A Digital Upgrade For A Transportation Company

Our client is a long established ferry company that provide passenger and freight services.

Over the past few years, its fleet has grown to include a variety of vessels, including conventional, passenger, freight and high speed.

It now carries millions of passengers and freight vehicles each year.

The company has two call centres.

One caters for enquiries relating to UK services.

For some years, the operator had been struggling with its outdated call centre telephony systems.

The shortcomings of the call centres were particularly pronounced during periods of travel disruption, when bad weather or other events affect crossings.

There is usually a major spike in telephone enquiries at these times, but the system relied on the right number of staff physically being in the call centres – it wasn’t possible for them to handle calls from home.

If extreme conditions prevented staff from making it to the call centres, then the company’s problems quickly escalated.

Just as bad for customer service, the telephone system could only cope with a certain number of calls.

If demand was high, many people couldn’t even get through to be placed in a call-waiting queue.

In addition to these problems, the telephone system wasn’t well integrated with the company’s wider IT systems.

This meant the operator didn’t have all of its callers’ data in one place, resulting in a poor customer experience and lost marketing and sales opportunities.

The system wasn’t integrated with email or webchat either, adding further obstacles to good customer service.

Taken together, all of these issues resulted in call centres that were inefficient, lost business unnecessarily and were expensive to run.

The client turned to Intergence to help solve its call centre issues.

We were asked to implement a solution, that had no limit on the number of calls it could handle, was integrated with other company IT systems and could cope with periods of high demand.

The work would also need to be part of a wider digital transformation strategy, which Intergence was driving on behalf of the client.

To solve these problems and many more, we recommended that the client move to a cloud-based system, called Five9.

Five9 is one of the world’s leading call-centre software packages and quick to install.

We usually get a service like this up and running for our clients in less than 10 days, so operators can quickly start taking calls.

It’s feature-rich and integrates voice, web-chat and email on the same platform.

Large numbers of users can use the system via their web browser from any location, making it easy for staff to work from home – and thus be on hand during periods of peak demand or during crises such as COVID-19.

The software also offers call recording, which is helpful to the company for training purposes and for monitoring evidence of potentially fraudulent activity.

It is also fully integrated with the traditional telephone systems used by non-call-centre staff across the rest of the organisation – so transferring calls to appropriate colleagues isn’t a problem.

The biggest source of potential, however, comes from the single view of the customer.

It is fully integrated with the company’s CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, allowing call centre agents to better understand customer enquiries, solve their issues faster and make targeted recommendations.

The move to contact service as a service has resulted in immediate benefits for our client and enabled them to work remotely and continue serving throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

The system also has the potential to open more oppor- tunities in the future.

Our client has the ability to introduce robotics and machine learning to streamline the service still further.

Because the system offers webchat and email integration, there’s huge potential for encouraging customers to shift channels – resulting in savings and fewer voice calls.

Best of all, having a single view of each customer will allow our client to better meet their needs and target services and offers according to their interests and travel history.