Orbit: A challenging, high-paced environment
Orbit's new Dialler Manager was faced with a number of unique challenges and a faster paced environment than she was used to in previous positions. Hostcomm Hosted Predictive Dialler and unparalleled customer support made life easier.
Orbit is a debt collection company and outsourced provider for a number of companies, mostly within the water industry. The company’s work goes beyond outbound calling to include comprehensive debt management – understanding what people can afford and informing them of the help that’s available.
Orbit handles around 7,200 outbound dials and 700 inbound calls per day across all of its campaigns. This figure continually increases as the company secures new business partners and campaigns.
A complex new role in Dialler Management
For the new Dialler Manager, despite her extensive experience using a wide range of diallers, becoming Orbit’s Dialler Manager was a uniquely high-pressured role with serious responsibility.
As an outsourcer for a number of different companies, Orbit effectively has five or six different businesses working within the same wider business. The success of those campaigns would depend on her ability to hit the ground running with the dialler.
“What we do at Orbit is more complex than anything I’ve dealt with before,”
she explained.
“Every business partner wants something different, provides us with different data and wants it dealt with in a different way. It’s a big operation and a big challenge to manage while you’re familiarising yourself with a new dialler.”
Many of Orbit’s campaigns involve debt recovery and debt management, which comes with safeguards designed to help vulnerable customers. In addition to common contact centre concerns like Ofcom and PCI compliance, these safeguards need to be considered with regard to call-backs and allowing people to get in touch with Orbit for help.
This requires extensive visibility over the way campaigns are being conducted as well as agent performance.
“When you’re dealing with people with financial issues, you need to make things easy,”
she added.
“It’s important for us, especially if a call is dropped, that people can contact us with the minimum of hassle. While the majority of our activity is outbound, we need a dialler that's just as effective for inbound calls.”
How the Hostcomm dialler makes management easier
To support inbound and outbound dialling, Orbit uses Hostcomm's Hosted Predictive Dialler – a hosted predictive dialler that makes even the most complex environments easier to manage.
“In my career, I’ve worked with seven or eight different diallers and their providers,”
said the Dialler Manager.
“For myself as the manager and our agents, the Hostcomm dialler is easy to work with and the Hostcomm team makes changes and customisation quick and simple. With Hostcomm's support, I was able to get to grips with the dialler immediately - and found that the speed of using it completely set it apart.”
Faster and more flexible data loading
“The biggest benefit of using the Hostcomm dialler is the ease of getting data in and out,”
she observed.
“Our business partners send data files in different formats with different headers – but we don’t want to seem inflexible and insist on specific formats. Hostcomm's Hosted Predictive Dialler gives you a lot of wiggle room in how you want to import data. We can manipulate it however we want and bring it into the dialler - however we need to.”
With Hostcomm's Hosted Predictive Dialler, the entire data import process takes just five minutes.
In previous roles with SQL-based data importing, the process of loading a list would take around 20 minutes every day and required specialist knowledge of SQL. This meant it was a job only a select few could complete.
In the event of a single error during the data import, the entire dialler would need to be taken offline for anything up to two hours. This resulted in large amounts of collection time and potential money being lost, with agents left without a dialler for as long as it took.
“The risk of uploading the data incorrectly was so big. You’d have to stop the dialler, find out what was wrong, strip out anyone you’d already called, then spend another twenty minutes loading it afresh. With Hosted Predictive Dialler, it’s a much easier process – and if something did go wrong, we could easily identify it and resolve it without downtime.”
Responsive support and technical know-how
While a low dialling ratio reduces Orbit’s number of dropped calls, the nature of the company’s campaigns and Ofcom compliance require an unusual approach.
“We wanted our setup for dropped calls to be slightly different,”
commented the Dialler Manager.
“We wanted a message to be played and an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system where people could add themselves to an inbound queue. But that meant configuring every campaign with a different message, then sending inbound calls to a different place. Hostcomm’s excellent support team made it possible – they understood exactly what we wanted and were very quick to get it done. This was something I never achieved with any other dialler. Perhaps different diallers did have the capability, but if they did, I wasn’t aware. That comes down to support and a provider understanding our needs. Hostcomm definitely understands our needs.”
As a result, Orbit has achieved a higher response rate, increased customer satisfaction levels and secured positive feedback from business partners. She added:
“Since I'm new to this role and to Orbit, I’m asking a lot of questions of Hostcomm. The support is responsive and helpful which is very useful to me as I build my knowledge of the dialler.”
A choice of inbound and outbound reports
A large part of the Dialler Manager’s role involves looking at the efficiency and performance of the dialler day-to-day. This includes strategies to get more out of data, assessing the best time to dial, setting up new campaigns, and changing campaigns to drive results.
Hostcomm's Hosted Predictive Dialler includes a wide range of real-time and historic reports. These are all designed to improve visibility and allow Dialler Managers to make informed decisions.
The Dialler Manager regularly uses:
- Real-time reports
- Historical Inbound and Outbound reports to:
- Collect performance information for other members of the team
- Monitor the dropped call rate, connection rate, and the percentage converted to a positive outcome
- Look at the times of day with good contact or no contact
- Calculate resourcing requirements and shift management to ensure agents are available for inbound calls
- Agent Time and Status to see how people are using the dialler and dispositioning calls, comparing agents to each other to spot any signs of dialler or agent issues
Summary
Having worked with seven or eight diallers across her career, the Dialler Manager saw the difference Hostcomm could make with a powerful dialler and exceptional support.
With Hostcomm's Hosted Predictive Dialler, she could load data faster and with less risk of errors, generate a wide range of reports, and depend on responsive support whenever it was required.
It’s important for us, especially if a call is dropped, that people can contact us with the minimum of hassle...
