Outsource option ‘like cutting off a limb’
“For us, the call centre is a mission-critical part of the business and outsourcing it would be like cutting off a limb.”
He says the company’s call centre is manned by 100 phone- support staff who handle 65000 calls a month out of a total customer base of 100000.
These calls are from customers that have a support contract, and include about 2000 new customers who get 30 days’ free support if they purchase Pastel accounting software products.
“On average, at any one time 3000 new customers fall within that free support time frame.”
In addition to technical support, customer queries may include questions such as how to set up a chart of accounts, create a journal or deal with lost cheques, how to do back-ups and how to use different functionality.
He says the company recently started dividing the phone support people into teams allocated alphabetically to customers in product ranges.
“This works well because it raises the probability of a customer being serviced by the same people each time they phone, and support staff get to know the customers better.”
Support staff feed information to other business units, such as statistics of customers asking for new features, says Cohen.
“Meetings take place every week between call-centre managers and the research and development people, and more than 80% of our new software features result from this feedback.”
While dealing with customers, support staff can screen their record to see whether they have a support contract, he says.
After the 30-day free support expires, a salesman will phone a new customer to sell them an annual contract, and can display a record of how many times they have called in as an argument. The salesman can see from the customer record what type of problems they have been having and ask whether these have been overcome, says Cohen.
This functionality is provided by Pastel’s Evolution Resolve business activity management software that integrates with the Evolution accounting system or can be used on its own, he says.
“Resolve is used to manage relationships and business activities, and the information can be accessed by sales, accounting and call-centre staff,” says Cohen.
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