resources

From a single base in Rotterdam, Netherlands, GDCC run simultaneous campaigns in many languages to many countries, specializing in the EMEA timezones. They utilize a wide range of native speakers to obtain consistently high quality results and have expertise in handling B2B campaigns with more difficult conditions, e.g. low connect rates, high proportion of bad numbers, high proportion of short duration calls.

After many years of their agents working either by dialing manually or through an old predictive system, GDCC were looking for a way to cope with the ever increasing demand from their customers without the expense of expansion or relocation. They decided it was time to upgrade, attracted by the potential increase in agent time utilization, which would mean faster completion of campaigns.

Requirements

The chosen dialing solution had to meet several criteria. The solution must

1. be able to integrate quickly and tightly to their agent desktop CATI products (Nebu, Nipo and Quancept)
2. be able to run campaigns with different CATI systems simultaneously
3. be able to run in preview mode when required
4. provide efficient and flexible call recording and retrieval as standard
5. enable easy monitoring of conversations for verification and quality assurance, either locally or remotely, plus coaching when required
6. be able to deliver effective performance under GDCC’s typically difficult campaign conditions
7. be able to utilize VoIP using desktop softphones
8. retain commitment to quality through very low incidence of nuisance calls
9. support home workers
10. support low cost long distance routing
11. support dedicated port utilization per country

The Trial

In March 2008 GDCC chose Sytel as a best fit for these criteria, after recommendations from both Nebu and Nipo, and after an extensive survey of the market. GDCC embarked on an extensive in-depth free trial of the Sytel contact center suite onsite. Sytel sent an experienced engineer to the Netherlands to oversee the process. Additionally, Sytel provided comprehensive support, advice and remote assistance to the inhouse IT team both during initial setup and throughout the trial period, in order for GDCC to gain maximum benefit from the Sytel software.

During the trial, GDCC used the advanced configurability of Sytel software to

• adjust telephony settings to cope with the particular conditions of individual countries and campaigns
• make TDM as well as IP calls
• assign ports to Europe and the Middle East via least cost routing
• archive call recordings to servers offsite
• run campaigns concurrently on several CATI systems

As with all trials, obstacles arose that needed to be overcome. For instance, communication issues were quickly resolved thanks to Sytel’s close partnership with the CATI providers. And when GDCC experienced very low connect rates, Sytel advised on issues of list organization to bring connect rates up.

Very soon, GDCC were conducting trial projects into Europe and the Middle East, and buying in and configuring new ISDN bundles to make best use of extra dialing capacity. Over the course of the trial, they used the feedback gained through Sytel reporting software to gain maximum predictive value.

The Result

At the conclusion of the trial, GDCC found that they were completing campaigns up to 40% faster than expected with their previous system. GDCC Managing Director Kees-Jan Mars commented "The Sytel dialer delivers excellent predictive performance on our market research campaigns at amazingly low levels of nuisance calls, and their support is second to none."

Sytel’s commitment to service excellence plus GDCC’s trademark quality of service continues to be a winning combination.

About Sytel

Based in the UK, Sytel Limited provides enterprise and contact center software solutions to organisations in over 40 countries. In the outbound world, its predictive dialer, Softdial Plugin®, is recognised as being the leading dialer for delivering effective performance under compliance. This is at the core of a rounded contact center product available to end-users or to VARS and integrators wanting to integrate world-class components into their call center offerings.

Poland, according to recent surveys, is the fastest growing contact center market in Europe, resulting in part from growing international awareness of Poland as an outsourcing destination.

In 2007-08, PCM approached 12 companies, including Sytel, with the aim of sourcing integrated desktop and telephony services to modernize and upgrade their operation in Warsaw. They had become aware that manual dialing was no longer viable in today’s climate, and that a richer feature set would enable them to far better serve their clients, make better use of their agents’ time and streamline the entire operation.

