#How we helped CallCredit improve its customer service frontline while reducing costs by 200%.

The UK’s second biggest credit rating agency, Callcredit, has deployed a storm solution that helped it reduce its cost base by 200% versus its previous, on-premise system.

Callcredit is a leading provider of marketing and credit solutions and also offers frontline communication for major brands and public sector organisations. The company’s multi-channel contact centre deals with the full spectrum of services such as handling incoming enquiries, complaints, changes of address and problems with online registrations.

However, under Callcredit’s old system it used to take administrators a number of days to make service changes and adapt call flows to the needs of its diverse portfolio of customers.

Meanwhile, maintaining on-site Interactive Voice Response equipment added to Callcredit’s already substantial IT overheads and took up the time of its in-house IT staff, distracting them from the business’ core objectives.

The contact centre outsourcer needed the benefit of owning and controlling the intellectual property contained in its call flows and its multimedia content, without the cost and burden that comes with managing an installed base of on-premise equipment.

“storm ® ’s cloud model gives us the best of both worlds,” said Cyril Law, Information Services Delivery Director for the Callcredit Information Group. “The solution provides us with the flexibility to adapt services to the precise needs of any customer organisation, quickly and efficiently.”

Changes to Callcredit’s customer service frontline can now be implemented in a matter of minutes. New call flows can be designed quickly and easily, using the intuitive graphical user interface of storm FLOW ™. Callcredit enjoys the versatility of a hybrid managed and self-managed service. With storm . the company benefits from the freedom and efficiency of being able to provision its own call flows but, during busy times, administrators can email a diagram of the desired call flow to Content Guru’s support team, which implements the service within a 24-hour turnaround time.

“storm s cloud model has helped us eliminate maintenance that we used to pay for our on-site equipment, not to mention all the resources we devoted to supporting them, which can now be deployed on more strategic tasks,” Cyril Law noted.

“And as well as the capital investment we made when buying the IVR system in the first place, we were locked into a cycle of upgrades that also required further capital investments. When all these direct and indirect savings are taken into account, our cost base has dropped 200%.”

Central to the cost benefits of the solution was the IT synergy that storm created with Callcredit’s existing contact centre infrastructure. No equipment needed to be upgraded or replaced when storm was deployed. In addition, storm services are delivered from a platform distributed across two secure data centres, with multiple points of fail-over and redundancy built into every software and hardware layer. This fully resilient architecture ensures that the customer frontline for all of Callcredit’s clients is always secure and eliminates the need for the company to build this level of resilience themselves, within their own network.

Meanwhile, real-time reports on all enquiries are displayed on the storm dashboard so that Callcredit has the business insight it needs to immediately respond to changing patterns of contacts, optimising call flows so that customers always get to the desired information in the shortest possible time. In a contact centre setting, ease of access is a vital ingredient of customer satisfaction. The ability to provision changes over a secure web portal to a remote IVR system designed for 99.999% guaranteed uptime, gives Callcredit real-time control over its business-critical communications, ensuring that it can deliver quickly and cost-effectively for its customers.

To learn more about the CallCredit solution, please read our case study .