Co-Op Travel Creates UK's largest Virtual Contact Centre

London, England. March 2006

The Co-Op Travel Group's Future Travel subsidiary announces today that it has gone live with the SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre solution to all its 630 ABTA-certified home-based contact-centre agents - creating the UK's largest virtual contact-centre.

Co-Op Travel uses the SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre to handle incoming calls from customers that are booking new holidays and enquiring about previously booked holidays. Incoming calls are distributed by the SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre service to agents working across the UK based upon skills, agent availability, entitlement, and equal distribution of calls. The SmartNumber service scales easily, takes advantage of agents' existing broadband and telephony connections and enables the Co-Op Contact Centre Manager to quickly add or reduce individual queue capacity as required.

Setting up home-based virtual contact centres (often referred to as 'home-shoring') is one of the fastest growing trends in the Contact Centre market. Teamphone, the developer of the SmartNumbers service, estimates that by eliminating office-costs and associated administrative overheads, the home-based contact centre operates at around half the operating costs of a traditional site-based contact-centre. Other benefits, according to Teamphone, include:

• Home-based contact-centres see a considerable reduction in agent churn, usually down to single figures. (In a traditional site-based contact centre, agent churn can be as high as 40% per annum)
• Home-based agents enjoy a net benefit equivalent to a 15% increase in salary (as a result of travel-to-work time being eliminated, greater flexibility and associated work-life-balance benefits).
• Quality of service is improved. (Organisations are able to recruit from a much broader pool of available specialists, ensuring they can recruit the highest quality agents and deliver a high quality of service to customers.

“We worked very closely with Teamphone on the design and configuration of the Virtual Contact Centre,” said David Picking, IT General Manager at Co-Op Travel. “We have some unique business models reflecting both the quality of service goals we provide to our customers, and also how we compensate our agents. It was therefore critical that the call distribution achieved both a high-quality experience for the caller, as well as the optimum distribution of calls to the most appropriate agent.”

“These problems were compounded by the fact that inbound calls have to be managed not just across one or two sites, but across more than 600 unique locations. Teamphone was able to configure its SmartNumber services to match our precise requirements – and provide us with real-time statistics and queue-management tools for fine-tuning these requirements as needed. Since its service works with existing telephones and required no additional hardware or network infrastructure we went live in a matter of weeks, and at a very low cost per agent.”

“The technology supporting the SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre was very easy to deploy”, continued David Picking. “And since it's available On-Demand it will scale to meet the requirements of the call-centre during times of peak demand and seasonality. We worked closely with Teamphone to ensure the specific requirements of Future Travel were accommodated in the design and deployment of our Virtual Contact Centre. It was especially important that the service worked on existing as well as VoIP and Mobile networks both for business flexibility and business-continuity reasons.”

Peter Healey, Technical Director of Future Travel commented “We reduce staff churn by offering flexible home working to, for example, new mothers returning to work part-time, or older people looking to reduce their hours but not yet ready to retire. In the travel industry, an effective home working centre means that you keep valuable knowledge and experience within the company. Being able to add or reduce lines to fit peak booking times, such as evenings and weekends, means that we can plan capacity.”

In addition to full IVR, ACD and call-distribution technology the SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre also provides real-time and detailed statistics of all telephony and messaging interactions with customers. Call Centre Managers can see on real-time wallboards with detailed information on:

• Service Level Attainment – The quality of service being provided to customers and the performance metrics required by their suppliers
• Agent Utilisation – The efficiency and effectiveness of the agents working at remote locations. Agents can be switched from queues that are under-utilised to those queues with higher traffic in real-time.
• Call Resolution – Determining the first-call resolution rate and further statistics on each customer calling in.

“Even though we have agents operating across more than 600 separate locations across the UK, I can track in real-time the performance and effectiveness of each our agents”, said Alistair Rowland, Managing Director at Future Travel. “In many ways, this provides me with better information agent utilisation than I would normally get if all the agents were operating in the single location. Here we can configure queues and teams based on hard facts – and not just perception of performance.”

“We believe that organisations like Co-Op Travel represent the very best in new business practices for tomorrow's flexible work-styles”, said Geoffrey Paterson, CEO of Teamphone. “Not only will Co-Op travel be able to operate at a much lower cost-base than its competitors, but its customers are also ensured a much higher quality of service through the recruitment of the very best agents – sourced across the UK or Europe. The SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre has once again delivered not only the scalability and resilience required for large contact-centre operations but also the flexibility to adapt to the unique demands of this important partner and its customers.”

About Co-Op Travel

United Co-op Travel is a division of United Co-operative Ltd which operates in Food, Healthcare, Funerals and Motors. Their Future Travel division operates brands including ‘Instant Holidays’, ‘Holiday Now’, ‘PTA’, ‘Instant Cruise’ and ‘Travel Now’ and is one of the largest teletext-based travel companies in the UK.