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18.12.2009
Innovation Awards 2010 shortlist demonstrates bottom-line improvement
Nineteen diverse organizations reached the closely-fought shortlist for the Contact Centre Innovation Awards 2010, today. For the very first time, the list includes innovations that also put the customer at the heart of outbound and back office operations, with many driving performance improvement that works across the entire customer contact operation.
Presented by the Professional Planning Forum, the winners are announced at Customer Contact Planning 2010 on April 19-20 in Birmingham, where the finalists will all be speaking about how they achieved such outstanding results.
“These organisations have achieved exceptional bottom-line improvement in difficult times”, explains Paul Smedley, Executive Director of the Professional Planning Forum. “They’ve done this by understanding what the customer really needs and they’ve stripped out the cost of other things that were just getting in the way. For the first time we can see that a real end-to-end customer contact operation is beginning to emerge.”
The full list of finalists is: Anglian Water Services, Aviva UK General Insurance, British Gas – Cardiff, Dorset County Council, Glasgow City Council, Gold Medal Travel, Harrow Council, HM Revenue & Customs, Invesco Perpetual, L&G Retail Savings Operations, Nationwide Building Society - Regional Brands, Northants Police, Orange UK, Prolog Logistics, RSA, Scottish Power, Shop Direct, Ventura (Speech Analytics and Ventura Business Solutions (Outbound).
“Fantastic, a real privilege” was the reaction of Ray Browne, Performance Improvement Manager at Shop Direct. Adrian Hawes, Resource Optimisation Manager at Aviva said their success was due to “perseverance” while Derek Maitland, MI and Planning Manager of Glasgow City Council described the “huge amount of work that had gone into their initiative.” He was “looking forward to sharing it with others” through the Professional Planning Forum’s best practice programme.
The record number in the shortlist reflects the depth of quality and the fantastic breadth of entries this year. For the first time, 3 outbound entries demonstrate how to put the customer at the heart of an outbound campaign – focusing the calling list on people who want to talk to you. The four back office innovations cover industry-leading achievements in planning, process improvements and delivery of effective end-to-end service.
The five public sector innovations include three local councils, Northants Police and HMRC. Other finalists include the implementation of speech analytics technology, the engagement of front-line staff in adapting to change despite recessionary cut-backs and innovations that make fundamental changes in the areas of resource planning and management information.
The 2010 Judging Panel includes 10 independent experts, many of who are previous award winners or finalists themselves:
• Cathy Eastwood, Customer Services Manager, Canterbury City Council
• Chris Collins, Customer Service Centre Manager, Coventry Building Society
• Grant Holden, Resource Planning Manager, HEROtsc
• Helen Booth, Head Of National Operations Centre, NHS Direct
• Kevin Beattie, Resource Planning Manager, QVC
• Paul Burgess-Clements, Head of Operations, Hastings Insurance Services Limited
• Peter Massey, Managing Director, Budd UK Ltd
• Richard Brimble, Customer Relations Director, Veolia Water Three Valleys
• Steve Borg, National Planning Manager, AA
• Tracy Rice, Operational Planning Manager, QVC
The judges visit all finalists in February or March for a more in-depth evaluation, and each finalist is asked to make a commitment to host a site visit in June or September and to talk about their work at Customer Contact Planning 2010 on 19-20 April where the awards are presented. Each short listed nomination is written up and added to a much-consulted case study series; the 2010 case studies will also form part of the Planning Forum’s 2010 Best Practice Guide.
Further information can be found at: http://www.planningforum.co.uk/conference/innovation-awards/2009-finalists.aspx and full details will be available after judging in April 2009.
For further details contact:
Katherine Potter, Katherine.potter@planningforum.co.uk
Or Paul Smedley, paul.smedley@planningforum.co.uk
Tel. 0333 123 5960
The Professional Planning Forum (www.planningforum.co.uk) is the independent industry body for effective resourcing and planning in the contact centre industry, working across all industry sectors to provide specialist support for contact centre professionals. Championing the importance of these critical skills, the Planning Forum is widely recognized for its best practice research and case studies, as well as the results-focused nature of its professional development training and in-company workshops. The Planning Forum runs the Contact Centre Innovation Awards and Contact Centre Planning conference, to be held in Birmingham on 19-20 April 2010.
Previous winners of the Contact Centre Innovation Awards
The Innovation of the Year Award 2009 was presented to QVC for the impressive and pioneering planning initiatives that cut occupancy by 15% in the call centre, dropped agency hours by 23% in the distribution centre and cut team leader admin from 50% to 11% of their working week. EDF Energy won the 2008 award for their ground-breaking new end-to-end service delivery for new customers, Salford City Council in 2007 for their Think Customer initiative, Tesco in 2006 for a programme of change that took the stress out of their Christmas peak period and HBOS in 2005 for developing initiatives to improve work-life balance and schedule efficiency.
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14.12.2009
Dependable HomeTech Optimises Workforce Management with InVision Software
Birmingham / Ratingen (Germany), December 14th, 2009 – Dependable HomeTech (DHT), a Canadian based provider of technology support services for residential and business customers, has selected InVision Enterprise WFM for optimising the scheduling of its call centre agents. By implementing the state-of-the-art technology from InVision Software, a leading international supplier of enterprise-wide workforce management (WFM) solutions, DHT aims for improving the efficiency of its disparate service departments. This will result in a better service at the appropriate times for its customers and a significant reduction in labour costs. InVision is providing its solution on an ASP (Application Service Providing) basis meeting DHT’s needs of a robust and cost-effective implementation.
