SmartNumbers helps Future Travel reach finals in ‘Best Use of Technology’ category at major European awards

London, England. July 2006

United Co-op Travel Group's Future Travel subsidiary has been named as one of four finalists at the prestigious European Call Centre Awards in the category ‘Best Use of Technology’.

Future Travel’s technology is based on a SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre. The technology solution, implemented by Evoxus, today supports a massive 630 ABTA-certified home-based contact-centre agents – making it the UK's largest virtual contact centre.

The winner of the award will be announced at a black tie dinner on the evening of Tuesday October 3rd at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole. The 2006 European Call Centre Awards is a highlight of CMP’s 2006 Call Centre Expo event that will take place this year at the Birmingham NEC, 3-4 October.

SmartNumbers handles incoming calls from Future Travel customers that are booking new holidays as well as those enquiring about previously booked holidays. Incoming calls are distributed across the UK based upon skills, agent availability, entitlement, and an equal distribution of calls.

The SmartNumbers service scales easily, takes advantage of agents' existing broadband and telephony connections and enables United Co-op Travel Group’s Contact Centre Manager to quickly add or reduce individual queue capacity as required. As well as providing an efficient and cost-effective technical solution, SmartNumbers has also helped Future Travel reduce staff churn by offering flexible home working to, for example, new mothers returning to work part-time, and older people looking to reduce their working hours.

The ‘Best Use of Technology’ award recognises European organisations that have used technology in a call centre setting to create a “unique implementation” that has had “a demonstrable impact on the customer” and created a “commercial impact ... with evidence of quantifiable financial benefits.”

“We’re absolutely delighted to have been named a finalist” said David Picking, IT General Manager at United Co-op Travel Group. “We worked very closely with Teamphone on the design and configuration of the Virtual Contact Centre and have created some unique business models that take into account both our quality of service goals and how we compensate our agents. SmartNumbers has been instrumental in not only delivering a high quality experience for the caller but also achieving an optimal distribution of calls to agents.”

“We believe that organisations like United Co-op Travel Group represent the very best in new business practices for tomorrow's flexible work-styles,” said Geoffrey Paterson, CEO of Teamphone. “We’re delighted that their achievements have been recognised.”

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.