Appreciating that its legacy PBX was approaching its end of life, the organisation began a migration to IP Telephony some 18 months ago, opting for an infrastructure based on the Cisco Call Manager. Following this project, RICS looked to improve its Contact Centre capability and service to its customers and members. They embarked on a highly successful pilot with Teleware and took the decision to implement the Teleware intelligent Contact Centre application to augment RICS’ IP infrastructure.
RICS is the leading source of land, property, construction and related environmental knowledge. The organisation supports 120,000 members worldwide, promotes best practice, represents consumers’ interests and provides impartial advice to society, businesses, governments and global organisations. As a service-led organisation, the efficiency of its call handling operations is vital to RICS’ continuing success. Their call centres typically handles 17000 calls per month, ranging from membership enquiries and renewals, to books and web sales to property help lines and find a surveyor.
Darren Smith, Project Manager at RICS explained, “We are a dynamic organisation that needs to quickly adapt to the changing needs of our members and customers. Of the solutions we considered for our call centre, the Teleware solution came out on top in terms of its functionality and flexibility. We were particularly impressed with the responsiveness of the Teleware staff who have supported us throughout the project to ensure things went as smoothly as possible, I was particularly impressed with Teleware’s ability to offer a customised solution to handle the organisation’s requirements around call classification and call waiting messaging.”
The Teleware solution allows greater flexibility in that staff can ‘log in’ to become part of their call centre team irrespective of their location. This could be useful not only to RICS’ UK operations, enabling it to have ‘virtual’ teams of call centre agents, but also to its increasing overseas business.
Heidi McDonald, RICS Head of Customer Services and Operations, noted, “Being able to trial the Teleware system before the final purchasing decision was taken by senior management was a real bonus and staff felt their opinion was valued. We conducted a survey of the 40+ staff involved in the trial and the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive.”