Client Services, a call centre services firm, says it has tripled the productivity of its call centre agents thanks to unified communications from Aspect.
Client Services Inc, founded in 1987, describes itself as a full service receivables management and call centre services company. With the majority of its business generated from debt collections on credit cards, Client Services also handles teleservices, telesales and customer service calls.
With a rapidly growing clientele and increasing account volume, the company realised that it needed a more flexible and effective approach to developing and maintaining its lists in order to improve agent productivity and debt collection.
Client Services has approximately 800 agents across call centres in five locations, which include three in Missouri, one in Texas, and one in Kansas. The company primarily conducts its business through outbound phone interactions, but also uses fax, email and post to send letters and notices.
Specifically, Client Services was focused on improving the number of right party contacts and reducing agent time spent on non-productive calls such as busy, no answer, wrong number, fax and answering machines. And with its account volume growing, Client Services was looking for a way to handle more accounts more efficiently without drastically increasing costs and headcount.
The existing system did not provide the transparency to managers and supervisors that Client Services needed, often resulting in hundreds of calls a day requesting campaign status updates — a process that had become tedious and time consuming and diverted agents’ attention from their core campaign activities. In addition, the Client Services system was distributed across three platforms which added a significant layer of complexity to gathering metrics and providing useful business intelligence.
An Aspect customer since 2004, Client Services implemented Aspect Unified IP in 2008 and followed that with the deployment of Streamlined Collections, one of Aspect’s unified communications applications for customer contact. By uniting outbound dialling, voice portal and advanced list management capabilities, Streamlined Collections enables companies to reduce cost per collected dollar and seamlessly connect collections agents, debtors and enterprise knowledge workers through virtually any communications channel, according to Aspect. Client Services also deployed Unified Command and Control – Real-time Reporting.
"Moving away from our manual dialler process has generated a great deal of cost savings and efficiency across our call centre operations," said Mont Little, CIO, Client Services. "Aspect’s solution gave Client Services all of the components crucial to achieving our vision for enhanced automation, greater insight and improved business results while keeping costs down."
As part of Client Services strategic undertaking, Aspect was able to help the company achieve dramatic results. Within just two months of the implementation of Aspect’s Streamlined Collections technology, Client Services tripled the call volume for number of calls per month.
Client Service also said the new systems give it confidence that it can easily adhere to the increasing number and complexity of regulatory compliance rules continuing to come into effect. The system now moves continuously throughout the day between predictive and preview dialler campaigns to maximise contact success rates while complying with regulations that preclude the use of predictive diallers for certain numbers.
