For Pogust Goodhead, the Fight for Justice Begins in the Call Center

Many people don’t get to see their daily work’s large-scale impact. But at Pogust Goodhead, every employee plays a role in helping ensure large corporations do the right thing and are held accountable for their actions.

Pogust Goodhead is an international class action law firm headquartered in London, England. Their growing global partnership consists of over 700 staff members in three locations. Pogust Goodhead’s mission is to level the playing field between individuals and large corporations.

“When you get into the weeds of what we do when speaking to clients, when you're hearing the impact on people from an individual perspective, suddenly the work goes from being a job to being a purpose,” says Harry Fox, Head of Operations at Pogust Goodhead.

There can be substantial barriers for consumers, residents, victims, business owners, and investors looking for justice—especially when they’re up against the financial resources of multinational corporations. The team at Pogust Goodhead works to remove those barriers so everyone can access fair and tangible results.

That path often begins in the call center.

Contact Centers Impeded the Flow of Information

Pogust Goodhead’s contact centers play a vital role in supporting the diverse needs of their clientele. Call center agents deal with people from every walk of life across different demographics. To be fully accessible to clients, Pogust Goodhead agents have to understand client challenges, including:

• Uncertain expectations of the legal system and what a law firm should do 
• A lack of access to technology
• Inadequate literacy levels to understand complex legal documents

The contact center team consists of 200 full-time agents at their Brazilian contact center, another 50 in the EU, and a 20-person team in London. These 270 employees serve about three million customers. Even though their customer experience is often low touch, agents must still ensure every client interaction is positive, and that reaching an agent is as simple and friction-free as possible.

That wasn’t easy with their previous contact center setup, which consisted of multiple systems that didn’t talk to the primary databases. It took time for agents to verify callers’ identities or retrieve the requested information. It took even longer to relay pertinent information or concerns through the chain of command to the attorneys working on specific cases. "Take simple tasks like retrieving a call recording. It was possible, but it was a headache. You had to take multiple steps and it was hard work," Fox says.

Rather than being helpful, the call centers impeded the flow of information to and from clients and legal teams, slowing everyone down.

Seeing Potential in a New Solution

The first step was moving away from their contact center service provider and bringing some services in-house. From there, they took a moment to reconsider their strategy, existing infrastructure, and available human resources. What could they change and improve about their previously inefficient workflows? Would they continue to use siloed tools or combine multiple contact center activities under one umbrella? What was the best way to spend their available budget?

They scoped a half dozen contact center solutions and invited proposals from four vendors, all of whom seemed to deliver similar functionalities. Ultimately, Talkdesk won out because of its forward-thinking approach. “The key reason for us moving from the previous providers was the potential to bring everything into one platform,” Fox says. The team saw a lot of possibilities to integrate emerging technologies like AI and chatbots, and Talkdesk also offered seamless integrations with Microsoft Outlook, Talkdesk for Salesforce, and various internal databases. Pogust Goodhead saw that migrating information from other systems to Talkdesk would allow them to streamline and accelerate customer communications, modernizing their contact center and maximizing their efforts.

The implementation started quickly. Because Talkdesk CX Cloud facilitates easier, faster implementations, Pogust Goodhead’s internal developers handled most of the migration and had the support of the Talkdesk professional services support team when necessary. It took less than two weeks to complete the migration. They were fully operational within 10 business days.

Streamlining and Accelerating Customer Communications

Pogust Goodhead moves fast, and they have to adapt workflows to ever-changing conditions.

When there’s breaking news related to current litigation, client calls flood the contact center, and they need to rapidly create an IVR option for people calling about that specific case. With their old system, making simple changes to an IVR required spending hours on support calls with Pogust Goodhead’s previous vendor. Someone on the vendor’s technical team would ultimately modify the menus, but the complicated process impeded the firm’s ability to react quickly to emerging situations.

