Constantine Call Centres is a contact centre outsourcer employing hundreds of agents who take and make calls on behalf of their many corporate clients. A large proportion of these clients have simply outsourced their customer services functions hoping to spare themselves the headache of having to manage internal contact centres with all the complexities and difficulties that such an operation entails.
The calls that Constantine Call Centres receives on behalf of its clients fall broadly into three categories:
1. Product, ordering & billing enquiries
2. Technical problems (either with the website or the e-commerce platform)
3. Complaints
Being a forward-thinking company, Constantine Call Centres routinely analyses the timing and nature of calls they receive on behalf of each one of their clients looking at peaks and troughs in the volume and nature of incoming calls as well as the distribution of these calls over time. The results of these exercises are always interesting and tend to provide clear indications of the areas that may be subject to improvements.
For instance, calls of the first two types tend to cluster around new product launches, the availability of new offers, website upgrades or indeed, within the first few weeks of anyone becoming a new customer.
Complaints have a tendency to lag about two weeks after the first wave.
Constantine Call Centres decide to offer their customers a new service. Whenever one of the trigger events described above (launches, offers, website changes, etc.) are planned, an outbound calling campaign is launched, informing all affected customers of the upcoming changes or offers and using this opportunity to review their accounts and to offer them additional associated products and services. Once the changes take effect, another outbound email or SMS campaign is offered which aims to contact a sample of the same customers (perhaps 10-20%) and gain feedback on the changes.
For the customers who take up this service, the results are remarkable. Not only are the number of complaint calls being eliminated to virtually zero, but also the other types of inbound calls (enquiries & technical) are reduced considerably. Not only is customer satisfaction receiving a major boost, but the cross and up-selling results in increased revenue for Constantine Call Centres’ customers. For Constantine Call Centres themselves, the unpredictable peaks of inbound calls are replaced with predictable outbound campaigns which can be carefully planned and executed resulting in important efficiencies which translate to a direct boost to their bottom line.
