XPS, ONE of South Africa`s leading express freight companies, has installed a state of the art call centre at its new Johannesburg head office to help improve customer service and ensure future market leadership.
According to Martine Forbes, Customer Services Manager at XPS, the company is already seeing a significant improvement in response times to customer queries and the number of abandoned calls has dropped substantially.
"Today, over 90% of our calls are answered within 30 to 40 seconds and we no longer have irritating bottlenecks. We are able to consistently maintain service levels of 95 to 97%."
"More importantly, because of the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system we`ve implemented, the caller is immediately routed to the agent with the best skills to answer a particular query. It has reduced the number of call backs, boosting both our own productivity and that of our customers as they no longer have to wait for an answer," she says.
XPS has based its new 12-hour a day, seven - day a week call centre on Interactive Intelligence`s award-winning Enterprise Interaction Centre (EIC), which is marketed and supported in SA by Dimension Data Interactive (DDI).
"The system has been designed to deliver major benefits with minimum training," says Craig Ireland, MD DDI Call Centre Solutions.
Each of the 24 XPS call centre agents and three switchboard operators had a mere three hours training before the system went live over Easter. Other features were then rolled out with many requiring little or no formal training.
"The fact that XPS is already seeing major improvements within a few months means that its return on investment will be very rapid. Satisfied customers mean more business," says Ireland.
Forbes reports that the agents as well as some 80 back office workers who now also use the EIC system, are happier in their work as well. Where previously they used terminals, users now have desktop PCs making it easier to access information, such as the company`s parcel track and trace system, while taking a call from a customer.
The introduction of PCs as part of the EIC rollout has also enabled operators to become multi-skilled.
"The whole implementation has gone like a dream and we`re now planning to roll EIC out to remote users, before moving on to the next implementation stage, which is to use EIC`s Internet-ready facilities. This new feature will further enhance customer service and interaction," Forbes concludes.
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