How NativePath Amplified the Voice of the Customer and Drove 90% Efficiency Gains

NativePath, a Personalized Health and Nutrition company, inspires, educates, and equips individuals with tools and resources to restore natural vitality with nutrition products and supplements. To support their customers, NativePath’s customer service team is tasked with educating new customers as well as offering consultative help in finding and purchasing complementary supplements to strengthen their wellness regimen. They capture 90% or more of inbound calls since the channel has proven to be fruitful in establishing new customers and retaining existing customers. As a result of their responsibilities and scope of work, NativePath customer service reps are measured on retention as well as conversion metrics and play a critical role driving customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Ken Shields is NativePath’s Director of Customer Experience (CX), overseeing the customer service team’s goals, performance, and operations. He is a strong believer in quality assurance as a way to ensure agents are listening to customers, responding appropriately, and following procedures. “Agents must always be listening for the need behind the need—after all, that’s what informs much of our business growth,” he says. 

“Agent success is my success, and NativePath’s success, too.”

How Manual QA Held NativePath Back

Calls are critical to NativePath’s success. They often point customers to their call center to avoid confusion and churn on the sales page, but manual QA was getting in the way of scaling. When Shields first joined NativePath, he grew the team by 5x to keep up with customer calls, but although the ratio of supervisors to agents decreased, NativePath still struggled to keep up with the QA needs of its exponentially growing customer base. 

Supervisors spent three-quarters of their day listening to calls manually, which drained their time and energy and, more importantly, meant that they weren’t actually supervising. As a result, agents lacked the coaching and direction to improve how they spoke to customers. Shields started to wonder if they should stop QA altogether to allow supervisors the time to manage their teams. 

While NativePath has always known that conversations with its customers were incredibly valuable, they couldn’t find a better solution than manually reviewing calls—and thus lacked visibility into customer conversations and the ability to report to other departments on growth opportunities.

Once AI came along, they realized how it would transform everything—so they went looking for a best-in-class solution to help them monitor their conversations automatically, surface important insights, improve agent behavior, and elevate the voice of the customer across the organization. 

From Trial to Full Rollout 

When Shields first saw how Echo AI could fully automate QA, he was hooked. The team decided to trial Echo AI for a small portion of its calls (15%) to begin with. He chose Echo AI because its interface was easy to navigate, and the transcriptions were more accurate than those he'd seen with other vendors. Plus, it felt like a partnership more than a vendor service agreement.

In just a few months, Shields saw the value and pitched a full rollout to his executive team—a presentation he didn’t even need to finish to get Echo AI fully approved.

“I had a presentation all lined up, and our COO stopped me halfway through, he said, ‘Ken, we got it—let’s do it,’ and that’s when we went from 15% to 100%.”

Stopping Churn & Reducing Headcount Needs

Improved efficiency 

Echo AI allowed Shields’ team to ditch their tedious, manual call reviews. NativePath supervisors now spend 1-2 hours per week manually listening to and reviewing calls instead of 15-20 hours per week. Supervisors can also now coach their teams and focus on scaling their organization without investing in more QA resources.

Preventing churn faster

With full visibility into customer interactions, NativePath can now take action to prevent customer churn in real time. For example, a NativePath customer called in about a less-than-satisfactory experience they had with an agent. Before Echo AI, NativePath would have had to manually listen to each call to find the agent and locate the exact conversation that had taken place.

With Echo AI, NativePath was able to surface the call in seconds and review sentiment scores to verify the customer’s story while identifying the agent who was involved. Within 12 hours, NativePath swiftly addressed the customer complaint with disciplinary action, ensuring they prevented further customer dissatisfaction that could risk retention.

“Echo AI enabled us to identify someone who was having a negative impact on our customer satisfaction and stop any more interactions from happening in a matter of hours as opposed to days and weeks—that's the powerful benefit of having AI in your work processes."

Controlling for compliance

Echo AI helps Shields and his supervisors listen for compliance-related words to ensure the team is delivering a world class experience to the customers.

Developing Quality Insights

With Echo AI, NativePath has been able to analyze 100% of customer interactions to uncover the root causes behind critical business priorities like product issues, stagnant sales, and customer churn. They use insights from Echo AI to review their top wellness products and better understand customer buying behavior.

“Our customer conversations are the most valuable piece of data we have—the reason NativePath is successful is because we listen to our customer conversations. With Echo AI, no conversations have to be sacrificed in place of someone’s gut feeling, and we no longer have to make decisions based on a sample of customers. It’s a mindset change now that we have the capability to review 100% of calls—the voice of our customer is much louder and clearer.”

Amplifying the Voice of the Customer to Fuel Business Growth

When Shields initially turned to Echo AI, his intent was to improve the efficiency of QA. When he expanded Echo AI call analysis from 15% to 100%, he turned up the volume on NativePath’s customer voice.

Without 100% coverage—and when the work of reviewing calls was manual, it was challenging to surface changes and overall trends quickly to other teams and leadership. With Echo AI, they just look at the insights tab and can quickly share top issues across their product lines in near real-time.

Moving into the future, NativePath hopes to roll out Echo AI insights across other departments such as supply chain, product, and operations with a full analysis of its top ten products in order to drive improvements across the entire business. . With deeper insight across its entire organization, NativePath will be poised to not only improve customer outcomes, but up-level operations to thrive in years to come.