Challenge
Reader's Union is a book club with two established call centres - one for customer services and one that handles enrolments and processing.
Their customer services side of the business was suffering due to peaks and troughs of calls, resulting in lost callers during busy periods. There were periods of downtime for customer service agents when the phone queues emptied, but the enrolment call centre part of the business and order processing call lines were always saturated and had minimal unused agent time. This very high level of occupancy was stressful for agents and callers alike.
![](http://voip4.orderlyq.com/assets/img/sub-pages/success-stories/readers-union.jpg)
Solution
We increased efficiency by introducing the OrderlyQ system and demonstrated that the system had a big impact. To do this we used the OrderlyStats package to monitor each line's performance over a two-week period. The first week we gathered statistics on both lines without OrderlyQ, and the second week with OrderlyQ installed.
The number of agents across the two weeks was similar, however, during the second week there was a significant increase in the number of callers due to a competitor closing and Readers Union winning the business. This meant more calls having to be handled by the same number of staff.
Results
Even with a significant increase in the number of callers, OrderlyQ delivered these fantastic benefits:
- Better response rate: 50% more callers were answered on the customer services line and 14% more on the orders and enrolments line - and without increasing the headcount.
- Reduced call abandonment rate: 43% drop.
- Reduced talk time: call duration decreased by 7%, due to the near-elimination of complaints about queueing during the OrderlyQ week - despite the additional demand.
- Increased effectiveness in smoothing out the peaks: the proportion of callers answered went up from 66% to 81%
- Increased customer satisfaction: caller feedback was incredibly positive, with almost 90% of callers that were told the wait was more than two minutes preferring to hang up and call back later rather than wait on hold.
- Fewer customer complaints: less than 1% of callers commented about the queue at all and of those who did, 87% made positive comments, the most frequent being that OrderlyQ was the best telephone queue system they had ever encountered!
This is the best queue system I've ever encountered!
Satisfied caller
Brilliant idea! Much better than holding on to the phone
Satisfied caller