Brrrrr......Winter has arrived but with it comes Message Pad's newsletter, bringing you news and ideas as warming and bright as a crackling log fire. Pull up a chair and enjoy.
It's business as usual at Message Pad despite the best efforts of the British weather
On one day last week, just over 4 million people failed to make it into work, the majority because of the winter weather. And we're still only in December! Last February, 124 million working hours were lost in one week and it's estimated that the current conditions could cost the economy up to £1.2 billion per day. The snow has certainly taken its toll on many of our customers' day-to-day operations; however, we are delighted to report that the entire Message Pad network has remained unaffected so we have been able to ensure that even the most severely disrupted customers have been able to carry on with business as normal.
One of our financial services clients stayed in touch with their customers, despite the adverse weather, by virtue of Message Pad's 24/7 support. The company’s own centre was unable to operate anywhere near to full capacity as staff struggled to make it into work. But rather than leaving their customers’ calls unanswered, they made full use of Message Pad’s contact centre network, resulting in Message Pad agents handling a staggering 30 times the usual number of calls during the first week of snow.
Message Pad to provide service support for Unicom customers
Message Pad continues to strengthen its relationship with Unicom, the leading provider of fixed, mobile and internet services to the SME sector, with the provision of out of hours service support to their key account base and mobile customers. Using a combination of Message Pad’s own call handling technology, iContact, and Unicom’s customer account management system, the Message Pad service will ensure that Unicom can offer an enhanced service to their customers, a key differentiator in this competitive market.
Research confirms people prefer to talk to people!
A recent piece of research by Key Note has confirmed what Message Pad and all our loyal customers have known for years; people prefer to talk to a real live person when they call a company, or their local council or, heaven forbid, need to make a complaint. 72% of 1000 people surveyed said their first choice for contacting an organisation is by telephone and over half of all those questioned wanted to speak to a person straight away rather than fight their way through an automated system. Want to have your say on this subject? Take part in our own survey on our home page.
News from our technology division, mplSystems
Making better use of technology to drive customer sales and service operations is very much a hot topic; it's pretty much universally accepted that happy contact centre agents, who don't have to battle with unwieldy applications and a myriad of databases, means happy customers. Two very different businesses - Babcock International, the engineering support services company, and Walker Love, the Messengers-at-Arms and Sherrif Officers - have both chosen iContact technology from mplSystems to support their contact centres and ensure their agents can always provide the best possible customer service.
Babcock International are preparing for an influx of employer raised apprenticeship vacancies, and apprentice applicants, under SFA funded initiatives with a new automated vacancy management system from mplSystems. The system, underpinned by iContact, automatically match places by interest and location, simplifying the application process for both apprentices and companies with vacancies.
mplSystems has provided Walker Love with an innovative solution to help them manage the introduction of an important new payment handling line enabling calls to be streamed through their network of 12 Service Centres throughout Scotland. iContact's hosted option, Aurora, has supported Walker Love’s Revenue Collection Service, growing its Local Authority client base.
Look out for our next newsletter in early 2011. In the meantime, if you have a question about any of the items in this issue or have a new requirement you'd like to discuss, contact us now; we'd be delighted to hear from you!