Valvoline Drives Revenue and Increases Coupon Send Rate by 76% With Textel

About Valvoline
Operating for over 150 years, Valvoline is a global marketer and supplier of premium branded lubricants and automotive services. Ranked as the third best passenger car motor oil brand in the DIY market, Valvoline has powerful brand recognition, notable for its exceptional service and innovative motor oil technology. Valvoline’s operations are extensive, with approximately 1,400 quick-lube locations and with the second largest retail brand by number of stores in the United States. In addition to the services they provide in store, Valvoline also markets its own brands of lubricants and automotive chemicals.

Industry: Premium automotive lubricants and services brand

Location: 1,200+ locations across the United States

Contact Center Size: 230+ contact center agents

Use Case: Decrease AHT, increase customer engagement

Product: Textel Conversations integration with NICE CXone

The Problem: With a Struggling Coupon Program, Valvoline Needed a More Efficient Channel to Send Promos to Customers

Valvoline’s contact center agents have plenty on their plate. On top of answering questions and fielding customer inquiries, they’re responsible for building up Valvoline’s customer experience in some critical ways.

Through the company’s coupon program, their contact center helps customers save money by sending coupons based on a customer’s service needs, automobile type, and more. These can then be redeemed the next time a customer brings their car to a Valvoline retail location. The coupon program has supported the brand’s customer loyalty, providing value straight to its customers.

What’s more, it helps drive direct revenue. But their contact centers were struggling to get the coupons sent out efficiently using only email. With email, agents could only opt customers in for coupons using an integrated page pop-up on their CCaaS platform. Send rates were low at only 17%, and redemption rates hovered at a mere 8%.

“We were emailing all our discounts to customers,” Valvoline’s Joseph Patrick said. “Getting email addresses over the phone left a lot of room for agent error and bounce back, which hurt our redemption rate.” Patrick, the company’s technology manager over customer support at the time, said the inefficiencies and error rates were too great to ignore. So, they turned to Textel.

The Solution: Valvoline Added Texting to Their CXone Workflow, Boosting Revenue, Customer Engagement and Efficiency

Valvoline already used the NICE CXone platform to streamline its IVR and track its customer experience metrics. So, Patrick pulled the data to see if there were any trends in customer preferences. Reports revealed huge clusters of customer phrases like, “Can you text it to me,” and “Text me my coupon.” This, he said, proved the demand for texting options.

“After we analyzed our call transcripts, we saw an opportunity to send out coupons to our customers via SMS text instead of just email,” Patrick explained.

But, with such a massive volume, +4.5 million estimated customer interactions annually, Patrick wanted a solution that would integrate right into their existing technology, ideally connecting with the contact center platform they already used.

On a recommendation from NICE, Textel provided a quick, easy and trusted text messaging experience for Valvoline’s discount coupon program. And, we connected into their CXone system. Textel worked alongside Patrick’s team to enable business texting at all of their contact center locations, then decided to tackle the issues with the coupon program. In just four weeks time, Valvoline had launched their text messaging solution and started to see results.

Using MMS, Textel Helped Valvoline Streamline the Coupon Program

MMS messaging opened the door for a new solution to Patrick’s problem, giving agents a way to text picture coupons to customers. “Now, they can send picture coupons by text message in the same page pop flow they’re already familiar with,” he said.

To implement this, Patrick’s team used the existing pop-up page agents were previously using to send coupons over email and included a new option for MMS text messaging in the drop-down menu. Pulling in available customer data, the text creates a custom coupon that agents can send to the customer’s cell phone on record. And to cut down on wasted time, Patrick’s team set it so that the customer’s phone number was pre-populated, making it quick for the agent to send the coupon over.

Now, agents are texting location-specific coupons tailored to fit their customers’ profiles with just a couple of clicks. The results are both impressive and unexpected. According to Patrick, they noticed their first positive ROI on the project cost in just two weeks from the launch date.

First, they saw the coupon send rate increase 76%, while coupon redemption has also increased at Valvoline Instant Oil Change stores. The integrated SMS capability also led to some additional efficiencies in the Valvoline contact center. Their average handle time (AHT) decreased by 20 seconds since deploying SMS, accompanied by a 10-second decrease in holding queue time.

“When you’re answering 200,000 calls a month, a 20-second improvement in AHT is very significant,” Patrick said.

With a 90% swing to prefer SMS over email, Valvoline customers have shown they’ll use texted coupons when given a chance. “At the end of the day, it’s about making each contact center interaction better,” Patrick added. “It’s clear that the text option for discount coupons meets our customer’s preference for SMS. Overall, business texting has improved agent efficiency and service level, further enhancing our customer experience.”

The Result: With Textel, Valvoline Improved Customer Engagement & Operational Efficiency

76% increase in coupon send rate.

After adding the option for SMS coupons within their coupon program, Valvoline was able to make their program more efficient and saw a dramatic increase in the number of coupons sent to customers.

20-second decrease in average handle time (AHT).

Once they added texting, Valvoline’s average handle time for customer interactions decreased by 20 seconds. Their holding queue time also decreased by 10 seconds. The improvement of both metrics saved them time, allowing them to connect with customers faster and more efficiently.

8% increase in coupon redemption rate.

With more coupons being sent to their customer base, Valvoline was able to increase revenue in their contact center. Within just the first few weeks of adding texting, they saw an 8% increase in the number of coupons redeemed by customers.