Call Recording Featured Article

A start-up company that grows fast is every entrepreneur’s dream. Of course, a company that grows too fast can be a bit alarming, since the businesses processes to support that growth aren’t in place yet. If you don’t have enough sales personnel to meet demand, demand is going to fall off. If you don’t have enough customer support personnel to interact with customers, you probably won’t have any customers next time you look.

Getting a contact center up and running is no small feat. Most successful contact centers are borne out of years of building up, adding solutions and hiring employees. When you need to get one moving quickly, cloud-based solutions are ideal: they have short implementation times, and they require very little upfront capital.

Listen Clear, a startup that provides affordable hearing devices, had a need for an inexpensive and scalable workforce optimization software that could handle their spiking staffing numbers and help them field all calls. While the company was successful in building a knowledgeable workforce in a hurry, it realized that because of call volume, it was able to take only 80 percent of calls due to inefficient scheduling and workforce optimization. The company approached Coordinated Systems, Inc., (CSI (News - Alert)) and their Virtual Observer workforce optimization solution for help with their the objective of optimal agent staffing.

“We had to get a solution up and working fast, and within our startup budget,” said Emily Hall, Listen Clear’s Director of Talent Acquisition and Administration.

Listen Clear ultimately chose CSI’s Virtual Observer U-wfm solution, which provided them with agent scheduling and forecasting; an intuitive user interface; a scalable and affordable pricing model; and a complete cloud-based architecture. The solution fit with Listen Clear’s lean IT budget, and was ramped up quickly. It was also able to easily integrate with Listen Clear’s Five9 (News - Alert) telephony solution, a SaaS-based telephony environment designed to be reliable, secure, compliant and scalable. Once the solution was implemented, Listen Clear watched the number of calls it missed go down radically.

“Listen Clear exceeded their objective of reducing missed calls down to 15 percent,” according to the case study. “The number is now at 9.9 percent. They were also able to flatten call center costs as a result of the new solution.”

According to Hall, the number of calls being missed before implementation of the solution was the company’s “hot point,” but Listen Clear had other goals, as well.

“Of course, this transfers to sales – missed calls equal missed opportunities. Since then, sales have grown from $12m to $60m. The number of agents in our call center has gone from 20 as a startup to 110 efficiently scheduled agents!” she said.

CSI staff was available to conduct ongoing training, and the company helped Listen Clear optimize process changes or to suggest operational changes to help accomplish specific and unique requirements. Post implementation, Listen Clear was pleased with the level of automation they were able to engage in to eliminate onerous manual tasks.

“By far, my favorite feature in the solution is all the automation it brings to our internal manual tasks,” said Hall. “For example, when my agents request time off, the schedule will automatically update upon approval,” she added.