Company background
Newlyn Collection Services Limited was established in 1999. Prior to this, the business had been run as a family concern, offering road traffic debt enforcement recovery and the collection of commercial rent arrears, the latter being the focus of the company.
In 1999 the Limited Company was formed - all of the directors had extensive knowledge and experience within the collections industry, having worked for one of the largest bailiff companies in the country for a combined total of 70 years. Together with other key personnel who had also worked at a selection of bailiff companies, they formed Newlyn Collection Services Limited with the objective of offering enforcement collection to local authorities for the recovery of council tax, non-domestic rates and road traffic debt.
The company initially based itself in London, starting with one local authority client; the London Borough of Waltham Forest, who Newlyn are proud to confirm remain a client to this day. The primary aim of the business was to offer its clients a sustainable qualitative service - and with this in mind, the company applied for work through presentations and tender selection processes to neighbouring boroughs. The ethos of a constant bailiff presence in all of its client areas worked and with it, the growth of the company. Today, Newlyn’s client base extends to over 35 local authorities, and the services provided include the collection of council tax, non-domestic rates, road traffic debt, debt recovery, tracing, enforcement of bail and no bail warrants, information gathering, bankruptcy and charging order services.
The Business Challenge
Newlyn Collections were manually dialling clients, whilst receiving incoming enquiries. Essential management information on how many calls were in the queue, how many hung up, what was the average wait time and agent performance were all absent. The absence of data on staff performance made it very difficult to identify who needed additional training or indeed praising. Therefore, It was assumed that staff were not working to their full capacity. The existing solution was not modular, which made growth impossible and to change the system was the only route forward.
This lack of data created a gap in the contact centre structure as it was difficult to monitor the staff and report generation was virtually impossible. First and foremost, managers at Newlyn wanted to increase productivity and efficiency in the call centre. As Newlyn is a dynamic, ever growing company, it was crucial they found a supplier that could provide a reliable, well supported system.
Newlyn took the opportunity to review the entire market for the solution looking at CTI products linked to the telephone system, soft diallers and hard diallers. At this stage, Newlyn contacted Telecom Applications to find a blended inbound and outbound contact centre solution with sophisticated tools offering high levels of Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
“We desperately sought an up-to-date solution as we had expanded and outgrown our existing solutions and our staff were not working to their full capabilities with a manual dialling system” - Lucy Sargent, Contact Centre Manager
Our Solution
The solution we provided to Newlyn gave them a blended inbound/outbound system that significantly increased the representative/call ratio. The TouchStar Software gave them intelligent scripting, allowing new employees to adapt and perform easily within the new operation. They could deploy programmed call-back messages that helped to create additional contacts through their inbound collections channel and with the software’s ‘whisper-coaching’ technology, dedicated trainers could monitor and coach sales agents in real-time without interruption to potential clients.
The integration with their self built CRM package meant that the agents had the most up to date client information available at all times, being able to write back to the database made writing letters and emails a simple coordinated task.
Benefits
The benefits of the TouchStar solution were apparent immediately to Newlyn, with collections increasing daily and staff motivation climbing - they were becoming more successful and targets were being beaten each day. At first staff were a little apprehensive about the “big brother” technology but soon found the benefits outweighed any misgivings. The agents were able to operate in two teams, providing a competitive element to the workforce, leading to increased motivation and productivity.
The monitoring and coaching of the agents provided immediate feedback that improved performance and was valuable to the management in spotting the weaker performers. This led to increased levels of customer satisfaction as revenues were collected more efficiently. Organisational control vastly improved due to the use of the TouchStar reporting suite. The integration of the client software within the agent script allowed data to be written back to the database without error or duplication, massively improving productivity.
Monitoring and reporting has improved agent training, provided healthy competition and has in turn increased motivation. Improved team morale amongst the call centre staff has created an atmosphere in which they are encouraged to beat their targets. Simultaneously, there has been a decrease in staff turnover as training can be better targeted at the weaker performers, before they start to fail, get frustrated and leave. Newlyn have been very satisfied that there has been an increased level of both customer and client satisfaction.
Implementation
The TouchStar blended call centre was installed and connected to a Samsung telephone system. The system was rolled out with features added as staff got used to the changes. From this point onwards, the 24/7 support was essential and as staff gained in confidence and took on more of the administration tasks, they became more self sufficient.
The installation and training was achieved with minimal disruption to the business, clients were unaware that the changes were taking place.
Lucy Sargent stated, “I was very impressed with the smooth and quick installation - the Telecom Applications staff provided us with support throughout. The training was helpful and done in a way that was easy for the staff to pick up – there was no disruption at all during the changeover.”.
Results
-Immediately increased business productivity
- Provided management tools to evaluate all staff and processes
- The value and the quantity of collections increased, leading to greater customer satisfaction.
- Customer SLA’s were exceeded in all areas.
- Staff turnover was reduced.
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