How call centres can cut costs and improve service

High telecoms costs and poor levels of service are constant complaints of call centre managers. But, says Patrick Byrne, MD of Glasgow-based outbound call centre operator Intellis, cost savings of up to 63 per cent and substantially enhanced service levels can be had through researching the market and switching telecoms providers.

“Our business is coping well with the economic downturn but I was becoming increasingly frustrated by the inability of the big telecoms players to understand us or even tailor their services to our needs.

“Our cost of calls and the structure of the tariff we were on simply made no sense for us. Admittedly, and as it turned out, we had been on the wrong tariff for ages, but we were clearly being taken for granted since nobody at our supplier seemed to care about us or the fact that we were paying way over the odds.”

As a result, he said, Intellis went to market to see if there was a better way of purchasing telecoms. “I fully understand that telecoms providers have to make a margin from their services to us but I greatly resented being treated like a number rather than a living, breathing business with its own way of doing things.

“I wanted a single dedicated service contact responsible for handling and resolving everything from fault reports through to making regular contact at pre-determined intervals to ensure we are getting the service we expect and need. I also wanted aggressively priced call rates which reflect the nature of our operations and low minimum call charges which reduce further on a sliding scale as volumes increase.”

Mr. Byrne narrowed down his search to a handful of providers and eventually, to abica, a ten-year-old UK-based telecoms operator focused solely on the small to medium sized business community. The company has built a long-standing and loyal base of customers because it focuses on delivering reliable, good value telecoms products, covering mobile, landline, broadband and now IP telephony products.

Said Mr. Byrne: “Once we had signed up with abica, they took care of the whole process of transferring the contracts and numbers from the previous provider without any further need for us to get involved, leaving us to get on with the business of running a contact centre.

“I was particularly pleased with their electronic billing and analysis suite which really lets us analyse, understand and manage the cost of calls. Our telephone bill used to arrive in a box and we had no realistic way of analysing our call costs to see whether or not we were being charged correctly and no sensible way of working out if we could save money on call costs.

“We thought we had a good deal from our previous provider, but with abica we will save 63% on our telecoms costs.”