BPO & Public Sector Organization

Profile

Industry: Public Sector/Outsourcing Contact centers: 6 Revenue: £3.7 billion

Business: Since 2002, this Business Process Outsource (BPO) has managed the contact center services that collect fees for this TV broadcast service through its customer management operation.

Challenge: To prevent call abandonment, completing more calls to increase renewals and collection of fees. Also, to improve the customer experience.

Solution: Self-Service IVR and Identification and verification solutions, delivered via the Eckoh Experience Portal - a single portal with access to all customer engagement and secure payments solutions.

Benefit

• Pay-as-you-go solutions portfolio
• Modern IVR
• Identification & Verification to accurately direct calls
• Increase the volume of calls handled
• Choice of channels to match demand

Background

This London-based BPO is an international business process outsourcing and professional services company. It is a leading provider of technology-enabled business services, operating across six key markets. Since 2002 they have managed the contact center services that collect fees for this UK national broadcast company. The number of contract extensions shows the level of success this partnership has achieved.

The service receives c.8.5m contacts via its telephony platform across c.200 customer-facing contact numbers. Their contact center agents handle c.5.2m calls, with a further 1.1 m handled via the IVR. Telephone contact is the second largest contact channel after their website.

Challenge

Originally, the organization's contact center agents were handling too many calls because their current IVR platform was not enabling them to offer as many automated applications as they'd like. At the time, they could not identify and verify as many callers as they wanted to, nor identify particular types of caller/license holder because of the limited data integration available. This was causing callers to drop out of the process, leading to lower license purchases, reduced funding for the organization and a poor customer experience.

With customers driving the choice of engagement channel, this position was no longer acceptable to a public-facing organization. Add to this the economic, as well as customer experience, benefits of self-service, and it became clear that change was required.

The organization, therefore, sought to modernize its IVR to offer more self-service options, integrate data to better identify callers and license types and to route calls better so they reach the right agent or option, as well as increase the number of calls completed.

This BPO chose to work with Eckoh because of its track record of delivering transformation projects just like this. Eckoh's expertise with IVR and a portal delivery approach to customer engagement and secure payments technology makes them a unique and obvious choice.

Solution

An IVR is simply the platform for whatever engagement applications an organization chooses - from DTMF to Chatbots, ID&V, and SMS, as well as information.

Eckoh's Experience Portal is more than just IVR. It allows organizations to take the solutions they need today and add new applications as it suits them.

For this organization we delivered the customer experience portal, intelligent routing, call identification and verification, as well as advanced speech self-service.

With this, the organization was able to:

• Know who was calling and get them to the right place quickly, reducing call abandonment and increasing revenue collection
• Improve their customer experience and satisfaction by providing more self-service options as well as a better and more effective service on the customer's choice of device
• Improve data integration to enhance the self-service and agent-assisted options while reducing agent involvement in calls so the organization was free to help those who need it most.
• Our solution is a hosted services model and is charged on a usage basis. There is no on-site equipment, no software licenses nor any ongoing maintenance and support to consider

This approach means that the organization can control the costs associated with the solution and only pay for the service they use. This flexibility means they can add services as they need or want, matching their business or customer requirements.

Value

Modernizing customer engagement: The new IVR will enable the organization to offer more self-service options as well as complete more transactions and calls that resolve issues and collect more license fees without the need for agent interaction. Not only will they increase their contact center efficiency, but they'll help collect the vital fees that continue to fund this broadcaster's programs and services.

Added value: The solution portfolio, covering customer engagement and secure payments, means that the organization can always add new solutions as they need them - keeping pace with customer expectations and emerging technology.

Innovation: With Eckoh's 20+ years' experience in delivering contact center technology solutions comes its track record for innovation in customer contact solutions. With Eckoh's commitment to R&D spend, the organization will be able to stay at the forefront of customer engagement.

Looking Forward

As a solution unique to Eckoh, we recognize that this example is likely a challenge many other enterprise organizations struggle with when they begin tackling payment security within their contact centers. Some organizations may even feel like their only option is to either deploy hardware on-premise – likely disrupting long-term cloud transformation strategies – or only achieve partial PCI DSS de-scoping.

As a result, the methodology innovated for The Client is now part of the Eckoh architecture. In fact, multiple other clients have also taken advantage of this solution, allowing them to maintain their existing telephony architecture while maintaining the strictest possible standard for payment security.

To learn more about how Eckoh secures payments across all engagement channels, please contact one of our trusted advisors.