iChoices boosted its turnover by 30%, upped its agents' productivity by 30% to 40%, secured uptime as close as technically possible to 100% and realised a return of investment of 35% - all in 18 short months. How did the company achieve this?
The challenge
iChoices is a lifestyle management company that provides a suite of flexible medical and lifestyle insurance options. As the company grew, it needed a call centre to service its clients. iChoices selected Interactive Intelligence, a global provider of IP business communication solutions supplied by ATIO to provide the 10 to 15 seat call centre it needed at that time.
Soon after iChoices had implemented the call centre, it recognised the opportunity to offer an outsourced call centre solution for other companies and as a result of this, iChoices Call Centre Outsourcing Solutions was born.
To become a serious player in the outsourced call centre market, iChoices needed to expand its call centre to a minimum of 500 to 550 seats. The company did a thorough investigation of all the vendors' offerings and decided to stay with Interactive Intelligence as its partner of choice.
“We selected Interactive Intelligence because its solution was flexible, cost-effective for us to implement and quick to deploy,” says Gavin Atkinson, MD of iChoices Call Centre Outsourcing. “Its all-in-one platform reduces the risk of downtime, saves on maintenance and integration costs, and offers a single reporting point.”
The benefits
In a mere 18 months, iChoices' outsourced call centre operation has added 30% to the group's turnover, and leading companies including FNB, Liberty, BMW and Planet Fitness have outsourced their call centres to iChoices. The business has 550 seats in Johannesburg and 250 in Cape Town.
According to Atkinson, three elements led to the company's rapid success: its staff, its processes and procedures, and the technology.
“The technology was critical to our success,” says Atkinson. “We needed a solution that would be easily customisable for each of our tenants.
“We also recognised the importance of an all-in-one solution. Having a solution with products from multiple vendors integrated together would mean that there were many potential points of failure. In our game, this is simply a risk we could not take. Today, our uptime is as close as is technically possible to 100%.”
Atkinson says that speed of deployment has also been an important factor in iChoices success. “Thanks to the technology, we are able to get our tenants' call centres up and running in a short space of time, and this agility is attractive to companies,” he says.
iChoices has added other elements of Interactive Intelligence's technology to its platform. The deployment of Interaction Dialer has increased the productivity of its agents by 30%-40%. The dialer automatically dials during outbound campaigns, and only puts live calls through to agents. In this way, agents are not wasting time dialling and getting through to answering machines and defunct numbers.
Staff performance gets a boost
iChoices has an innovative reward system for its agents. Called “Mission Possible”, agents get scored on performance, as well as punctuality and attitude. Through the reward system, the agents earn points which can be exchanged for treatments such as massages and pedicures, or to purchase Nintendo games, for example. Top scorers are entered into a draw, and one agent can win a trip overseas.
Atkinson says that Interactive Intelligence's solution has added significant value to this process. “Because the reporting comes from the platform, performance reports are completely objective and accurate. Agents feel that they are being evaluated fairly and this adds to morale in the company.
“We are delighted that the solution has delivered so many benefits to our company in such a short space of time. We had high expectations and these have been met. Just by having Interactive Intelligence's solution as our platform, we have been able to win clients who prefer the solution over other vendors' offerings.”
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