Growing pains

In late 2006 Orcon’s success as an Internet Service Provider (ISP) was causing growing pains, particularly in our contact centre. Orcon’s reputation for innovation had resonated with the younger demographic and we were experiencing increasing demand for our services. The office telephony application that had seen us through start-up was under intense pressure, unable to efficiently manage the number of calls that we were receiving every day. It was apparent that we had to upgrade our contact centre software and, being an ISP, it was equally obvious that we would have to select a Voice over IP (VoIP) solution that could be used on our own network. Our vendor search criteria comprised detailed requirements in the areas of reporting, real-time capabilities, call flow design, telephone sets, supervisor functionality, queue management and interconnectivity. Amtel recommended Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Centre and for us, their software was head and shoulders above all the rest. Amtel managed the deployment, establishing the call centre capability, as well as internal office telephony for approximately 150 staff in Auckland and Wellington. It’s been a little over three years since CIC went live and there have been a lot of changes at Orcon. When we first started looking for a contact centre solution, we were receiving an average of 20,400 inbound answered calls per month. Now we deal with 28,500 calls per month. Back then we had 17 agents. Now we have three different business units, with 60 inbound call agents, 20 inbound and outbound sales agents and 150 staff across our Auckland and Wellington sites. Our changing product set has led to a totally different kind of engagement with customers and this has seen our average call time lengthen from just over 5.5 minutes in 2006, to 10 minutes today. It would be nice to be able to pinpoint productivity gains due to the change in software, but in our case it’s impossible. Orcon is a far more complex business than it used to be – both in product and operational terms. In fact, one of the nicest things about CIC is that it has been able to grow with us. As we’ve bought new companies, we’ve been able to add new queues to the phone system and still keep them initially separate. The software is very easy for agents to use. Like most contact centres we have a reasonably high turnover of staff. However, because our agents are predominantly Gen Y people, technology and computer applications tend to be second nature to them. The system has given us the flexibility to respond to changes and to keep customers informed. For example, if there’s an outage, it’s very easy to put up a message in real time at the front of the queue so that customers know what’s happening; nor do we have to go back to Amtel every time we want to make a change to an announcement. It can all be done by us, in real time. We’re also able to record every call. If I was going down this path again, one thing I would do differently is that I wouldn’t have physical phones on agents’ desks. We’ve continued using our phones, simply because we already had them, but with the latest release you can do away with the phones completely and free up extra space. Also, if you’re planning to power the desk phones using PoE (Power over Ethernet), be aware that if the desktop computer loses power, or has an issue during an active call, then the call will still remain active and will need to be manually disconnected. This is because the two devices are powered separately.Finally, never stop looking for ways to improve your understanding of customer requirements. We are still making improvements to the way we deal with customers. Recently we used CIC to introduce a new “wrap-up” code for agents on completion of a call. It helps us to pinpoint more precisely what the call was about. For example, if a call is in the billing queue, the wrap-up code will identify if the call is from a customer who had trouble reading the bill, or if it was about a query on the invoice. It’s a matter of using the technology to drill down to that next level, always identifying areas we can improve on.