Case Study: BGL Group Reduces Call Volumes

The BGL Group has reduced its call volumes with proactive outbound SMS messaging, with help from Sabio.

The solution

The BGL Group, a financial services business with over 8 million customers, has deployed an outbound SMS messaging across its multiple businesses – providing proactive support for customers at key touchpoints where, previously, they would have had to contact the company themselves.

Before deploying outbound SMS, the team first worked with Sabio to identify current industry best practice in this area, and developed a set of specific guidelines for SMS outreach.

Central to this approach is the need to simplify processes for customers, whether by pre-empting a customer’s need to call, alerting them to upcoming card payment issues, or providing contact details.

“The company was already strong in multichannel customer engagement; however, just because a business is active across a range of innovative online channels doesn’t mean there still isn’t a role for more traditional communications such as outbound SMS,” said Kenneth Hitchen, Director at Sabio. “Detailed repetition analysis for BGL showed a number of specific areas where challenging contact centre demand via SMS was appropriate, and it’s clear from analysis that this is a solution that works well for both customers and the different businesses that have added SMS outreach to their contact channels.”

The results

The project, fulfilled through Sabio Network Services, has seen an increase the volume of outbound SMS messages – from an initial volume of 50,000 every three to four months to a rate now approaching 500,000.

Key to the success has been a determination to only deploy SMS messages at the right points of the customer journey. Areas identified – including customer confirmation messages, critical calls to action, and the sharing of address details for documents – followed a joint analysis exercise with Sabio identifying specific instances of caller frustration.

The benefits

“We have clearly been able to show how the appropriate use of outbound SMS confirmations across brands has proved helpful for customers – indeed we’ve already seen a 12% reduction in calls from customers wanting to confirm the status of their no-claims documentation, and a similar improvement in customers registering for our online self-service portal,” said Paul Thorley, Senior Project Manager at Fusion Contact Centre Services at BGL Group. “Our proactive SMS approach has already generated a very positive response from customers, and we’re now looking at ways we can be more creative through the use of more intelligent messaging technologies.”

For more information about Sabio, visit their website.