SCENARIO: 

Huntswood was engaged by a major retail bank to provide contact centre telephony resource to support a large increase in financial assistance inbound queries. As a result of FCA guidance on payment holidays, branch and call centre closures, the bank required additional capacity to deal with customers in financial distress. The requirement was closely supervised by the bank’s board, as well as the regulator. All work was undertaken remotely with Huntswood staff deployed within a home working environment..

At short notice, we redeployed 500 and recruited 300 skilled financial services resources to support with a significant spike in complex customer queries. All resources deployed had previous banking experience and were well versed in dealing with customers in vulnerable circumstances.

To ensure speed of deployment we converted our Liverpool operational site into a training centre to support the onboarding of the resource. We subsequently delivered all training and associated route to competence remotely, utilising Huntswood trainers and operational staff.

Due to government guidelines regarding office working, within four weeks, all resources were provided with laptops and headsets, to allow for fully operational home working. We implemented consistent spans of control, virtual communication methods, robust governance structures and real-time coaching to ensure quality of delivery.

At full capacity, our operation contained 46 Team Leaders, 46 Quality Specialists, 6 Operational Managers and 702 Telephony Agents. Due to the quality and experience of our resources, we experienced low attrition levels and have been able to support our client achieve its required contact centre SLAs.