Challenge
Directline Holidays is one of the largest independent online travel agents in the UK, selling, holidays, flights, city breaks, cruises, and skiing trips. These are sold online and over the phone, so they heavily rely on their call centre to handle all the sales and post-sales calls that are generated by the Directline websites.
Successful years of rapid growth made it challenging for Directline Holidays to record and forecast their call centre growth needs. This lack of forecasting meant that the company was experiencing a rising number of missed calls, which masked the number of unique callers making it difficult to know where the real ‘demand points’ were. With a business that depends on its calls being seamless due to the high-value product they sell, this was a significant issue that needed to be addressed to ensure the company's profitability.
Solution
Directline Holidays reduced both the cost per call and amount of missed calls they received by deploying OrderlyQ – with advanced reporting, IVR, and superior queuing facilities, these all contributed to improvements in their key performance indicators.
When queues build up OrderlyQ gives each caller an estimated wait time and encourages them to hang up and call back at a time of their choice. When they ring back OrderlyQ recognises each caller's number and puts them to the front of the queue, to be answered straight away.
Results
OrderlyQ helped Directline Holidays to:
- Reduced staffing costs by 20%.
- Increase their call centre efficiency.
- Monitor data for individual callers.
- Identify the number of repeat callers.
- Provide visual reports so it was easier to understand the call data.
- Deliver high levels of uptime.
We also maintained a strong level of continued consultation service with Directline Holidays which allows us to ensure that their system is always tailored towards the business and new features are made quickly and efficiently for them.
Because our call volumes are volatile, OrderlyQ helps us on three fronts; firstly the queuing facility helps flatten demand peaks, secondly the reporting allows us to implement the optimum number of staff and thirdly it's a far better experience for our customers whose place in the queue is ‘saved’ throughout the day. It's difficult to overstate the value of OrderlyQ – but the call queuing alone must save us the equivalent of 20% of our staffing costs.
Matthew Flint, Sales Director