In the May 2010 General Election, the Conservative Party achieved record gains in the number of seats won. At the heart of Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ), a powerful Altitude interaction management solution was key in powering efforts to contact potential voters, record voting intentions and other strategic data that was then used to underpin campaigning activity.

According to Jonathan Hazzlewood, GenEVA Operations Manager, responsible for the Conservative’s call centre, the system was a huge success. "Not only did we make over a million calls in the run-up to the campaign and in the campaign itself, but the system performed faultlessly allowing us to continue calling electors up to 9.45pm on election night. Such was the ease of use of the system, we were easily able to get our volunteers making calls within a very short time."

Conservatives developed sophisticated campaign applications using Altitude Solution developer environment

The Altitude team and the Conservatives worked together in the run up to and during the campaign to develop a sophisticated campaign application using the Altitude Scripting Studio environment. This enabled the system to be set up to easily target specific seats, and to prompt the campaign caller for the elector’s views and intentions, depending on the target constituency and other factors. Additionally, a master management application was developed to populate the campaign application with relevant questions for electors, and to display constituency-specific information, such as the local candidate’s details.

As Jonathan Hazzlewood said: "Using the Altitude platform, we developed an application that was not only extremely flexible and intelligent, thus equipping our callers with information to use during the call, but also very easy to use. The fact that we were able to use a large number of volunteers, some with little computer experience, speaks volumes for the ease of use of the system."

Flexibility and ease-of-use enabled Call Centre to be used to maximum effect on Poll Day

Throughout the election campaign the information collected by the volunteers in the GenEVA call centre was automatically imported into the Conservative Party’s central Database, where it became part of a real-time view of voting intention patterns and emerging voter issues. This data then helped to influence the campaign strategy directly, enabling Campaign Managers to target their communications in the run-up to the election. On Poll Day, the call centre was in constant use, and the data collected was synchronised regularly with hundreds of online campaign centres around the country, to allow activists to focus their efforts in maximising the turnout of Conservative voters. Note that Altitude Software provided a flexible licensing model thus enabling the Party to rapidly alter the number of callers who could use the system at any time without needing to process orders for additional licenses.

Richard Woollaston, General Manager for Altitude Software in the UK, commented: "This was a unique experience for us. We worked with the Conservative Party to ensure that the right developments, licenses and support were in place to handle the flexibility the Party needed, both in terms of the number of users and the desktop application used by volunteer callers. This experience demonstrates very clearly how powerful Altitude Unified Desktop is in minimising training time for contact centre agents, equipping them with the right information so they can communicate their message clearly and record feedback accurately, and as a feed into corporate databases. I’d like to congratulate the Conservative Party on the success of their campaign."

The Altitude uCI contact centre suite enables advanced contact centre applications to increase business results and operational performance in areas such as blended multimedia services, outbound campaigns, self-service voice applications and advanced agent desktop applications. The Altitude Software suite allows organizations to use a powerful, highly scalable, customizable IP multimedia contact centre solution at a very competitive cost.