Westward360 was able to make some big improvements to its contact center. Perhaps the biggest came from an unexpected place: the phone tree.

Before, Westward360’s phone tree was overly complicated—a tangled mess of roots and branches—and it led to bottlenecked calls and a disorganized experience.

Now, they have a new phone tree that incorporates four new contact centers and a support line department. This is amazing for the team, since it allows them to have dedicated teams and agents for specific support—no more sending customers back and forth to talk to the one person who’s an expert at sorting out payment issues or maintenance.

Whenever a call comes in, they can identify what the caller needs and direct them to the right person for the job, from maintenance requests to billing. That’s a relief for both customers and agents alike. This has been life-changing for the team, especially when their team is split between the Philippines and the United States.

Speaking of billing, Dialpad’s contact center analytics helped Westward360 allocate their teams to prepare for monthly rent-related questions. The analytics gave them a clear indication of when to expect residents to start calling in with questions about their latest bills, so they could prepare their teams and brace for the incoming calls.

If you’ve ever needed to contact a property manager about a bill, you know that’s a frustrating call to make—Westward360 helped alleviate the frustration by making sure the callers weren’t stuck on hold or agents were caught unprepared.

“It’s been a really, really good experience,” notes Jude. “I don’t know if we’ve had as good an experience with any other tools like Dialpad.”

Improving productivity by 20% with Ai transcriptions

Before, whenever the team had to check what was said during a particular customer call (which happened often), they had to listen to an entire call recording, which was time consuming.

“Ai transcriptions help the team look up specific parts of a conversation to verify what was communicated with the customer,” says Brawley. “We can pull up the exact part of the call to review, which saves a lot of time.”

They also use Ai transcriptions to search for specific mentions of a property, property manager, or an issue at a property. “This way, we can figure out exactly what was discussed, and with whom,” says Brawley. “It’s improved our productivity by 20%.”

Ai Recap also helps the team improve productivity. Instead of having to read the entire transcript, the team can also quickly review the call summary to learn what happened during the call. “Ai Recap saves us about a couple of hours a week,” says Brawley.

Survey says...

It’s no secret that contact centers need to know if they’re keeping their customers happy, which is why CSAT surveys are essential. In fact, they’re the number one KPI for most contact center managers and business leaders.

The challenging part is getting accurate scores from the customers. Sometimes customers leave negative reviews based on the problem that brought them in, even though they were satisfied with the solution the agent provided. Others don’t even bother to fill out the survey, which provides no information at all.

Dialpad’s Ai Scorecards have helped Westward360 get a closer look at the survey scores and why customers leave the ratings they do. Plus, as part of the Early Adopter Program, they had the opportunity to try out the latest improvements to Dialpad’s CSAT surveys.

For starters, the survey results now include not only a number, but also the reason why a customer left that score.

“Ai Scorecards have been really helpful to give us more context behind a particular agent’s CSAT scores,” says Jude.

What about when a customer doesn’t even answer the survey? Well, Dialpad now has two new ways to resolve that.

The first is Ai CSAT, which uses Dialpad's artificial intelligence technology (which we call Dialpad Ai) to infer a CSAT score. If a customer says “Thank you so much, you’re a lifesaver” but doesn’t fill out the survey, that positive feedback would likely have gone uncaptured as customer feedback… until now. Dialpad Ai can capture those sentiments to provide a more comprehensive understanding of CSAT, even if a company doesn’t get as many explicit CSAT responses as they’d like (which is often the case):

The second is with SMS CSAT, which messages customers after the call to ask them to fill out the survey via text, rather than making them stick around for a minute after the call. This not only helps businesses like Westward360 reach customers if they hang up before they get to the survey, but it also allows them to answer at their convenience. Response rates via SMS tend to be significantly higher than surveys from other channels, so being able to send CSAT surveys this way is exciting for Jude and his team.

“Most of the time, we’re now getting that automated text or email asking to leave a review or feedback from everything we do now. It’s an industry trend we’re seeing everywhere, and it’s great to know that’s now a feature for our CSAT service.”

More analytics, less time on hold

How does Westward360 know that Dialpad is working for them? They have the analytics to prove it.

Specifically, Dialpad’s analytics let Westward360’s team track their call volumes and hold times. Now they can see at a glance when they need extra hands on deck and make sure callers aren’t left on hold forever (no matter how catchy the hold music is).

Plus, they can also easily track the missed call rate and abandon rate, which helps Westward360 make sure they’re helping as many callers as they can (before they leave an angry review about not being able to reach anyone):

“Now we see that we have a significantly higher call abandonment rate if we get, say, 300 to 350 instead of 200 calls a day. We can see what exactly happened here and how we predict for that to happen in the future. It helps us have the right team in the right areas,” said Jude.

11,000 real-time assistance recommendations for agents in a six-month span

Westward360's agents have been benefiting from Dialpad Ai too, through Ai Agent Assist cards and Custom Moments.

Their managers use the Ai Agent Assist cards as a training (and customer service) tool, since they can quickly provide agents with information as soon as a customer asks for it. When a customer asks a tricky question, they no longer have to go, “I… actually don’t know that one, sorry,” or stall for time as they quickly look it up. Dialpad Ai automatically picks up on the question and pulls up the assist card with the answer on the agent’s screen:

In fact, these real-time assist cards have triggered over 11,000 recommendations for Jude’s team in just a six-month span.

Brawley shares the same sentiments about the assist cards: “Real-time assist cards help us standardize the information we provide to customers, reduce training time by 50%, and quality control our calls with customers,” says Brawley.

Plus, keywords and phrases can be tracked with Custom Moments, letting teams see how often certain topics get brought up. What does that mean for Westward360?

Simple: It helps them tell what callers are asking about the most. Is there a new recurring question users have? Is there an upcoming event resulting in a surge of calls? Now it’s easy for them to tell and adjust training to make sure agents are ready:

API: “Amazing Possibilities Introduced”

Before Dialpad, Westward360 didn’t have much in the way of APIs. (APIs, if you need a quick refresher, are interfaces that let multiple apps work together, like how an email app automatically adds a new meeting to your calendar app.)

For Westward360, the lack of APIs led to inefficient processes that took precious time—something had to change.

With Dialpad’s APIs, the entire contact center experience has become much more seamless. (Yes, that’s an increase in a decrease of seams—Dialpad is just that good.) Westward360’s agents can now quickly find everything they need to know about a customer’s experience, from how long they waited to exactly what they talked about, without needing to switch between multiple tools. It’s all there and ready in Dialpad.

Now that Westward360 has switched to Dialpad, the team’s old contact center issues are far behind them. With more contact center teams, tools, and APIs at their disposal, Westward360’s contact center is primed for success.