Overview
If you haven’t heard of RPO, you would do well to speak with PeopleScout.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing is sweeping through businesses across the world as organisations realise that talent is a scarce resource that needs to be recruited and managed with specialist skills outside the usual in-house capabilities.
PeopleScout are true RPO experts with solutions and technology to cover all requirements. The past year has seen them win a stream of awards and accolades on a monthly basis, bearing testament to the exacting standards set by their operational and customer experience teams. In an environment where analysis and presentation of credentials are under constant scrutiny, PeopleScout’s services have to meet the highest standards.
In particular, these standards are tested in the contact centre where the performance of the customer service agent at the customer experience interface can make or break reputation and brand values.
Challenge
With this in mind, Richard Cook, Head of IT for PeopleScout in the UK, decided the time was right to assess the quality of existing communications systems across the organisation, located at three sites across London and Bristol and serving some 300 employees.
Existing communications infrastructure comprised three Avaya ACM systems, running from on-site PBX hardware over ISDN lines from each of the three offices. The two London-based systems delivered simple telephony features whilst the Bristol-based system provided a limited range of contact centre capabilities – simple routing, announcements, basic reports etc.
After ten years’ service, all three systems were showing their age. For the contact centre, an absence of modern-day features plus an antiquated management system, based on a command-line interface, made life difficult for both the agent and the administrator. All systems occupied valuable office space and provision of an air-conditioned environment knocked up a significant energy bill.
All in all, it took little analysis to deduce that the cost and benefits of acquiring a new, fully-featured, hosted telephony system was, financially, a far more favourable option compared to the annual six-figure sum incurred by existing maintenance costs.
Results
Over more recent years, though, businesses have come to realise that the waiting is over. The benefits of hosted telephony to customer experience, business productivity and mobile working are creating tangible competitive advantage. Furthermore, the shut-down of PSTN in progress across Europe poses a looming deadline that cannot be ignored.
Forward-thinking businesses, like PeopleScout and other service-driven organisations, are making the move and reaping the rewards of hosted communications.
