Case Study: Call recording at Brittany Ferries

Last year Brittany Ferries transported in excess of 2.6 million passengers, 780,000 cars and 170,000 lorries between the ports of Britain, Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal.

The rise in customer service call volumes caused the company to take a look at the way inward and outbound calls were managed at its CTI call centre in Plymouth.

Storacall was one of three companies invited to pitch for the tender as part of Brittany Ferries’ standard procurement practice. The companies were invited to discuss the requirements of the call centre and propose a suitable call recording system that would answer the needs of call centre staff.

Storacall proposed its Enterprise-level VoistoreLive call recording solution to record 60-channels of ISDN complete with a data link to the telephone system to provide “search by extension” capability. This would enable Brittany Ferries call centre staff to deal more effectively with customer service enquiries and dispute management, an area that is becoming increasingly important.

The solution provides continuous, high-quality digital recording and network archiving of telephone conversations and integrates seamlessly with all leading call centre middleware applications. Being web-browser based, the system could be accessed by everyone at the call centre regardless of where they sat.

A significant factor in Brittany Ferries’ decision to go with VoistoreLive was the scalability of the solution. This was considered vital in aligning call centre resource to demand and enabling the company to respond quickly to a highly seasonal holiday market without further capital outlay in infrastructure.

Calls recorded by the VoistoreLive system are automatically encrypted, compressed and archived for easy retrieval at a later date. The system supports industry standard file formats allowing recordings to be sent via email to customers, third parties and even law courts if required. This is of huge benefit to Brittany Ferries, helping to resolve customer issues swiftly and effectively.

Once the VoistoreLive system was installed the reservations managers soon realised the potential in using the recording, fast retrieval and playback capabilities to train and evaluate reservations operatives.

VoicestoreLive supports free-seating which allows for immediate call playback to a specific agent regardless of her location or the extension being used. This ability to play back a telephone conversation to an operative is an invaluable training tool and has contributed to improving Brittany Ferries’ training programme, which in turn has improved staff retention and customer service levels.

Telecoms Manager at Brittany Ferries Juliet Thrift said “Storacall seemed to have listened and understood our requirements to a greater extent than the other companies. This inspired confidence right from the start.”

On the technical side, Juliet was also pleased with the outcome… “Storacall was the only company to offer a solution that offered trunk sided recording in addition to extension side recording.” Commenting on Storacall’s quote, she said… “The quote was competitive compared to the two other companies but, more than that, they were the only provider to offer a free trial of the system.”

Juliet concluded… “Storacall proved to be reliable, competent and professional. At no point did we feel pressured to make a commitment; the Voistore solution simply didn’t require a hard sell, making the whole experience a pleasure.”

16 Jul 2008

Filed under Call Centre News , case study