CHALLENGE

  • In order to complete a high volume of outbound calls, cope with a significant backlog of accounts and meet inbound service levels, an existing client required support with the telephony capacity within their Collections department.
  • We were required to work with our client’s existing operation, using their current policy and process, to supply additional resource on budget within a timescale of 15 weeks.
  • The resource would be dealing with customers in arrears and were expected to assist and support customers by bringing their accounts up to date with the Lending Standards Board’s Responsible Lending Code of Practice. Therefore, our resource needed to be strong communicators and possess in-depth knowledge in several areas, such as repayment plans, individual voluntary arrangements, bankruptcy, and secured and unsecured finance on both motor and retail products.
  • Resource also had to be flexible so that customers could be contacted at different times throughout the day.

ACTION

  • From the beginning, we engaged our client’s Operational team in ongoing discussions to establish the requirements to deliver the task. Members of our sales and operational management teams also gave our client confidence and enabled a collaborative working relationship to progress.
  • Due to the experience of the agents, the usual six week training period was reduced by four weeks. After the telephony agents and the team manager completed the training, call sign off was successfully completed which also included a quality checking competence procedure.
  • As customers needed to be contacted at different times during the day, our agents completed a fortnightly rotation of early and late shifts.
  • Our Senior Delivery Manager regularly visited the site to engage in meetings with our client’s management to ensure we were meeting, or in many cases surpassing, their expectations. Our client was impressed with the resource we had provided, their work ethic and the management information that had been produced.

RESULT

  • Each week, we presented the raw data we had collected on the previous week’s performance to show our agents exceeded department averages on many key performance indicators, including the average handling time of calls.
  • We managed to significantly reduce the backlog of accounts quicker than anticipated due to greater productivity and the condensed training period. The backlog of work was brought up-to date, enabling our client to maintain both the manual and automatic work after the agents completed their contract.
  • The volume of outstanding cases was lower than our client’s requirement when our engagement on the project had finished.