#contactcenterworld, @sharpentech

Indianapolis, IN, & Chicago, IL, USA, Oct 4, 2018 -- onPeak, a provider of hotel bookings for the events industry, has improved the customer experience and cut costs using Sharpen Technologies’ agent-first omni-channel cloud contact center platform.

"Sharpen’s intelligent routing and callback capabilities have helped us reduce hold times by about 75 percent," said onPeak’s senior director of operations John Hunt. "This, among other capabilities, have helped our contact center maintain an average 95 percent customer satisfaction rating, which is higher than our overall company rating of about 93 percent."

Further contributing to improved customer satisfaction is a better agent experience. "We’re all about quality of service, but we also believe our frontline agents must be happy to provide that," Hunt said. "Sharpen enabled us to quickly and cost-effectively support work-at-home agents, which has greatly improved the quality of their lives. They no longer have to fight traffic and pay commuting costs. This has left them with more time for their families, which supports our ‘family first’ policy. What’s more, agent sick time has dropped by about 65 percent."

"Sharpen has made it incredibly easy to manage all these remote agents," Hunt said. "I can literally whip out my iPhone and set a new inbound call route in one minute."

"We look at typical performance indicators, but those aren’t what drive us," Hunt said. "The beauty of Sharpen is that it gives us a single, easy-to-use system for flexibly monitoring, scoring and coaching agents. The platform’s use of analytics aggregates all this data to give us insights based on what’s uniquely important to us. And this functionality is all included. Those are typically expensive add-on features with other vendors."

"We cut ongoing costs by a third after we switched from our on-prem ShoreTel system to Sharpen," Hunt said. "It was a relief to no longer have to deal with servers, trunks and so on. Now, instead of having to pull in a bunch of IT people who understand all that infrastructure, we can maintain it ourselves."

"We were acquired and had separate contact centers when we deployed the Sharpen platform," Hunt said. "That left us having to manage three PBX systems with redundant carriers, T1 lines and a number of other telco complexities. The Sharpen platform allowed us to combine our businesses and consolidate centers. As a result, we were able to absorb all these extra costs while actually expanding. And instead of replacing IT staff that naturally attritioned out, we were able to reduce that group by more than half."

"Our deployment gave us a central system to broker what had been a bunch of siloed communications across our business units," Hunt said. "That was essential in order to maintain our quality of service following the acquisition."

"I had been warned that as Sharpen grew we wouldn’t get the same treatment," Hunt said. "Well, they’ve grown and nothing has changed. Sharpen's service and support teams are super responsive, just like they were on day one."

#contactcenterworld, @sharpentech

Posted by Veronica Silva Cusi, news correspondent
Source: https://www.businesswire.com