Case Study: How Flogas Improved Contact Centre Efficiency

This case study investigates how Flogas boosted contact centre efficiency by improving its technology.

Flogas specializes in liquified petroleum gas (LPG) and electricity supply to B2B and B2C customers in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It also has an energy business supplying natural gas and electricity to residential and commercial users.

The company primarily interacts with its customers over the phone. Its telephony solution was mission critical when it came to communicating with its customers.

Its legacy telephony system was developing issues with reliability and also lacked business continuity and disaster-recovery capabilities. The need for change was made more urgent by the pandemic.

Making the Right Choice – Why the Enghouse Interactive Communications Centre on Teams Was the Way Forward

Flogas decided to seek out a resilient and robust contact centre solution to tackle these challenges and ensure it was delivering a reliable telephony service to its customers at all times.

To address this it decided to implement the Microsoft Teams UC platform running in the background, with the Enghouse Interactive Communications Centre (CC) operating on top of it for all contact centre users and the Enghouse Quality Management System (QMS) in support.

The decision-making process was logical and intuitive. It was key that any chosen solution was affordable, easy-to-use and integrated fully with the Microsoft Technology Stack.

Flogas also wanted a single back-end solution for both unified communications (UC) and the contact centre.

This combination of UC and contact centre solutions also had to be cloud-compatible to allow agents to be mobile and work on different devices, from a corporate laptop to a tablet or a smartphone – which would bring Flogas benefits at all times but especially during a pandemic where providing remote access to frontline staff is increasingly a must.

Also, it needed to integrate easily with customer service systems, particularly with customer records, to identify customers as calls come into the contact centre.

Added to this, Flogas wants to introduce higher levels of automation to its customer communications over time. It is looking at developing automated payments and an automated ordering process to validate orders in advance of the agent connecting, based on caller ID or security questions.

Flogas was also looking for the new system to deliver enhanced insight into the performance of its contact centre. It currently has 130 agents but little real awareness of agent performance or handle on business metrics like first contact or first call resolution.

The combination of Microsoft Teams, CC and QMS fitted the bill. Flogas took the decision to implement the solution and, with Enghouse Interactive’s help, got it up and running in matter of weeks, helping ensure business continuity and enabling it to mobilize its contact centre workforce to keep customer service operating at optimum levels during this difficult time.

It has been using QMS mainly for call recording so far but there is potential to grow its usage over time.

In addition, Flogas recently added three operator console licences for its reception team to the set-up of CC.

Resilience and Continuity in Crisis Conditions

Flogas found the new CC solution easy and intuitive to use and was able to get up and running with it quickly. But to ensure supervisors and agents were using it to its full potential, Enghouse Interactive delivered complementary training, tailored to job role.

Supervisors and administrators undertook a different training course to agents or receptionists, for example. Enghouse showed flexibility in making active use of video calls to continue to deliver training remotely during the pandemic.

With CC now installed, Flogas has a single contact centre solution for the whole of Ireland. It has a more resilient and robust solution in place. Agents are working remotely with no impact on their efficiency or productivity, and business continuity is ensured.

Agents can work in a more agile manner because calls can be quickly and easily passed between them. There is more visibility about which agents are available at any one time and how many calls are being held in a queue, for example.

The reporting capability of the system has been another significant benefit for Flogas, who now has visibility over the volume of calls it deals with every day.

“Using QMS, our supervisors can also access reporting on the performance of agents, enabling them to monitor the quality of service delivered to customers,” said Brian Gahan, head of IT, Flogas.

“The solution enables supervisors to listen to interactions and provide feedback but it also allows them to identify areas for agents to concentrate on and improve on, which helps with training, but it also helps them to identify and celebrate examples of great customer service.”

With regard to IT, the team also now has simple straightforward information on telephony which can be shared with senior management to provide enhanced insight into how the centre is operating.

CC has also allowed administrators to set up call queues without requiring the wider IT team to get involved. This is especially useful at times of high call volumes or sudden activity spikes.

Changes can be made quickly without the IT team becoming a bottleneck.

Finally, the ability to use operator consoles has proved to be a further key benefit for Flogas. When a call comes in to an operator it allows them to transfer the call to the best agent and provides presence information. i.e. who is available who isn’t.

Directed to the person with the right skillset, it helps provide a faster call handling time, reduced call abandonment and a lower overall cost of service.

Positive Prospects – Driving Efficiencies Across the Customer Journey

“The new contact centre solution from Enghouse gives us the ability to improve turnaround times for customer queries and interactions and reduce the cost of our customer engagement more generally,” added Gahan.

Looking to the future, Flogas plans to evaluate and, where necessary, reconfigure the customer journey through the contact centre in a bid to provide a more seamless customer experience.

Another potential opportunity is for Flogas to put in place more industry norms or best-in-class practices around telephony.

The focus will be on increasing levels of human intervention in the process and making sure that self-service options are used where possible, and certainly for routine processes like meter readings and paying balances.

“Moving forwards,” added Gahan, “we believe the new solution will also give us the opportunity to open up other channels of communication over and above telephony, such as email, social media channels and webchat, and expand the scope of our whole approach to customer engagement.”

“We are looking forward to working with Enghouse to ramp up our contact centre capability further over time.”

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Author: Enghouse Interactive