Requirements

PCM presented Sytel with an extensive list of requirements, including predictive dialing, IVR, agent scripting, reporting and call recording. The Sytel system had to provide:

• Call blending
  As a multi service contact center, PCM needed to be able to pull agents off predictive or progressive outbound campaigns in response to inbound spikes.
• Inbound IVR
  To make best use of their agents’ time, full function IVR was required to acquire account details, perform database lookup and provide screen pops for the agent
• Agent scripting Agent scripting, as well as providing tools for building and delivering web-based scripts, had to provide
  • support for HTML email, SMS, instant messaging and chat
  • support for custom dictionaries to provide language- and campaign-specific support for their agents
  • support for legacy scripts written in Visual Basic
  • instant script update capability on the fly
  • support for verification of sensitive data, such as personal ID and bank account details
  • a facility for making notes during a call
  • a facility for calling a number back before taking another call
• Reporting
  Extensive reporting should be web-based, enabling home-working supervisors to monitor agent activity and perform coaching across all PCM sites out of business hours. It should provide both real-time information for agents and supervisors, and historical reports for billing and performance monitoring. In the busy PCM environment, the reporting system should be able to service many simultaneous client requests. At any time, PCM needed to be able to track all interactions with a particular consumer.
• Call recording
  All calls needed to be recorded, with an easy search mechanism for later retrieval
• A Polish interface
  In order to provide ease of use for their staff, all screen interfaces had to be in Polish
• Scalability
  Should be able to quickly and seamlessly handle increases in numbers of agents in response to demand
• Resilience
  To minimize downtime and lost revenue, the system had to be able to recover within minutes from any network, hardware or software problem.
• Ease of integration
  A number of legacy integrations had to be performed, including with Microsoft Active Directory and PCM’s existing Avaya PBX.

The Trial

Sytel was one of only a handful of systems selected for further consideration. In order to demonstrate the Sytel system’s flexibility and its ability to provide the exhaustive feature set required (and more besides), Sytel delivered an entire system including hardware and software for their local partner Telesystemy AC to install at PCM. Throughout the trial period, PCM was fully supported by Sytel and Telesystemy AC.

PCM then launched an extensive program of substantial testing, proving and familiarization.

The Result

After considerable deliberation and comparison, PCM selected Sytel to supply telephony and desktop applications for 400 outbound seats. Several factors proved to be decisive:

• Exceptional outbound performance
  During the first weeks of operation, campaigns were being completed up to 50% faster than expected
• Exceptional support
  Sytel’s level of email and phone support at all times gave PCM the confidence and peace of mind to move forward
• Exceptional flexibility
  Sytel’s ability to meet stringent and diverse criteria made it a close fit and an obvious choice
• Competitive pricing
  Sytel provided a winning combination of full feature functionality and competitive pricing

Managing Director of PCM, Jan Załęcki commented, "We are delighted with the performance of our new system. It makes far better use of our agents' time, increasing our effectiveness by 33% on average. And the fast time to project completion, enabled by the outstanding support from Sytel and Telesystemy AC, means we can offer an extensive feature set with unparalleled performance much sooner than we could have expected."

PCM continues to be supported on the ground by Telesystemy AC.

About Sytel

Based in the UK, Sytel Limited provides enterprise and contact center software solutions to organisations in over 35 countries. In the outbound world, its predictive dialer, Softdial Plugin®, is recognised as being the leading dialer for delivering effective performance under compliance. This is at the core of a rounded contact center product available to end-users or to VARS and integrators wanting to integrate world-class components into their call center offerings.

• Their growth plans were very ambitious and they needed systems that could grow to handle more than 1000 simultaneous outbound calls
• Reliability was absolutely key. They, and their blue-chip clients, were very intolerant of downtime
• Flexibility in all ways was also key. They wanted to link some of their own existing applications into Softdial Contact Centre.
• Avance deals with some of the leading enterprises in the country and their demands are very exacting. That means working with products that are flexible and can be fine-tuned and adapted quickly to meet not just 99.99% but exactly what the customer wants.
• Hosted capability was vital. They needed multi-tenancy that is there from the ground up and just works, so that they could provide their solutions to other outsourcers
• They needed a solid architecture where the supplier continues to innovate at a strong rate
• And crucially, they needed a dialer that was going to be not just compliant with Ofcom regulations, but give great performance under compliance

We sat down with Campbell Mitchelson, Avance’s IT Director, and said "take a free trial, we'll support you and you won't be disappointed!"

When the trial was over and the integration complete, Campbell shared his response with us:

“Well, I am just delighted at how you have performed against all our demands. And let me single out two things in particular. Not only was the integration of our apps with the Sytel solution not a problem, but your help in doing this was superb. Your instant responses on all matters, be it support, licensing, or product issues, has been astounding and simply unequalled in my experience; the industry could learn a lot from the way in which you look after your customers.

