TP was amongst the first to recognise the need for business continuity and exceptional workload management in contact centres, they trebled the size of their outsourced call centre, to specifically accommodate client overflow needs at very short notice. "We pride ourselves in matching or exceeding our clients' in-house call centre performances for both selling and inbound services." commented Patrick Jolin, Head of Operations. "Our secret? It is what lies behind any successful outsourcing partnership - we work with our clients as an integral extension of their business operations and the technology that we have adopted has enabled us to do so."

A business case for communication recording

TP have been focusing more and more in the area of specialist services such as mystery shopping and quality assurance. Mystery shopping is a service area with a growing demand, reflecting the shift of focus for call centres from up selling / cross-selling to customer retention. "Mystery shopping is a powerful tool for stopping your customers from walking away." explains Jolin, "It is like being a customer rather than an employee and therefore better poised in identifying where the shortfalls in your customer service are". With a reputation for harnessing technology to provide the best quality service to their customers, the company recognised the need for a customer communication recording solution to support their new service offering.

The business case for such a solution highlighted four key points: firstly, the need for compliance with industry regulations and standards such as the General Insurance Standard Council. For some industry sectors such as healthcare and finance, call recording is a must, as Jolin points out "We need to hold records of all the customer interactions from anything from 6 months to five years, in order to prevent any contention about information given whilst selling health care plans".

Secondly, a web-enabled recording solution would provide TP with a unique service to offer to their clients: unannounced remote access to the outsourced contact centre's recorded calls to monitor TP' quality of performance.

Thirdly, a voice and data recording solution is a vital requirement for supporting specific specialist products such as mystery shopping.

Last but not least, a customer interaction recording solution would improve the contact centre performance by helping with the training and development of the agents and also providing management with readily accessible information as and when needed.

Finding the right solution

TP investigated what was available in the marketplace for communication recording. As Jolin recalls, "If you just do a feature-by-feature comparison it may seems that many products offer the same functionality. Activa's solution offered exactly what we needed, but the main reason for selecting them was the customer interaction recording solution, which was seamlessly implemented and integrated within the contact centre existing IT infrastructure without any business disruption.

Measurable business benefits

The recording was switched on right away for supporting a mystery shopping project and individual call scoring times was immediately reduced by around 75% as a result of easier and faster call retrieval and analysis. As a new service offering, the customer could also remotely access and monitor TP' performance on the project. As Jolin says, "They can just listen unannounced to what we are doing. We are committed to deliver quality to our customers and in this way we can really prove it. Since the recording solution enabled us to offer this service, the clients' perception of our agents' performance has increased. Now our clients can mystery shop the mystery shopper!"

The contact centre agents took to the recording solution straight away. "One of the solution pre-requisites was ease of use and minimal training requirements." explains Jolin, " Its web interface delivered just that. Our agents were capable of using it within a couple of hours of seeing it." The recording solution has also been of extreme help in the areas of agent monitoring and support. TP is recognised by the industry as a policy setter for contact centres recruitment and retention and they apply internally the same rules that they recommend to their clients. The company's attrition rate and that of the clients they advise, is well below industry standards. Before adopting the recording solution, supervisors used to sit in the corner of a room and monitor individual agents. This was a time consuming and highly subjective way of assessing agents' performance and training needs. "With the recording solution, the monitoring process is now backed up by hard evidence, it is easier to identify best practice behaviour and therefore educate the rest of the team." comments Jolin, "Moreover, our best practices are now highly visible to our clients".

Looking into the future

TP is looking to grow its contact centre in an organic way bringing it up to 100 seats by the end of the year, whilst still strongly maintaining its focus in specialised services. "The recording solution has delivered for us major benefits in all of the four key areas identified by our business case." concludes Jolin, "In the days when working in a contact centre for just one week of your life is the modern day equivalent, from a character-building stance, of a week's National Service, customer interaction recording solutions are essential and this is a well recognised fact by both ourselves and our clients. Activa's solutions coupled with its astounding support and services are offering us the competitive advantage that we were looking for."  (Maria Boxley: Activa Soluitions)