How Republic Services stopped the wasted effort and uncovered lost value

Challenge: Locating the cause of online struggle

Republic Services uncovered a problem: the company’s Voice of the Customer (VoC) survey showed that many customers were experiencing a problem paying their bills: they couldn’t set up auto-pay, or even make an immediate payment. When some of Republic’s customers logged in, they were met with an error message including a phone number and were then directed to a customer service call center. According to customer surveys, this issue was Republic’s number-one detractor on the digital customer satisfaction score — and was costing them money.

This was not a small problem: the login and payment pages are the most visited pages on the Republic Services website, with over 500,000 and 300,000 visits annually. Republic Services wasn’t sure how to solve the problem. The company went into its existing analytics tool to search for the issue and couldn’t find anything. There was no process in place for finding and measuring payment-error issues. The team didn’t know what to do: they couldn’t measure the scope of the problem, and they knew if they threw the problem over the fence to IT that it could take months to find the root cause. They needed a fast resolution.

The only information the team had was the complaint themselves. There were no attached names, addresses, or account numbers. Just anonymous complaints. There was no data that offered insights into who these people were — only that many were experiencing issues logging in and paying their bills. Witnessing, first-hand, what was actually happening would be crucial.

Solution: Capture and quickly analyze failed interactions

That ability to see what was going on came with the arrival of Acoustic Experience Analytics, that uses AI to capture and analyze visitor interactions on websites and mobile applications. By tracking each web interaction, Republic Services is now able to see and review individual consumer sessions on the website.

According to Kirk Vidinghoff, Marketing Manager of Digital Analytics at Republic Services, “I love being able to see the actual sessions of a user to better understand why they may have done something like abandoning a form or not completing a purchase. Knowing what people are doing only gets us so far. Understanding why puts us into action.”

Republic Services had integrated its VoC solution with Experience Analytics previously, and this provided the key to solving the problem, since Experience Analytics is able to identify users and sessions by a number of metrics, including IP addresses, zip codes, even free text of a person’s name. The most precise tracking was with the TLT SID, a unique identifier Experience Analytics assigns to every consumer session.

With the integration of Republic’s VoC system and Experience Analytics, the Republic Services team is now able to match the TLT SID of the session with the survey response. Voilà — they can review the exact session tied that caused the complaint.

In session replays, they saw exactly what the user experienced. The consumer attempted to log in, was met with an error code that included a phone number, attempted a few other sections such as auto-pay and contact us, and was forced to call in to the customer service center to pay their bill.

The team at Republic Services was able to go into the web code with the pinpointed error and uncover the issue. The team then sent this more precise information to IT to fix. This saved what could have been a long slog to troubleshoot the problem by looking at the issue from outside-in.

Results: Quickly diagnose and fix online problems

Republic Services discovered that about 200 customers a day were experiencing the issue with bill payments. They were able to bring that down to under 50 per day immediately, and with further research brought it down to zero. The Republic Services team found that over 18,000 customers had experienced the issue. With a $100 average account value, they calculated that they were unable to collect over $1.8 million in revenue because of the issue.

But the problem they corrected had been greater than just the revenue they weren’t collecting. By using Experience Analytics, Republic Services was able to reduce call center traffic by 20% in just three months. In addition, the IT team saved about four hours per QA ticket because they were able to troubleshoot this more efficiently through Experience Analytics.

Vidinghoff notes that, “I love the ability to add metrics to quantify issues and opportunities on the fly. I don’t need IT interaction and sprint scheduling. I can create metrics from the recorded sessions and start gathering data that day!”

Experience Analytics has not only been valuable, but Vidinghoff has also been happy with the Acoustic relationship. “Support has been great: whether it’s my direct vendor support team or simply using their portal, I get fast responses and solutions to my questions. The user community is helpful as well. Sponsored user groups have put me in touch with other expert users for major companies, aiding our implementation.”

Experience Analytics worked so well, Republic Services encouraged widespread and increased Acoustic usage across Marketing and IT. These teams are now able to walk in the consumer’s shoes and fix their problems faster. Take it from Kirk Vidinghoff, Marketing Manager of Digital Analytics at Republic Services, who says Experience Analytics is an “essential tool in our MarCom tech stack, enabling us to understand our customers better.”

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