And your dialer has been truly great. It left the legacy dialer we had been using trailing a long way behind and is bringing huge additional productivity to our bottom line.”

About the Avance Group - in their words

Avance is one of a new generation of specialist outsourcing organisations, totally focused on improving the performance of accounts receivable and customer relationship management. We are not a generalist. Our approach sets great stall in innovation. We do not simply “take out” a process for our partners – we immerse ourselves in it, using our cross-sector knowledge to identify and deliver continuous process improvement.

Using technology developed for over a decade, we are working with some of the leading names in global business, our approach enabling us to improve process performance and deliver insightful reporting so that our partners gain a new level of control over their customer relationship and credit management functions. We understand the importance of brand value, and have diligently earned the trust of a growing number of global blue chip companies to work in their name. And we operate in 40 countries, in more than 32 languages, giving us the scale needed to tackle multinational operations, cutting through corporate hierarchy to simplify operations and give senior decision makers the information they need to manage effectively.

As Michael McKinlay, Managing Director at Sytel explains, "In late summer of 2007 we were given a go live date of 1 October. We had to install and commission a dialer, train Park’s people and help them write some particularly challenging scripts, using our new web-based scripter product. We like this kind of challenge and assigned an experienced project manager to pull everything together."

“We were delighted with the knowledge and support Sytel brought to the project”, said the IT Director of Park Group, Steve Lock. Much of our business in this market comes in the fourth quarter and it was vital that Sytel could help us contact all our customers and prospects in time to deliver product for Xmas and for them to save for the following Xmas. Sytel met our tight go live date and that meant we were able to so, and handle the rush. The reaction from our customers and prospects has been very encouraging with new orders significantly up when compared with the previous year and we exceeded our targets. “Sytel have played a major part in this recovery,” he said.

“One reason for choosing Sytel” said Lock, “was their web-based scripter which allowed us to prototype and change scripts for our agents very quickly. Change is a constant in our business and as we talked to our customers and learnt their latest requirements, we were able to build this knowledge immediately into our scripts to help better address our business. Don’t believe it when people tell you that scripts don’t matter! They do and we couldn’t have made the business gains we did without this ability to respond immediately to our customers’ needs. One aspect of the solution that we really appreciated was the fantastic performance we got from the dialer in the industry, which enforced the regulations laid down by Ofcom without any intervention being required from us,” he said.

Based in the UK, Sytel Limited provides call center solutions to organizations in over 30 countries. In the outbound world, its predictive dialer, Softdial Plugin, is recognized as being the leading dialer for delivering effective performance under compliance. Sytel has campaigned in all major markets for responsible rules for predictive dialers and acts as adviser on dialer regulations to many national marketing and government bodies around the world.

SNT have ambitious plans to offer their clients leading-edge technology, to help them develop and maintain high levels of customer service. Their priority is that the company’s networks and workstations will have a standardised, new technological environment and be fully web and IP based with the objective of functioning as one centralised platform. In order to meet these exacting requirements and reap the benefits, SNT turned to UK based Sytel Limited in partnership with Dutch based TietoEnator to deliver a solution.

As TietoEnator’s managing director, Bjorn de Hoon explains, “We choose to work with Sytel because we regard their predictive dialer, Softdial Plugin® to be the only solution to efficient dialing under compliance. The dialer has benefited many of our clients with the scalability, multi-tenancy capability and ease of integration with any CRM or Telco environment, all of which are paramount in providing ASP and larger call centers with discreet, partitioned services.

Sytel’s Softdial Plugin takes account of all campaigns and dialing parameters and is able to constantly adjust its dialing speeds to match changes in the campaign conditions, together with providing the lowest possible waiting time given the user’s objectives on abandoned calls. Ever since 1999, Softdial Plugin® has delivered the ultimate in predictive performance, with a consistent abandon rate of 3% as recommended by Ofcom in the UK and the Federal Communications Commission in the US.

“We continue to push for industry wide adherence to predictive dialing compliance legislation," comments Michael McKinlay, managing director at Sytel. As a company we are committed to supplying our customer with dialers that offer high levels of performance under compliance."

