Warranty Holdings

Company: NoeticaCustomer: Warranty HoldingsSubmitted by: MCC InternationalDate: May 2001Founded in the UK in 1974, Hertfordshire based Warranty Holdings supplies a wide range of insurance services to the motor industry. Since 1995 Warranty Holdings has taken on increasing amounts of both inbound and outbound calls as it has developed warranty relationships with a healthy spread of motor manufacturers. It has realised that the key to its success is how it can tailor different warranties to different customer prospects.Warranty Holdings works in partnership with some 14 motor manufacturers, around one in three of the top 100 UK dealer groups, and over 12,000 independent motor retailers. Priding itself on being one of the motor industry’s most innovative provider of services such as warranty programmes and insurance products, it is imperative for Warranty Holdings to keep on top of the latest technology. Warranty Holdings identified its call centre as critical for servicing many customers and sought out the best technology to deliver optimum service levels.

The goal:

Once Warranty Holdings sat down to discuss strategies to help them remain ahead of the competition and what they wanted to achieve, one particular target came to the fore. “Our main goal is to increase our renewal rate by 50%,” explained Director of Direct Marketing Mark Coles. “Renewals is a market that historically we had difficulty with. It is important to know exactly what the customer wants and, because of this, a lot of information about them and their preferences needs to be gathered. All this is normally time consuming and expensive.”

The solution:

Coles and his team approached Noetica, a leading developer of innovative software solutions for call centres.

Noetica’s solution, Synthesys, has been designed specifically to enable non-technical staff to have complete control of the call centre. Synthesys key features include customer relationship management (CRM); callflow/script designing, service call centre management and support; outbound campaign management; web compatibility and computer telephony integration (CTI).Coles and his team looked at different call centre software packages [before deciding on Synthesys. “We particularly liked the fact that Synthesys’ callflows could be amended and updated so quickly, which reduces downtime on a campaign and helps us to remain one step ahead of the competition,” explained Coles.Synthesys allows Warranty Holdings to effectively gather the right information about its customers.

Synthesys populates the callflow (script) with personalised data throughout the conversation, using current and historical data, thus negating the need for information to be re-entered. This clever use of the right data to personalise the conversation allows Warranty Holdings to incorporate cross-sell and up-sell opportunities by better understanding what the customer wants, and therefore offering them an appropriate and desirable product or service.Through Synthesys, Warranty Holdings is able to build and amend its callflows quickly and easily, fine tuning them to better meet the needs of the customer. Consequently Warranty Holdings has been able to add value and increase its competitiveness by delivering the right warranty to the right customer; whilst also exploiting cross and up sell opportunities ­.This can be by offering road-side recovery services from Green Flag, or by increasing the duration of the customer’s warranty cover. These opportunities are always exploited during the conversation between the agent and the customer, by being built into the callflow.

The conversation between the agent and the customer can be complex, with lots of questions and many possible outcomes. It is extremely beneficial that the agents don’t need to learn each of the thousands of different warranties available and the specific criteria for each one. They can rely on Synthesys to identify the product most suited to the customers’ requirements.

Automating the calls:

“It has become apparent how essential Synthesys is; we simply needed this type of technology in the company,” said Coles. “Where the call centre does not yet utilise Synthesys you can really tell the difference in their call duration and fulfilment stats.

“”Its not simply the fact that we have almost doubled the amount of calls that we have been able to make,” continued Coles. “But more the fact that through using Synthesys we have became more effective in closing sales and exploiting cross and up sale opportunities.”

The agents’ friend:

The agents’ training time has reduced dramatically since Noetica’s Synthesys has been implemented – now taking hours, instead of weeks, for new agents to start taking live calls. The call flow itself is modelled and refined around the best sales persons calls, not only to eliminate the risk of an agent sounding inexperienced or nervous on the call, but also to ensure all sales opportunities are exploited.”Synthesys is the most advanced solution I have used during my time in the call centre industry. One of the most impressive features of Synthesys for us is the ability to change the callflow (scripts) quickly and easily,” said Coles.

“We can give a new Callflow a trial run parallel to an existing one and it can be amended in minutes and deployed to the agents in real time.”Warranty Holdings no longer need agents with specific industry or sales experience as they feel confident in making calls very quickly due to Synthesys’ intelligent conversation scripting. Many agents especially like the web-based help screens and links to relevant pages, which allow the agent to find additional information and complete the call effectively.”Synthesys has redefined the role of the agents,” said Coles. “We no longer need to train them on product knowledge due to Synthesys’ clear, consistent and intuitive presentation of information. The agents have the ability to link into relevant documents and websites within a second of clicking a link.

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Revving Up:

It was the functionality of the callflows that helped seal a recent deal with CarChase (www.carchase.co.uk), CarChase were very impressed with the benefits Synthesys has delivered to Warranty Holdings, especially the increase in sales revenue, so as a consequence asked Warranty to manage the expected 5,000 calls a week.CarChase is re-engineering how cars are sold privately with its unique car sales process. Potential car sellers can purchase a pack from newsagents containing a car sellers guide and a disposable camera.

They are then directed to take pictures of their car, send in the film, and ring the call centre to place the text for the advert; this is where the Synthesys solution kicks in.”Through a link with the vehicle validations bureau and with Synthesys’ call-flows we have been able to astound customers by just how quickly we can gather the relevant information required for the advert. Often we will know more about their car than they do!” explains Darren Vogel, Commercial Director, CarChase.

The importance of remaining open:

Synthesys has been integrated with a variety of existing systems including an HPI link to the vehicle validations bureau database, an address look-up and a bank sort code look-up.”CarChase saw how we were utilising Noetica’s Synthesys technology and asked if we could manage their calls too,” explained Warranty Holdings’ Mark Coles.

“Now, CarChase is exploiting leading edge technology to offer its customers a sophisticated solution.”

Confidence in the future:

“Since implementing Synthesys we have been able to increase our renewal sales and better utilise cross and up-sell opportunities by personalising the conversation to the customers, we have been able to increase our sales revenue,” concluded Coles. “It has empowered the agents and given them more confidence in what they are saying throughout the call. Working with CarChase has further reinforced the importance of Synthesys to increase sales revenues and support an integrated marketing campaign.”Keith Symondson, Commercial Director of Noetica, has been consistently impressed with how Warranty Holdings has used Synthesys.

” It’s great to see the product’s unique branching facility being used to personalise the conversation to the customer’s exact needs. This also means that the agents are automatically presented with possible cross-sell and up-sell opportunities throughout the conversation.”