Challenge
Bensons for Beds is the UK's leading bed retailer. We supplied OrderlyQ to their Warrington, Tewkesbury and Ayr sites. Due to an in-house restructure, their primary call centre was suffering from extremely high call volumes at certain times of the day, resulting in ‘peak’ call periods where customers were waiting on hold for too long. This resulted in many customers not getting through at all and hanging up in frustration. There were also long periods of idle agent down-time during the ‘troughs’ when queues emptied.
Solution
We suggested using the OrderlyStats package straight away to gather call statistics, for an initial period of one week. After the statistics were gathered, we introduced OrderlyQ to their contact centre and measured the call centre performance after deployment of the OrderlyQ package. The numbers were astounding.
Results
Introducing OrderlyQ to their call centre helped Bensons in so many ways:
1) OrderlyQ gave callers an estimated wait time, allowing them to decide whether to continue to hold or call back after the given time and go straight to the front of the queue. This meant more people were able to get through on their first call and didn’t hang up in frustration.
2) OrderlyQ also shortened the queue faced by new callers, so more callers were able to get through in a shorter period.
3) By removing the need for people to hang up and call back multiple times, and by ensuring a much shorter queue, OrderlyQ eliminated caller ‘churn’, reducing the number of calls per caller and improving answer rate.
4) As complaints about call queuing stopped, the average call duration also reduced. This aided agents to deal with more callers in a shorter period.
5) Agents were much happier in taking calls as customers came onto calls happier and ready to do business, so no more disgruntled customers.
The results were remarkable:
- The proportion of callers answered increased from 56.7% to 99.1% - a seismic change for the business.
- Effective capacity of the call centre increased by 60%, and the call answer rate increased by 39%.
- Average talk time dropped by 7.3 seconds as less time was spent dealing with complaints relating to queue issues.
- A 59% increase in the number of answered callers, while still working with the exact same team size.
- Average wait time for those who chose to remain on hold was decreased by 65% - that's almost two thirds!
To see similar results the call centre would have had to increase staffing by at least 60%. OrderlyQ delivered top-flight call centre performance for considerably less than it would have cost to hire the additional agents.