SNT are now enjoying the benefits of the new system. The central database uploading and the flexible scripting options are hugely successful and they have been able to execute complex campaigns for clients that they otherwise would not have been able to handle. The inbound modules are integrated with the other systems and new business intelligence functionality has been added. It is from this centralised platform that SNT are able to operate both inbound and outbound from all sites as if it were a virtual contact center. As Ankie Straathof of SNT comments; “The platform was immediately embraced by the Team Managers and the other people involved. People came to ask of their own accord whether they could work with the system."

Based in the UK, Sytel Limited provides call center solutions to organizations in over 30 countries. In the outbound world, its predictive dialer, Softdial Plugin, is recognized as being the leading dialer for delivering effective performance under compliance. Sytel has campaigned in all major markets for responsible rules for predictive dialers and acts as adviser on dialer regulations to many national marketing and government bodies around the world.

The organisation receives only minimal government funding and is reliant on donations, bequests and the proceeds from the telemarketing of a wide range of popular merchandise.

As Vladimir Hinrichsen, GDV’s Financial Controller explained; “We were previously managing the call center operations the hard way. Our agents were constantly frustrated by the inability to connect ‘live calls’ with customers, which in turn discouraged staff from achieving their sales targets. The process was slow and we were frequently missing sales opportunities."

GDV turned to Lake Corporation Pty, an Australian owned supplier of value added multimedia solutions for contact center providers. At the core of its XCalibur Connect solution is the Softdial Plugin® dialer application. Designed by the UK based Sytel Limited, Softdial Plugin is developed using a highly sophisticated simulator known as the Virtual Event Machine® (VEM). Capable of running in excess of 10 million calls per second, Softdial Plugin is aimed at software houses, switch vendors and system integrators who have a specific requirement for a predictive dialer that offers outstanding performance under compliance.

As Michael McKinlay, managing director at Sytel Limited comments; “Lake Corporation are a strategic partner and our work with them has opened up many opportunities in the Australian contact center market."

Before implementing the Lake System, GDV’s telemarketing was principally based on a semi-manual dialing system that was developed in-house. Its ability to operate efficiently was constrained by the frequent no answers, answering machines and wrong numbers, together with other problems associated with network conditions.

With the new Lake system now installed, GDV are able to make a lot more completed calls, whilst retaining the same number of staff. For GDV, the XCalibur Connect functionality not only meets, but exceeds both international and Australian compliance codes, regulations and legislation for contact centre practice including integration with do-not-dial databases and the virtual elimination of over-dialing.

As Mr Hinrichsen concludes; “We are confident that the new system will deliver a real and absolute increase in merchandise sales and that agents will now be able to meet their sales targets sooner, for which they are offered attractive incentives."

Based in the UK, Sytel Limited provides contact center solutions to organizations in over 30 countries. In the outbound world, its predictive dialer, Softdial Plugin, is recognized as being the leading dialer for delivering effective performance under compliance. Sytel has campaigned in all major markets for responsible rules for predictive dialers and acts as advisors on dialer regulations to many national marketing and government bodies around the world.

Designed by Sytel Limited, the Softdial Plugin® dialer is installed in call centers around the world. Developed using a highly sophisticated simulator known as the Virtual Event Machine® (VEM) and capable of running in excess of 10 million calls per second, Softdial Plugin® is aimed at software houses, switch vendors and systems integrators, who have a requirement for a predictive dialer that offers outstanding performance under compliant rules.

Sytel were invited to join Infinity Contact Centre Software Limited, the IT development arm of the Teleperformance Group and a developer of the Infinity suite of software, a leading contact centre management application used in some of the most demanding, outsourced environments in the world. Core to the development of the Infinity application for outbound use is the Sytel Softdial Plugin® predictive dialer.

As Michael McKinlay, managing director at Sytel explains; “We are the ‘secret agent’ in many call centre solutions around the world. The Teleperformance Group was the first customer to use our dialer some ten years ago and we are delighted that their continuing success with it has led to their IT arm, Infinity Contact Centre Software Limited, actively selling it across the Teleperformance Group."

As Nick Ray, director at Infinity Contact Centre Software Limited in the UK added; “We have worked exclusively with call centres for the over 10 years, providing solutions to meet their business needs. The combination of our Infinity solution, combined with Sytel’s dialer is, in our view, an unbeatable offering for outbound call centres."

