Yell

Company: NoeticaCustomer: YellSubmitted by: MCC InternationalDate: May 2001Yell, the international directories business, operates in the classified advertising market through printed and online media, including the Yellow Pages and Business Pages directories, Yell.com, Talking Pages and Yellow Book in the United States.Yell.com (www.yell.com) is the destination site from Yell.

It features approximately 1.7 million UK classified listings that can be searched by business type, name and location. Advanced search functionality, up to date information for leisure and business services and an increasing range of e-products and services are accessible through Yell.com.Yell’s aim is to become the top business information provider connecting buyers and sellers by providing its customers and users with value for money products and services that generate business leads, give access to relevant information and offer purchasing solutions. To meet the changing demands of customers and users, Yell needs to take advantage of new technologies and communication methods.

Not everyone is familiar with Service Call, Yell’s customer contact service that delivers a message answering and call out facility for companies wishing to provide a 24-hour, 365 day, contact point for their customers. Based in Yell’s 200-seat call centre, Service Call receives calls on behalf of more than 110 clients – round the clock, every day of the year.

Embracing Technology

Andy Mason, Technical Support Manager, Service Call, was certain of the following: “We wanted to move away from our old predominantly paper based system and embrace the technology that was available. I wanted to increase the efficiency of the call centre by 30% through reducing man hours required, thus reducing staff overheads so that we could pass on these benefits to our customers.”Service Call historically used a bespoke call centre package to manage the calls, but soon realised that because of it’s inflexibility and difficulty in scaling up, it would be best to move to an off-the-shelf package with open standards and development capabilities that could be tailored to its needs. This is when Service Call called in Noetica.

Noetica is a leading developer of innovative software solutions for successful management of any call centre. Noetica’s solution, Synthesys, has been specifically designed to give non-technical people 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).

Call Out Service

Service Call’s customer types are diverse, but one thing that is constant, is their desire for optimum customer service. “One of the reasons we chose Noetica’s Synthesys was its intelligent CallTracker Module.

A key business function of Service Call is a call out service that we operate on behalf of our clients,” explained Mason. “What we mean by a call out service is how we handle external calls and re-route them to appropriate companies or individuals, one example being a Supermarket fridge repair service. When we take the call, Synthesys’ CallTracker module checks the engineers’ rota, establishes which engineers are available in the appropriate area and then contacts them. We found very few software products that had this tracker facility of call completion as part of the package.””The operation is very complex, Synthesys simplifies and handles the escalation procedures of the enquiry by automatically flagging up if an engineer hasn’t responded to a request within a specified time, then Synthesys moves on to the next choice of contact method for the most appropriate person, and continues to do so, until the query is resolved,” added Mason.

Rapid and Easy Callflow Scripting

With Service Call managing callflows for over a 100 different clients and over 80 of the callflows being updated weekly, Service Call needed to ensure the software they chose would allow non-IT people to build and amend callflows quickly and easily, “With Synthesys’ easy to use callflow writing facility, complex scripts can be created and amended quickly.

This is a key part of the software,” explained Mason.

How to handle 26,000 Contact Names

Service Call has recently started running an additional outbound campaign to generate additional revenue, which has only been possible due to the flexibility Synthesys has built in. Mason and his team began the outbound campaign by calling 26,000 contacts on behalf of Internet office equipment trader, Group Trade. The campaign was targeted at getting small companies to sign up to the Group Trade website. “When there is such a large number of contacts it is imperative to be able to track and report the calls made; it shows just how adaptable Synthesys is for inbound and these outbound calls,” said Mason. “The callflow scripting capabilities of the outbound calls using Synthesys are highly impressive, with our agents being able to control the conversation from start to finish, and exploiting cross and up sell opportunities wherever possible.

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Call Centre Productivity

“Synthesys has dramatically improved the rate of productivity at work here in a number of ways. We can now set up a client in just half a day with the right screens and callflow/script automatically appearing in front of the agent when a call is received,” said Mason. “Agents can work more efficiently, now that they have all the information that they need to handle the calls on their desktop, consequently each agent handles a greater number of calls.”People prefer a human voiceService Call acts as a message reception for many clients, where agents take out-of-hours or diverted calls. The system automatically passes on the messages and the agent simply uses the script onscreen to gather the correct information and answer the caller’s questions.The message reception service of Service Call is proving to be a big success with Mason hoping to expand it later this year to use Synthesys on all 200 seats.

“The simple truth is that people prefer a human voice – up to 80% of calls made to an answer machine hang up!” explained Mason. “This is something that our 110 clients are aware of and with Synthesys’ assistance we can ensure that they never miss a potential sale.”

Benefits

“Synthesys gives the information our people need to handle a call, when they need it, via their desktop PCs. We have eliminated any reliance on physical documents, and the reduction in manual data entry has drastically reduced any room for errors,” concluded Mason. “Synthesys has been a major factor in us being able to reach our goal of increasing efficiency by 30%”

Constant Support

“Finally, our installation of Synthesys has been reinforced by the development work that Noetica has done to accommodate our requirements; probably as much as 20% of the total product has been tailored to our needs. Noetica has been extremely responsive and more than willing to take on board our requests,” said Mason.

“In the early days the help desk was very useful in showing us how to use the information logs and pass on certain reports to our clients.”