Industry Sector
Leisure, Charity, Waterways services
Client Objectives
To deliver a customer-centric high-quality service to the Trust’s users, customers, and stakeholders, whilst driving down ongoing costs and improving service efficiencies to enable the Trust to achieve budget.
Canal & River Trust
Canal & River Trust is a charity, and the waterways authority for large parts of the UK. It is responsible for managing and maintaining the rivers, canals, reservoirs, and docks, as well as providing blue and green spaces for people to enjoy, which benefits their wellbeing. The Trust was formerly British Waterways, a public sector body.
The Challenge
Canal & River Trust were looking for a new outsource contact centre partner to improve its customer contact activities, provide a high-quality customer-centric service, embrace, and develop additional digital contact channels and deliver efficiencies in the customer journey to drive down costs.
The Solution
During the tender process it became clear that the Trust wanted to completely overhaul their contact centre processes and empower a new outsourcer to provide a more wholistic customer services function, with the aim of achieving higher first contact resolution rates and reducing unnecessary escalations/hand-offs to the Trust’s regional teams. In response to this, OpenContact conducted a detailed discovery process and made a series of recommendations during the tender process, as well as providing consultancy services to aid the Trust to better understand their current processes, their short-comings and what data needed to be extracted from the incumbent provider for analysis and interpretation.
Following OpenContact’s successful appointment as the Trust’s new partner, OpenContact began further discovery to aid the implementation of all services and the recommendations made during the tender process. Service provision includes:
- Total inbound customer contact handling for all departments across the Trust (frontline support) via phone, email, live chat, and social media, with the following actions for these contacts:
o Processing boat licence applications and renewals, including payment processing
o Booking moorings and access to or through manned structures
o Escalating enquiries to regional and central teams, including urgent and emergency issues
o Taking donations from supporters
o Signposting for volunteers and contractors
- Design, implement and manage a complex and dynamic IVR service
- Implement and manage a ticketing system to track and respond to customer queries
- Implement and manage an SMS CSAT survey system
- Provide consultancy services, project manage and implement a new Trust-wide CRM system
- Design and deliver detailed daily, weekly, monthly, and ad hoc reports of contact volumes, analysis of contact types, and service cost analysis
The Result
OpenContact have achieved all of the Trust’s initial aspirations for the partnership, in addition to further improvements and efficiencies during the first 3 years of the partnership. Highlights include:
- Reducing the cost per customer contact by 33%
- Reduced unnecessary double-handling of emails resulting in savings of 30%
- Increased boat licence conversion rates and revenue
- Significant savings by introducing an intelligent IVR service and improved CSAT
- Consistently delivering service costs below the Trust’s forecasted budgets