CallMap case study
the issues
The Company used Microsoft Outlook to book appointments – this provided little scope for preventing double-booking of appointments,
and relied heavily on the agents to provide efficient routes for mobile representatives. Also, to ensure territorial bookings, calls had to be
segmented to match agents with territories, which involved extra management and reduced efficiency.
With the responsibility to ensure
that the mobile representative’s route was efficient (or even feasible), the time required for the training of new agents was also becoming
an issue.
Lack of centralised control made performance reporting difficult to achieve. It was also important to ensure that
prospects had understood and agreed to the representative’s call, to avoid wasting time and money. Cancelled and rescheduled
appointments were handled on an ad-hoc basis, and often the pertinent information did not reach the mobile representatives properly.
the solution
The CallMap CRM Suite was chosen as it provides a centrally managed system, automatically providing Agent Performance and Call Quality statistics. The ease of use of the CallMap Desktop and the advanced Scripting engine also reduced training requirements for new agents to a minimum. With data being stored centrally, automatically managed and secured with the CallMap Workflow engine, administration and IT support requirements were dramatically reduced.
The CallMap ‘Appointment Maker’ provided several advantages:
- Each mobile representative was allocated a ‘shared’ calendar within the system. When a prospect was called to arrange an appointment, CallMap automatically selected the correct representative’s Calendar based on the postal code/territory match for the person being called.
- As an appointment was entered, changed or removed, any other agent currently working on that representative’s calendar would see the changes made dynamically – completely removing the chance of double-booked appointments.
- The simple Script used to make the call also ensured that appointment details agreed were read back to the prospect.
‘Spot Recording’ was used (this allowed for only the segment of the call where the prospect agreed to the appointment date and time to be
recorded) … this provided backup of the validity of the appointment in case of complaint, as well as a valuable resource to be used for
Training purposes.
Geographic Mapping of the prospect’s sales territory was also provided via CallMap’s in-built interface to
Microsoft Mappoint. With existing appointments placed onto the territory map, route planning for mobile representatives was simplified,
and efficiency improved.
In order to inform mobile representatives of any new, amended or deleted appointments occurring that day,
it was decided to use SMS Messaging. This was easily achieved using the CallMap Script engine … when a call was completed, CallMap would know
whether it was a new, amended or deleted appointment – and also whether it was necessary to send out an SMS alert to the representative
(reconciliation of appointment schedules are normally carried out by CallMap automatically via nightly e-mail ‘drops’).
In these circumstances, a non-intrusive SMS Message would be automatically transmitted to the representative by the CallMap script –
without any action being required by the agent.
With automation, and the removal of the requirement to pre-segment calling
lists on a per-representative basis, call volumes and efficiency increased. High visibility Performance Reporting combined with
individual Targets also improved agent efficiency.