Anexa BPO - Customer Service Department of the Year

Company: Anexa BPO
Company Description: We’re a Mexican company with over 20 years’ experience in offering tailored solutions to a wide variety of companies to accomplish diverse business goals, whether they be centered around customer experience or by acting as a strategic outsourcing partner. Through the integration between technology, processes, and human talent, we are committed to transform customer service.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year

Nomination Title: End of the beginning, or how Anexa is only just getting started

In April 2020, right when Mexico was beginning to realize just how serious the Covid-19 pandemic was, one of our operations managers summarized the overall uncertainty as well as the commitment to our customers with a simple phrase: “I’m still learning, this is my first pandemic”.

Being a call center company with customers in strategic sectors such as telecommunications and government, we had to take actions that would ensure service continuity for our customers and the people who depend on the services they provide, as well as protecting over 2,000 jobs in our 6 sites all over Mexico. We were able to act quickly not only because we had been monitoring the situation evolving in China and Europe, but also because we had the good timing to start several strategic projects one entire quarter before the beginning of 2020. This inadvertently bought us some sorely needed time to make the transition to life in the new normal as easy as possible. Our corporate and administrative teams had already been working from home one week before the government issued social distancing orders, and once that happened the groundwork was ready to send agents home with all the necessary tools as soon as 72 hours after working centers were officially closed.

As an “essential service” ourselves, as designated by the Mexican government in the first month of the pandemic, we were able to provide continuity to our customers through cloud-based services that also benefited our agents, as they were working remotely and away from potential sources of contagion. Simultaneously, we strengthened our administrative, hiring, and training processes to support our agents – and therefore, our customers – in this transition to the “new normal”, this by working closely with our customers to maintain transparency and reduce the amount of friction when new actions were taken, as well as by increasing the number of safe networks, VPNs, and corporate equipment used in the new working environment.

Thanks to the commitment of our customer service leaders, as well as the foresight of the executive team of the company, our biggest challenge was to deploy all the measures described previously on a national level. And Anexa more than rose to the occasion.

For example, we had originally planned for 30% of our workforce to receive virtual users to be able to work remotely, but that number quickly grew to around 50% of our workforce at the time without any major strain on our IT infrastructure.

We also surpassed expectations on the following KPIs:

-Sales conversion: 38% increase from pre-pandemic levels
-Effective calls: 12% increase from pre-pandemic levels
-Quality: 24% increase from pre-pandemic levels
-First call resolution: 8% increase from pre-pandemic levels
-Agent turnover: 2% decrease from pre-pandemic levels

Thanks to the efforts made by our teams all over the country, our strategy was successful in providing service continuity to our customers without major interruptions and, by extension, helped thousands of people through a complicated time. One of the achievements we are the most proud of is the fact we earned three certifications for the first time in company history – PCI DSS, and ISO 27001 & 9001 – in the middle of the pandemic, as well as two 2020 International Business Awards for our Covid-19 response. This proves our unwavering commitment to our customers and the quality of our services, as well as the flexibility of our team, united even if physically dispersed all over Mexico.

The actions taken by the company leaders in the latter half of 2019 – to accelerate remote work projects – paved the way for a swift and decisive response that protected service continuity for our customers in strategic sectors. Our passionate teams exceeded every expectation and as a result helped protect jobs and continued to provide outstanding service, safely. Hopefully, this will be our last pandemic, but the learning opportunities have been priceless.

-Accelerated strategic work from home projects that allowed a massive migration of agents to home office environments. The first teams went home just 72 hours after official social distancing orders were issued.
-Achieved 3 international certifications – ISO 27001, ISO 9001, and PCI DSS in the middle of a pandemic.
-Won 2 Stevies, as well as another local award, for our Covid-19 response.
-Surpassed KPI expectations even with the pandemic as a background (for more information please look at attached documents)
-Proved our value to our customers as strategic partners.
-Drove the continuity of services for customers in strategic sectors, such as telco and government.
-Achieved 82% satisfaction as reported in our annual customer satisfaction survey