AUTOMOBILE ASSOCIATION Industry: South Africa's leading motoring association Key Solution: Interactive Intelligence Predictive Dialler

“The implementation of ATIO-supported predictive dialling has increased sales call centre revenues for the Automobile Association of South Africa (AA) by 25%” Pedro Semiao

AA Divisional Manager for Corporate Accounts and SalesAfrox National Customer Service Centre

ATIO Corporation's predictive dialling sparks revenue surge for AA

The implementation of ATIO-supported predictive dialling has increased sales call centre revenues for the Automobile Association of South Africa (AA) by 25%, according to AA Divisional Manager for Corporate Accounts and Sales Pedro Semiao.

Background

The AA is one of the largest membership-based organisations in South Africa. As well as an inbound call centre for handling member queries, it has an outbound call centre dedicated to member retention and specialised campaigns. Up to May this year, agents in the centre were making approximately 10,000 calls a month, many of which were unsuccessful due to incorrect contact details or unavailability.

Business Issue

“The call centre runs on an Interactive Intelligence CIC soft switch platform for which we've provided support since April 2003,” says ATIO client services manager Cindy van Wyk.” As part of our commitment to service excellence, we work closely with our customers to ensure we really understand their business needs. At the AA this meant close involvement with the day-to-day operation of their call centre, and we noticed the frustration of the agents and the call centre manager. They were making manual outbound calls off an Excel spreadsheet at the time, which was cumbersome and expensive.

Solution

“After a series of workshops we decided to automate the process using the CIC platform's predictive dialling capacity. This means that agents don't have to pick up the phone to make outbound sales calls the system makes the calls, and then presents the agent with customer information on screen once a valid number is reached and the phone is ringing.”

The AA already owned licences for the predictive dialling technology, and the dialler module was rolled out on a pilot basis after a scoping session to establish the business requirements. The dialler campaign proof of concept was operational within a week. “This is one of the major advantages of the CIC platform,” says van Wyk: “ It is easy, quick and cost-effective to add new modules and functionality. This reduces system installation and configuration time.”

Result

Following the implementation of predictive dialling, call volumes have jumped to an average of 30,000 per month, of which 11,000 result in successful conversations with members culminating in a dramatic 25% revenue increase with no corresponding increase in costs.

“Previously our agents used to waste a lot of time dialling wrong numbers and fax numbers or waiting on hold to be put through,” explains Semiao. “The predictive dialler can recognise fax lines and invalid numbers, and only puts a call through to an agent once a phone is actually ringing. It's had a dramatic impact on our productivity and sales effectiveness.

“We weren't sure at first that the system would actually deliver what it promised in theory, so we agreed with ATIO and the call centre staff to run it as a pilot for two months,” adds Semiao.“ The results have been so dramatic there's no question we'll continue with the system. Our agents are paid on an incentive basis so the increased revenue has benefited everyone. The dialler is helping the agents to contact three times as many clients as they were before”.

The predictive dialler has also improved the accuracy of AA's member database. Previously agents worked from Excel spreadsheets which were frequently outdated. The predictive dialler is now dynamically linked to the membership database, ensuring that data is constantly updated.