If you're an avid golfer whose idea of vacation means pursuing your favorite sport and pastime, perhaps you've used Golfbreaks.com, a golf travel company founded in 1998. From the company's inception to last year, it has grown rapidly, experiencing more than tenfold growth in bookings in six years; from less than 20,000 a year to 200,000 across all channels. As a result, Golfbreaks.com identified the need to transform the booking process and improve the service it delivered to customers as demand shot up, but without further increasing personnel resources.
Specifically, the company's communications infrastructure was unable to fully support its long-term business goals and provide enough flexibility to develop the way it interacts with its customers. Golfbreaks.com was also facing agent training challenges. Call recording was not available, meaning management could not easily ensure that agents were correctly handling calls. With the team doubling in just five years, there was a distinct requirement for technology that would assist in better training and coaching to ensure that standards were consistently high.
“Our previous system, which was eight years old and very much showing its age, did not support computer-telephony integration, which was a huge limitation to the business,” said Sam Churchill, IT Infrastructure and Services manager, Golfbreaks.com in a press release. “Our reporting systems were too basic for our changing needs and time was being wasted for both our agents and customers through insufficient systems and lack of integration. Our incumbent system had become very clunky and unreliable, and our objectives to accommodate additional channels such as conference calling and social media integration could not be met.”
The situation came to a head when the company added a second contact center site. The company needed a way to integrate the two sites with one another and with its in-house customer relationship management (CRM) system, web chat, voice calls (via Microsoft Lync) and e-mail into one streamlined system. To find a solution, Golfbreaks.com chose Aspect – in collaboration with its partner, Dell – to implement the customer interaction platform, Aspect Unified IP 7, and workforce optimization applications for its 65 agents at the company's Windsor, UK-based contact center.
Aspect Unified IP 7 is based on a unified, multichannel architecture that combines voice, e-mail, web chat, IM and SMS communication channels, and delivers Golfbreaks.com a next-generation customer contact solution for customer service, sales and telemarketing processes. Since the implementation of the Aspect/Dell solution, Golfbreaks.com reports it has seen an improvement in workforce performance. Contact center agents now use “click-to-dial,” enabled by Microsoft Lync, which allows users to make outbound calls at the click of a button on their computer. This is a brand new feature, which has improved productivity hugely through cutting wasted agent time, as users no longer need to manually look up and dial phone numbers. Agents are now able to better serve customers, too, through skills-based routing that enables the customers to be put through to the correct agent in the first instance – improving first call resolution rates and reducing the number of internal transfers by 50 per cent. Agents can now focus their time on the customer interaction at hand.
Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.
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