We at PC MD Consulting love to save money for our clients!
This is short post about one of our clients from the moment we stepped through the door until we finished the project.

One of our clients referred his friend to us, he called us and asked for our free one hour consulting, we set up an appointment and were able to meet him the same day.

At the meeting we found out he had around 50 employees, of which 30 were an inbound/outbound call center.

Let’s start with the fact that no-one likes to work with call centers since they abuse the minutes. Average home phone lines report 2-3 hours of talking a week, businesses lines report approximately 10 hours a week, but call centers report 40 hours a week!

Our client’s main issues were:

1. Not all phones were ringing when calls came in.
2. Calls were “lost” during transfer.
3. Customers complained no one answered.
4. Voice-mail was not working.

They had an old analog phone system that cost them $1500/mo for maintenance and AT&T’s bill was around $10,000 /mo.

Our solution was to replace whole system with VOIP system. Our client asked us to build a system for 100 agents since they were looking to expand, so we did!

New System Cost:

100 VOIP phones ($130/piece) cost $13,000, 4 network switches to support network traffic $5,000 and free setup. Total $20,000.

When we finished the project, their monthly bill dropped down to $4,500 /mo ROI in 5 months!!! And they doubled the agents!!!

With our VOIP system they didn’t lose any more calls and they got full control and a monitor system to improve themselves with options like:

1. Call recording: all calls where recorded for monitoring and learning.
2. Call monitor: Listening – This option allows managers to listen to any agent’s call, Whispering – Allows manager to talk to agent without customer listening, Breaching – Allows manager to get into the call, just like a conference call.
3. LCD TV Screen with list of calls waiting in queue to monitor call volume.
4. Voice-mail & after hour recording.
5. CRM plug-in – This system takes the caller ID and runs it in the Client Relationship Manager (CRM) database and pulls customer’s information before call is answered, this helps agents know who is calling before they pick up the phone. This also allows the agent to have customer’s history on screen and better assist, making call flow faster.
6. Calls by Priority – Agents that make more sales get more incoming calls from the system, this helped sales increase by 20%.
7. Report System – The system provides full reports, such as average call time, average wait time and more.
8. Predictive dialer – The system makes outbound calls to make call queue always busy and have agents with active calls all the time.

At the end of the project our customer got what he needed: a reliable, affordable system and most importantly a system that will help him and his managers to monitor all calls.

Some of the things they found out with our VOIP phone system:

• They found out all the “clock-in, clock-out” agents – These agents didn’t care about sales, they simply picked up the phone made themselves  look like they’re talking and hung up the phone. They don’t care about sales, simply to get their hour pay.
• In a particular case, they had an agent pick up a call around 4:57, let the customer talk for 3 minutes and at 5:00 put him on hold and left home since he finished his shift. This type of monitoring wouldn’t have been possible.
• Proof that one of the agents took customers credit cards and used them for his private needs… Needless to say, they called police and found out this was his 3 felony!

These stories show us that simply by improving the system, a business can make more income and save a lot of money. Also it can help monitor and reinforce customer care strategies.

99% of the times when we switch call centers from analog system to VOIP system, customers save a lot of money and get a lot more… Way more!!

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