Contact centres are starting to spring up in quite different places.
Last week Jonty visited the Balfour Beatty Workplace contact centre in Salford Quays to see how they deal with facilities management queries.
Balfour Beatty Workplace, the support services business within the Balfour Beatty group, opened their National Operations Centre in 2010. This centre is novel within the facilities management industry, the objective being to provide a centralised contact hub rather than disparate customer service desks for supporting their clients, 24/7 around the UK .
The Operations contact centre deals with a wide range of estate management challenges from dealing with blocked toilets, to landscape garden or catering. They have a diverse range of clients from the BBC and Arqiva to through to government-based contracts including schools and hospitals. The challenge is providing support for many contracts with differing SLAs and procedures.
They have around 100 people working in the National Operations Centre – about 20 people in front-line service desks with the remainder in planning and dispatch. They currently handle about 3,000 calls per week.
The call profile broadly follows the normal patterns but there are some significant differences from other contact centres:
- There is a significant peak early in the day (as people get into work and discover things that they don’t expect).
- There is a much lower tolerance of queuing. If a call is not answered within 30 seconds then there is a very high probability that the caller will hang up.
- They are starting to see an increasing number of people using email to report problems.
The centre has been operational for around a year and is fitted out with a modern colour scheme – a lot of orange with some purple on the walls. The centre has a light and airy feel and the staff are obviously enthusiastic and proud, made apparent in the low staff turnover of less than 5%.
Something that I had not seen before (maybe I never really looked) was the vending machine that dispensed frozen ready meals. The microwave oven next to it had a built in scanner that could read the bar code and set the correct cooking time. The choice of meals seemed rather limited (Tuna Pasta Bake, Beef Lasagna, Potato Wedges, etc.) but it’s still nice to see the opportunity for agents to have the ability to sit and have some hot food in the middle of the day.
This facility was set up so that decent meals could be provided in the evening when individuals where unable to obtain food from any other source. They have a daily lunch offering that allows individuals to buy sandwiches and fruit amongst other items.
In terms of technology, Balfour Beatty Workplace is using one of a new generation of technology applications that have come on the market. The application, called iContact, is developed by mpl systems. This is a spin-off from the technology developed by their parent company, the outsourcer Message Pad.
This was the first time that I had seen a working version of iContact, although it has been in the market for a little while. The system has been installed in a number of customers including Babcock Int and Truphone.
iContact combines a combination of classic automatic call distribution technology, call recording and a simple CRM application (although mpl systems prefer to call this business process management) which aggregates data from various applications and databases across departments into a simple GUI for the call centre agent desktop. The application also contains workflow software and Balfour Beatty Workplace were using this to integrate to their asset management software, IBM Maximo.
Calls arrive on the system through standard Acculab ISDN 30 cards. A combination of CLI and DDI is used to identify the caller. The call type and the customer details (including case history) are screen popped onto the agent’s screen. The audio interface is through a usb port that connects into a very chunky Sennheiser headset (it’s unusual to see Sennheiser headsets these days). There is also an SIP telephony interface into the Cisco PBX system.
The big advantage of the system seems to be a combination of low cost as well as the ability to interface into other systems.
“The iContact system has a good name in the market,” said James Jannion, Operations Director at Balfour Beatty Workplace. “It is flexible and provides a bespoke system suited to our needs,” he continued.
Author: Jonty Pearce
Published On: 2nd Mar 2011 - Last modified: 12th Dec 2018
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Thanks Jonty – nice to see a piece which gets under the skin, captures the dynamics of the centre (rather than just technology) and talks about some of the people issues – will investigate the vending options
Balfour beatty is the best company ever.I hereby appreciate the help of all my managers and the present managements in millions.Many thanks