The Woolwich selects rostrvm OutBound dialler to improve customer retention
Woking, May 2002 – The Woolwich, a leading provider of personal financial services in the UK, has installed a new rostrvm OutBound dialler to improve customer retention as part of its overall CRM strategy. The company will use the technology in its new telemarketing and sales division, based in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, promoting savings products, such as ISAs.
The Woolwich is to pilot rostrvm OutBound at the beginning of June 2002. The system will be linked to a customer database, which identifies customers with savings products that are about to reach maturity. When OutBound goes live it will automatically dial these customers and forward answered calls to advisors.
The new telemarketing and sales team will be trained to obtain policy renewals and maximise on cross-selling opportunities to encourage customers to stay with The Woolwich.
OutBound was selected to maximise the return on investment in rostrvm’s CTI product suite, which was installed in 1998. Gary Parsons, voice communications manager at The Woolwich, said: “OutBound had all the capability of standalone diallers and it was just 10% of the cost. It’s a software only product and so we didn’t have the cost of integrating new hardware into the call centre.”
Before making the decision to invest in an automatic dialler, the Woolwich carried out a trial using manual dialling. However, this only resulted in a 15-20% answer rate. Lindsay Brown, technical director of rostrvm, said: “At the Woolwich less than 2 in 10 calls were getting through to a customer, evidence that manual dialling is both time-consuming and frustrating for advisors. We assured The Woolwich that OutBound could make its agent time 400% more productive, on a predictive dialler, simply by passing only answered calls to agents.” According to Gary Parsons, The Woolwich plans to expand its call centre operation in Clacton-on-Sea through the use of rostrvm OutBound and is looking for new premises for the telemarketing and sales team. “Although we are starting off small with a team of 10 advisors promoting savings products, we will be ramping up telemarketing activity and our aim is to have a 200-strong team of sales advisors,” he said.
The Woolwich first used rostrvm CTI software when it opened the state-of-the-art call centre at Clacton-on-Sea in September 1998. Since then The Woolwich has used seven of the eight rostrvm software modules, including, AdVisor, CallManager, SuperVisor, CallDirector, ControlCentre and InterFace. OutBound is the latest rostrvm software to be installed.
The call centre also comprises a Rockwell Spectrum ACD, an Edify IVR system, an Ericsson MD110 and Verint Systems call recording. The rostrvm product provides the integration software between all of these and the CRM application from AIT. It logs everyone into the telephony system and CRM application, monitors transfer of calls, sends screen pops, authenticates in IVR and sends information to the voice recording equipment.