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Inside the Loop
By Michael Gray
In 1999, Yorkshire Water, one of the ten largest water companies in the world, decided to move its customer service operation out-of-house to an outsourced partner.
When the responses to its competitive tender came in, however, it realised that in terms of both value for money and quality of service its own in-house Customer Services Department was superior to any of the proposals received.
Yorkshire Water and its parent company, the Kelda Group, were convinced that they could make a mark in the UK customer contact market – and decided to form a new outsourced group operation, Loop Customer Management.
The new outsourced contact centre operator opened its doors in 2001 with 450 personnel. By 2004, that number had grown to over 550. Loop’s clients today include Yorkshire Water, EDS Energy, Merseyside Fire Service, Oxfam, B&Q, Cleveland Fire Service, Wales Tourist Board and Jet2, and a number of insurance companies.
Commitment to quality
From day one, Loop Customer Management had the strength and commitment of the Kelda Group fully behind it. Kelda is one of the largest water management businesses in the world, providing clean water to 4.5 million people and 140,000 businesses as well as treating waste water to safe environmental standards.
The fish tank in the call centre
In a market characterised by tight regulation and growing competition, Kelda’s emphasis on high quality customer service and increasing value for shareholders enabled it to stand out from the crowd. In the same way, Loop’s commitment to ‘quality’ and ‘people’ has seen it emerge as an outstanding and award-winning outsourced customer contact operator.
Loop ’s Business Development Manager Paul Tasker is clear about who’s behind this success: the company’s front line staff. “W e deliver great customer experiences through great people ,” he says. “We address the needs of a broad range of employees from all ages and backgrounds. It calls for us to be flexible about shift patterns and to use our workplace to motivate and support team working”.
In 2004, Loop was named Best Large Contact Centre at the National Customer Service Awards and received a Special Judges Award at the European Call Centre of the Year awards. It is also the first ever non-public sector UK organisation to be awarded the Charter Mark for Service Excellence.
Contact handling
Technology has played a massive part in the company’s success. Today, Loop uses best-in-class solutions in every area of its operation from multichannel contact handling to CRM, document and workflow management, workforce and performance management.
In April 2004, Loop reviewed its technology requirements with a view to increasing its business revenues. “We are totally committed to an open systems fut ure,” explains Tasker, “and that means no longer relying on manufacturers of proprietary solutions for our hardware, software and system support.”
“We needed a technology vision that could support our ambitious plans – an integrated end-to-end solution that would allow us to bring all our customer contacts into a single contact repository.”
As a result of the review, Loop adopted the Aspect Enterprise Contact Server as its key computer telephony integration (CTI) and multi- channel contact handling engine. The Aspect solution replaced an earlier Genesys T-server CTI solution.
The Contact Server now sits at the heart of Loop ’s contact management infrastructure, ensuring the company can answer, prioritise, intelligently route and report on all customer contacts, regardless of media type (phone call, email etc) . The new solution has improved Loop’s overall contact handling reliability and also its hot-desking capabilities.
The Contact Server is fully integrated with other open system software solutions used by Loop including the Aspect Call Center, Witness call recording, SER outbound dialler, Periphonics IVR, and Clarify CRM.
Workforce Planning
Another key challenge for Loop has been to ensure that it has the resources available to handle a vast multi-channel workload. Today, Loop handles around 3 million inbound and outbound phone contacts each year, over 1.5 million items of correspondence, plus tens of thousands of emails and faxes. It also processes bills for around 15 million customers.
The company has identified a massive 80 different work types associated with these tasks. Workforce planning is complicated further by the fact that call, postal and other customer contact volumes fluctuate significantly on a daily and even hourly basis – and by the vast number of different skill sets within the workforce (eg. some advisors handle only calls and others multiple media).
Using Aspect’s eWorkforce Management software, Loop can successfully determine what staffing levels and skill sets are required at its two sites to handle the forecast number of calls, as well as to track contact centre performance.
"Workforce Management software will ultimately enable us to manage one ‘reservoir’ of work and match it to our workforce in the most efficient way and with full control over delivery standards” explains Tasker. “This means that we’ll need fewer people to manage the same workload, while still delivering a consistent level of customer service.”
Loop ’s efficient workforce scheduling has led to outstanding contact handling results.
In correspondence response, over 90 percent of people receive a response within two working days – a rate which far exceeds targets. And with phone-based queries, Loop now answers 98% of all calls received, 94% of these in under 15 seconds. Impressively, it also resolves 80% of the 1.7 million phone-based queries it receives on first contact.
Tackling people issues
Three years ago, Loop was no different to many other large contact centres, suffering from absenteeism, attrition and occasionally low morale. What’s notable about its story though is what the company did about these problems.
Loop was desperate to know what would make it a great place to work. So it started by asking its own people by way of one-to-one interviews and focus groups – interviewing a third of the entire workforce. It even interviewed people that had left the company and asked why they’d left.
The initiative culminated in an all-employee survey which told management exactly what people felt and what wound them up – even down to niggly details like ‘I can never find milk for my coffee at break times’.
Loop acted by putting all its 60 managers through a broad-based Management Development Program which was focused on leadership, recruitment and communication skills. It also completely redesigned its reward framework. In addition to standard performance measures, Customer Relationship Managers are now recognised for the way they develop and apply their skills; Team Managers and Contact Centre Managers for the satisfaction levels amongst their team members.
Loop demonstrated it actually was a people-focused business: one that listened to and acted on the wishes of its staff. “When working mums suggested that it would help their work-life balance if they could take more unpaid time off during school holidays, we agreed and put in place such a policy,” explains Nicola Wilson, Head of Human Resources at Loop Customer Management. “We’ve even put in place a ‘life opportunity’ scheme so that people can take time off to go travelling or extend their maternity leave - and still have a job to come back to”.
“The return from our investment in people has paid for itself many times over” she adds. “Statistically, it has improved employee satisfaction and lowered staff attrition and absenteeism. But it’s also really noticeable in terms of the atmosphere. People smile more. You can really feel the difference.”
Loop’s ability to deliver on its people-oriented vision earned the company a place in the Financial Times '50 Best Workplaces in the UK' in 2003, as well as the Sunday Times '100 Best Companies to Work for in the UK' in both 2003 and 2004.
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