As Lucio Appolonj, CEO at Teleperformance Italy, a leading user of the combined product, explains; “An outsourced environment is one of the most demanding for contact centre and CRM software. Not only do we need to set up and run many projects, we also need to be able to analyse results and return on investment in real-time. Infinity has become the lynchpin of our operation and in combination with Sytel’s dialer, has delivered well beyond our expectations."

Based in the UK, Sytel Limited provides call center solutions to organizations in over 30 countries. In the outbound world, its predictive dialer, Softdial Plugin, is recognized as being the leading dialer for delivering effective performance under compliance. Sytel has campaigned in all major markets for responsible rules for predictive dialers and acts as adviser on dialer regulations to many national marketing and government bodies around the world.

Provider is one example of Brazil’s thriving contact center industry. Based in Recife, in the state of Pernambuco, north west Brazil, Provider employs over 950 agents and is one of the region's largest contact centers, primarily servicing the collections industry. Under increasing demand from its clients to meet stringent productivity targets, Provider turned to Teclan, one of Brazil's leading vendors of contact center solutions, to help them implement a cost effective, scalable system that would boost productivity without compromising performance.

Founded in 1991, Teclan develops CTI solutions for the contact center market. At the core of its solution is the Softdial Plugin® dialer application. Designed by UK based Sytel Limited, Softdial Plugin is developed using a highly sophisticated simulator known as the Virtual Event Machine® (VEM). Capable of running in excess of 10 million calls per second, Softdial Plugin is aimed at software houses, switch vendors and systems integrators who have a specific requirement for a predictive dialer that offers outstanding performance under compliant rules.

Commenting, Provider’s CEO Jose Aloysio Martins Accioly said; “The Brazilian contact center market is beginning to adopt globally recognized industry standards and our clients are stipulating that we migrate to predictive dialing as the best practice for ensuring that we utilize our agent groups to the best of their ability."

As Michael McKinlay, managing director at Sytel explains;" Brazil is a new market for us and we are delighted to have the opportunity to work with Teclan and their clients. As more and more centers realise the performance benefits of compliant dialing, so Softdial Plugin is becoming the de-facto hub in a growing number of contact solutions around the world."

Based in the UK, Sytel Limited provides call center solutions to organizations in over 30 countries. In the outbound world, its predictive dialer, Softdial Plugin, is recognized as being the leading dialer for delivering effective performance under compliance. Sytel has campaigned in all major markets for responsible rules for predictive dialers and acts as adviser on dialer regulations to many national marketing and government bodies around the world.

Key to Quantrax’s choice of Sytel, was their view that the collections industry in the US will not escape the increasing demand for sensible dialing rules for all users of automated dialing systems. Commenting, Ranjan Dharmaraja, CEO of Quantrax noted; “Unlike other dialer vendors, Sytel understand what it takes to produce an excellent dialer to cope with compliance – and uniquely in the industry, have a track record over many years of doing just that. Their continued leadership role around the world in shaping compliance regulations sends our customers all the right signals."

As Michael McKinlay, managing director of Sytel Limited comments; “And this relationship is not just based around our dialer. Quantrax have become a leading development partner of ours, taking advantage of all our call center features to turn their Intelec product into the best full service offering for collections available in the US today."

“Collections is not just about handling outbound calls, but being able to respond to inbound calls in a flexible way, and not leaving people who have rung up to make a payment, in a hold queue, listening to music or a message. Excellent customer service means excellent systems architecture that allows Quantrax to fine-tune the functions they offer to their customers. This is attainable only in an integrated dialer environment as offered by Sytel," he said.

Ranjan Dharmaraja commented “In terms of predictive capability, we know we have simply the best. We have had many tributes from our customers and this one is typical…"

“It is amazing to work through a predictive campaign without seeing 300-400 abandoned calls. We were astounded! Abandoned calls are down to just a trickle and performance if anything is even better than we are used to."
(Sharon F Amann, President, Armor Systems Corporation)

Based in the UK, Sytel Limited provides call center solutions to organizations in over 30 countries. In the outbound world, its predictive dialer, Softdial Plugin®, is recognized as being the leading dialer for delivering effective performance under compliance. Sytel has campaigned in all major markets for responsible rules for predictive dialers and acts as an adviser to many national marketing and government bodies around the world on dialer regulations.