Cox & Cox

Impact were initially contacted by Cox & Cox, a homeware mail order company who were looking for an outsourced call centre that understood the importance of delivering a world class service. The quality of their products, demographic of their customers and long-standing excellent reputation that they had within the market must be protected at all times. Their incumbent call centre provided a dedicated team of agents, that should have been able to handle all calls, other communication methods and emails, especially during peak periods including the Christmas period.

However, SLA’s were consistently not being met, with high abandon rates during busy periods and no visibility of the agent activity within each hour to help the client understand if or how they were receiving value for money. During the negotiation phase, Impact reviewed the client’s TrustPilot comments, which only gave a single star and we could see a pattern of poor responses by Customer Service and Inbound Sales, deliveries and returns, with a clear lack of ownership by the existing call centre.

On request, Impact Call Centre received a year’s worth of call/email/non-phone activity data and, although the report lacked detail, we were able to identify that only 40% of the agents’ activity was being accounted for. This showed that there were significant periods of time for which the client paid for the time, but the call centre could not show what was being done during this time.

As Impact provides a hybrid bureau service, this was a key concern for us as we need to understand what activities are being carried out so that we can give an accurate quote for our services. Due to the lack of useful data, we made it clear Impact could not give 100% accurate costings for like for like comparison until we understood the exact details of the activities and levels required. Training was key to ensure our agents understood the client’s technology platforms, the many different products and the processes to support customers to return faulty items, etc.

Impact and Cox & Cox created a customer charter, which details the responsibilities Impact can perform without escalating to them, such as a maximum value for refunds of returned items, which was initially set at £25 and any sum above we would contact the client and gain authorisation before proceeding.

Initially the cost to Cox & Cox did increase, as Impact uncovered the reasons why the previous call centre could not account for 60% of their time. However, due to the constructive agent approach to ownership, they were able to proactively communicate the issues to the management team and by using our world class service approach, and continuous improvement programmes and training we were able to treat the customers with empathy and dignity and, almost immediately, the TrustPilot reviews improved along with the many associated benefits such as an increase in trust and sales from new customers.

By sharing our findings with the client and agreeing the root cause of the issues, the client invested in improving their systems and processes to be more integrated and as a consequence they now have a five star TrustPilot rating. An additional benefit is because the processes are now more efficient and our agents take ownership of the customer issues, costs to the client are significantly lower than the previous incumbent, the customer feedback is more positive and the client has 100% visibility of what they are spending, with specific details and reporting.

The client now views Impact as a key part of their business and a true partnership is in place which is evidenced by the customer charter refund maximum being extended from £25 to unlimited. A true reflection of the trust gained between the client and Impact Call Centre.