We are a not-for-profit (NFP) organisation who had a day-to-day requirement to manage calls through our central contact centre with the ability to host a 24/7 donation and support line should a crisis situation arise.
With over 500 volunteers, more than 10, 000 supporters and an average of 1000 donations a month, typically over the phone and on the website, we needed a communications service that wouldn’t let us down and be flexible enough to allow us to change quickly to developing situations if needed.
The central contact centre was manned by 100 people at any given time but needed to connect to over 20 other UK fundraising teams. Reliability was crucial, particularly when dealing with disaster support.
Common issues were an inconsistent broadband connection with limited bandwidth and poor call handling. In our business, a lost call is potentially a lost supporter or trouble when taking a payment either online or via the phone could loose us an important donation. We couldn’t put it off any longer
The Solution
Contact Manager by TalkTalk Business provides a virtual networked-based solution with complete flexibility to handle any situation. Eliminating the need for any additional hardware, we can now enjoy advanced contact centre functionality but at a lower price than traditional systems. We can also self-manage and route calls to volunteers at any of our offices across the UK. Even better, the solution TalkTalk Business delivered is fully scalable (ability to add new lines quickly) and robust, critical in emergency situations. It also allows us to unlock volunteers from across the UK when we need them in one seamless operation, with a range of options for non-geographic numbers to help relief efforts or direct marketing campaigns.
A big consideration for us was utilising our relatively new telephone system, purchased just 18 months earlier, which our branches across the UK also used. Because Contact Manager is purely ‘cloud-based’, it was able to interface with our systems easily and did not involve any hardware upgrades, much to our relief.
TalkTalk Business really impressed us during implementation of the new software – they carried out a rigorous test scenario, simulating two major incidents of a rail crash and an earthquake across 3 locations and testing functions such as call plans, voice messaging, call waiting and the ability to select different languages and options. As demand rose, a second line was set-up to manage call flow comfortably – an important consideration for such a reactive environment. It’s all possible because they’ve invested in what is now the UK’s most connected Next Generation Network, which can cope with millions of users, 150Gb of general IP traffic every single second and 1.5 billion minutes of VoIP traffic each month. That amount of traffic would cause other networks with their century-old technology to struggle, but TalkTalk Business even has capacity to spare.
But it’s not just about fancy technology. TalkTalk Business also delivered on their quality promises, in terms of the support we received, broadband connection consistency and voice calls clarity. There’s nothing more frustrating when making an important call than terrible quality. With TalkTalk Business, that won’t happen because of their Quality of Service (QoS) which guarantees that our business telephone calls (internal or external) are delivered in crystal clear quality. What’s more, with TalkTalk Business, your bandwidth is also assured to guarantee that your data is given priority over residential traffic.
By adopting true IP convergence with TalkTalk Business, we have also been able to deploy a number of new services quickly and easily, such as call recording and IPVPN which connects our sites and remote workers virtually to allow more collaborative working. It also empowers us to make accurate time-sensitive decisions, improve efficiency through more light-touch network management and reduce our operating costs even further, all with one supplier which makes our lives a lot easier at month end.