Talkdesk Studio flows allow Pogust Goodhead’s administrators  to make the changes in a few simple steps—no outside assistance required. The team can set up IVRs so their clients can reach agents faster and receive a timely response. The CX Cloud platform is incredibly user-friendly, and if any issues arise, the Talkdesk support team is always available to walk them through a fast resolution.

Another way Pogust Goodhead connects with clients quickly is through the Talkdesk's Salesforce integration, which connects Talkdesk to the CRM the moment the phone rings. It retrieves callers’ profiles and presents agents with all the information necessary so they never answer a call without context. “Agents need to adapt their communication style extremely quickly to ensure a caller feels like they're being heard,” Fox says. “With the tools that we have available, simple pieces of information can be added to the file very quickly, which gives the agent who's answering the call a bit more data and makes their life easier.”

“Anything that we can give the agents to equip them with extra tools, information, and understanding of what each call is going to look like is only going to help them in managing that interaction with the client.”—Harry Fox, Head of Operations, Pogust Goodhead

Instead of taking several minutes to confirm a caller’s identity and locate the appropriate claim, now with CX Cloud agents can get to the heart of the matter in seconds. This integration saves time for clients and allows Pogust Goodhead to reduce wait times and process more incoming calls. They also use the Salesforce data dip to group callers according to their claims and route them appropriately.

“​​The world is full of busy people these days, and not many people want to actually speak on telephone. So being able to give our clients the opportunity to hit a button while they're on the telephone with us to receive a link by SMS to enable self-service is something they clearly appreciate,” Fox says.

Improved Analytics and Workflows

Agents and supervisors were reluctant to access call recordings before, but Talkdesk CX Cloud records and transcribes customer interactions, making it easier for attorneys and clerks to search for keywords and discussion topics. It’s far more efficient than having agents manually forward notes and talking points to their supervisors, who would then pass it on to the legal teams handling a case. The wheels of justice move slowly, but the faster attorneys can gather the information they need, the faster they can act.

“When the legal teams are able to articulate what they need, they will get regular reporting on that information coming back from our clients directly,” Fox says. “It saves that extra step that we may have had to take historically, where we have to go out looking for information.”

Talkdesk Dialer is an essential tool in outbound campaigns. Agents sometimes have to call clients for information, but those calls frequently go unanswered.  On average, out of 10 outbound calls, six don’t answer, two go to voicemail, and only two pick up. With Talkdesk Dialer, it takes mere seconds for an agent to move from one call to the next. “It is at the absolute foremost of the campaigns that we're running for outbound at the moment, and it has such a huge effect for efficiency,” said Naimh Thomas, Client Operations Manager. Agents can handle about 15 calls an hour while still having meaningful conversations that generate more positive sentiments and help advance outreach.

Capturing that positive sentiment has also become significantly easier. The team uses  Talkdesk Customer Experience Analytics to analyze every customer interaction, identifying positive and negative sentiment and using that data to inform their actions. In one example, they ran a pilot campaign contacting satisfied customers and encouraging them to leave positive reviews on social channels and other platforms.

With the basics under control, Pogust Goodhead turned to the AI functionalities within Talkdesk CX Cloud to further empower their customer contact teams. They’re working on a project using language models to compile chatbot answers to clients’ frequently asked questions. Now, clients can get answers after hours or take advantage of a live chat or call with an agent during business hours. “That's ensuring that we've got a full omnichannel platform covering all of the needs of our clients,” Fox says

Saving $750k and Serving Justice with Talkdesk

In the first year of using Talkdesk CX Cloud, Pogust Goodhead saved $750,000 by increasing efficiency. Instead of expanding the team, they boosted their capacity to interact with customers, moving through outgoing calls quickly and processing incoming calls effectively.

Litigation can take years, but Pogust Goodhead’s contact centers move fast to improve efficiency and keep cases on track. By embracing a forward-thinking platform, they’ve enabled their teams to work more effectively, advancing the causes they defend, and seeking justice for those who otherwise have no recourse.