Contact centres

Integrating call management technology and CRM

March 2007

Established in 2001, Bright Finance, based in Sheffield, is a business-to-business consumer finance broker employing nearly 200 staff. Since it formed, the company has experienced dramatic growth, and part of this success is attributed to its inbound/outbound contact centre operation, which the company views as the heart of its customer communication.

Bright has recently launched a one-stop shop for mortgages, remortgages and insurance. The business unit, called Bright Mortgages, provides a comprehensive mortgage service for people in a variety of circumstances including the self-employed and those who have experienced credit problems.

The company had been working with call centre technology provider Amcat for many years, and although the existing system worked effectively, the company was keen to improve the quality of its customer communications.

According to Bright’s chief executive Mark Cooke: “Customer awareness and service expectations have increased in recent years. As lifestyles become ever more demanding, people value leisure time and expect some simple things from any service provider, such as their call being answered swiftly by a real person who is polite, friendly, interested and knowledgeable, and can deal with their needs without being transferred.”

Customer communication

The company saw the significance of building long-term relationships with customers and ensuring first-call resolution where possible. They wanted to focus on the ‘quality’ of the call and measure this through a set of Best-Practice Call Handling Standards.

Bright’s head of IT, Andrew Long, relates the steps taken to improve the quality of customer communication by investing in new contact centre technology in 2006: “The key to effective communications is the ability to make intelligent use of our customer data. With the old system, although we had some integration with our central customer relationship management (CRM) system, it wasn’t sufficient to allow real-time updating of information. What we wanted was a live method of accessing and modifying data, so we always had the latest information available.

"The accuracy and speed at which we can access this information is critical, because it means we can match customers with the most appropriate products and policies in the shortest possible time. The real-time data updates mean that customers can be transferred to lenders at the same time as their details, so that everything can be done on a single call without the need for call-backs.”

By upgrading to Amcat’s Contact Centre Suite technology, Bright now has complete integration with its own CRM system so that its database can be updated during every customer communication. Calls can be forwarded to other departments where more specialist advice may be sought by customers.

Long continues: “Whereas our contact centre used to be heavily biased towards outbound, we now have a more balanced split of 60/40 between outbound and inbound respectively. So when we decided to drive more inbound traffic whilst continuing to work multiple outbound campaigns it was essential to move to a blended environment to maximise our resources.”

Call routing

Bright is also using the IVR (interactive voice response) call-routing facilities of the technology to direct calls to the appropriate person, thereby ensuring incoming calls are recognised using the CLI (call line identity or Caller ID) and delivered straight to the correct department or even a third-party company. For call-backs this facility saves the company around eight FTE (full-time equivalent) staff, because it recognises those that should be assigned to a live person, i.e. the department or agent that ‘owns’ the customer, and those that can be automated. In parallel, because of the integration of the call management technology and the CRM programme, the appropriate script will pop up on screen together with all of an individual’s details. In addition, it has speeded up response times and decreased the occurrence of abandoned calls.

Management reports

nderstanding customer behaviour and needs is essential to the company. Using reports generated from the technology, supervisors can see who or what campaigns are performing well, and if necessary tweak any scripting or give agents additional coaching. In turn this management information helps senior management plan for the future.

The dramatic efficiencies in productivity gained in the last 12 months coupled with enhanced agent skills and increased motivation have resulted in Bright Finance increasing the volume of applications generated while utilising fewer resources.

Long comments on the company growth and how Amcat as a technology partner has played a part: “Since installing new technology the payback period has been remarkably quick, delivering a phenomenal growth rate to the business. The stability and flexibility of the product have also meant we’ve been able to take full advantage of our sophisticated back-office IT infrastructure, which has been fully integrated with the call centre operation. Downtime has been negligible, so there have been few distractions to our core business, a factor that is clearly borne out in our bottom-line figures.”