The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

"Business Systems ultimately provide the whole package; a best IT product, strong customer references whilst being responsive and easy to work with." George Stones, Telecoms Customer Services Manager, CE Electric.

CE Electric UK delivers electricity to over 3.8 million properties across the North East of England, Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire. Regulated by Ofgem, CE Electric promises customers that it will put safety first, respect them, their time and their property, all whilst doing the best job they can.

Reinforcing their commitment to service and ensuring regulatory requirements are met, they have invested in a call recording and quality monitoring system from Business Systems which has been rolled out across their Call Centres, Customer Services Centre and Control Centres located in Penshaw, Leeds and Middlesbrough.

CE Electric Control Centres provide mission critical services via their engineers who have the precarious task of energising and de-energising anything up to 132,000 Volts in the electricity distribution system. Field engineers rely on the Control Centre when dealing with faults and conducting ongoing maintenance by agreeing via telephone whether the work required is safe to perform and follows correct protocol. It is imperative these calls are recorded in the event of any safety issues arising so that the Health & Safety Executive can replay recordings to pinpoint where any fault may reside.

In comparison the Call Centre’s primary purpose is responding to the public when they lose electricity and providing progress reports on problem resolution. The ability to maintain service levels here is key, particularly if the situation is exacerbated by a major incident on the network. For example if 30,000 properties lose electricity supply, CE Electric could escalate from receiving around 300 calls per day to receiving around 10,000 calls within the space of 15 minutes. It is here that a robust recording and telephony solution is instrumental in being able to maintain service levels.

It was obvious to Business Systems that CE Electric required a reliable and flexible call recording solution which would enable them to meet their varying objectives across the different departments. This meant providing a system which would assist with dispute resolution, achieve compliance in the eyes of the industry regulator and identify areas for improvement in service delivery to maintain best practice standards.

Following an intensive tender process and the evaluation of numerous systems Verint Audiolog was selected. It was considered a best of breed solution which could be relied upon to provide a single view across the business with the ability to monitor all sites from one point. A CTI link ensured recordings could be searched and retrieved based on agent or operator name and an intuitive front end web system makes search and retrieval easier, saving time and giving operators the ability to drill down into individual calls.

From a quality evaluation perspective, the product is also delivering. Agents are regularly reviewed and critiqued in areas such as ‘willingness to help’ and ‘politeness’ to measure the effectiveness of customer handling.

Since the implementation of the system following each agent evaluation, the call centre team has typically seen an increase of between 15 - 20% on agent scores.

According to Kevin Parkin, Call Centre Training Manager at CE Electric ‘This is the best system I have used; it’s simple to use and menu driven with intuitive drop down boxes. It has really enhanced the training process enabling agents to view the evaluation form in bite-sized chunks so when they are being critiqued they can see that by making very small refinements in certain areas they not only improve customer experience, they increase departmental performance whilst achieving higher scores.’

Ofgem regularly carries out a quality assessment on a sample of CE Electric customers which they are subsequently graded on. Since recording and evaluating the content of calls, CE Electric have made enhancements to the way information is relayed to the public resulting in a marked improvement in overall performance. A key component of this has been that the system is used in a way which facilitates constructive and transparent feedback and coaching.

George Stones, Telecoms Customer Service Manager, CE Electric concludes ‘Business Systems ultimately provide the whole package; a best IT product, strong customer references whilst being responsive and easy to work with.’

About CE Electric:
CE Electric UK delivers electricity to over 3.8 million properties across the North East of England, Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire.

About Business Systems UK Ltd:
Business Systems is the U.K.’s largest independent provider of market leading call, screen and VoIP recording solutions. The company offers unbiased advice on the ‘best fit’ solution from industry leading manufacturers accompanied by fully project managed implementation, consultancy and maintenance services. Professional services include assistance in implementing quality monitoring and advanced analytics programmes or enhancing existing ones whilst setting up measurable objectives to ensure a speedy return on investment.