DHT employs 500 people in total with 150 of them are working in the DHT headquarters based call centre. They service incoming calls from residential and business customers, providing technical support and premium support over the phone or online. ”We are committed to delivering a great customer experience and have therefore decided to implement a high-performance WFM software solution for the demand-oriented scheduling of our service employees“, explains Cheryl Lewis, Vice-President, Dependable HomeTech Services. “The InVision solution enables us to generate accurate day-to-day forecasts of the expected workload and to create automated and optimised staff schedules of the workforce needed.”
DHT’s decision to purchase InVision’s software solution was influenced by several factors: Besides economic reasons and InVision’s competitive pricing, DHT required one single platform for planning across disparate departments in order to achieve a truly flexibility in staff planning. Furthermore, DHT appreciated the high quality of InVision’s optimisation engine and the high performance of the module AutoScheduler. Using this feature, the planners at DHT can create requirement-driven and optimised schedules at the push of a button while meeting all scheduling constraints. The AutoScheduler performs the entire scheduling and optimisation process in a single step, starting from the long-term assignment of working hours per day all the way to defining individual activities to be performed within the course of a day.
“Now more than ever, cost-effective IT solutions are required which enable companies to reduce their operating expenses without abandoning service quality”, says Peter Bollenbeck, CEO of InVision Software. “We are offering a solution that helps companies to reduce labour costs through automated, optimised scheduling and our short-term renewable licensing provides the cost advantage of on-demand software with the full functionality of a system installed on premise.”
About Dependable HomeTech
Dependable HomeTech is a growing Canadian based leader in providing and servicing broadband technologies to both residential and commercial markets. The Dependable HomeTech service offering, network deployment, IT integration, and support services enable the cable television and telecommunications industries to deliver a high quality broadband experience to their customers. Dependable HomeTech's clients rely on Dependable HomeTech's knowledge and expertise to rapidly deploy the latest technologies to support advanced cable services, cable broadband Internet access and DSL. Services provisioned include new installations, reconnections, disconnections, service upgrades and downgrades, inbound technical call centre sales and trouble resolution for cable Internet subscribers, and network servicing for broadband video, data, and voice services for residential, business, and commercial marketplaces.
Further information: www.mydh.com
About InVision Software
InVision Software is a world-leading supplier of enterprise-wide workforce management solutions which enable companies to optimise their staff planning and scheduling processes. InVision empowers customers to reduce personnel costs, increase productivity, improve employee satisfaction and to boost revenue by leveraging better customer service. Founded in 1995 and based in Ratingen (Germany), InVision currently employs more than 210 WFM specialists and has offices across Europe, North America, and South Africa. InVision Software AG (IVX) is listed in the Prime Standard Segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Among InVision's clients are numerous international blue chip companies, such as ABN Amro, Allianz, BMW, Deutsche Telekom, IKEA, Sky and Vodafone.
Further information: www.invisionwfm.com
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08.12.2009
Noble Systems Celebrates Top 10 Technology Vote
Contact Centre Technology Leader is recognised for excellence by Call Centre Helper Readers
Manchester, UK – 8th December, 2009: Noble Systems Corporation (NSC), a global provider of contact centre technology solutions, is celebrating being voted in the Top 10 Call Centre Technology vendors in the UK.
Over the last two decades, Noble Systems has achieved a number of milestones, growing from a start-up technology provider to one of the industry’s leading developers of contact centre solutions. This growth can largely be attributed to our clients, who have recently voted Noble Systems as one of the Top 10 Call Centre Technology vendors of 2009. The survey was conducted by callcentrehelper.com..
Noble Systems were listed as the highest ranking unified contact centre technology provider and received a number of very positive comments from our customers, including “Runs the Call Centre so I can get on with running the business. When implemented, it reduced the costs to a point where it paid for itself and still saved money on an ongoing basis which can be reinvested elsewhere. The Lexus of diallers, unparalleled elsewhere.” To view other voter comments, please go to www.callcentrehelper.com.
Colin Chave, General Manager EMEA states “Noble Systems prides itself in its advanced technology and unparalleled customer support and we are delighted to be recognised in the Call Centre Helper Top 10 Call Centre Technology 2009. The team at Noble Systems is looking forward to continued growth in 2010 and our key focus will involve working with our clients to continue to build value and performance in their contact centres”.
About Noble Systems®
Noble Systems Corporation (NSC) is a global leader in contact centre technology solutions, providing innovative products since 1989. Every day, millions of customer contacts are made by agents at 3,000+ client installations worldwide using the award-winning Noble platform for inbound/outbound/blended communications. The scalable, integrated Noble® Solution includes advanced ACD and predictive dialling; unified contact processing; and integrated IVR, recording, messaging, quality/monitoring systems, scripting, and real-time reporting and management tools. Noble Systems was the first vendor to offer an open, scalable, fully-distributed platform. For more information, contact Sian Ciabattoni at 0161 772 7100 or visit www.noblesys.com.
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