Countdown to ECCCSA Awards

Ventrica has opportunity to clinch two of the industry’s oscars

It’s less than a week until the European Contact Centre & Customer Service Awards (ECCCSA) 2016 take place on the 21st November at the Hilton Park Lane Hotel in London, hosted by TV personality Fiona Bruce! We are absolutely thrilled to be up for two awards this year after winning Silver last year for ‘Best Outsourcing Partnership’ for our work with on-line estate agency PurpleBricks.com. This year we are nominated for the coveted ‘Best Medium Contact Centre of the Year’ award and ‘Best Outsourcing Award’ for the second year running.

The tension is mounting here as everyone looks forward to the prospect of winning at ECCCSA next Monday night! In the meantime, here’s a reminder of why Ventrica is up for the awards.

Firstly, the ‘Best Outsourcing Partnership’ nomination is in recognition of Ventrica’s work with housebuilder Barratts. Here’s just a flavour of the benefits that Barratt has seen from outsourcing its customer service. The results of the partnership have included enhanced customer loyalty, the generation of 700 appointments every week, a 4.8/5 customer satisfaction score and a 10% conversion rate of enquiries leading to house viewings.

Ventrica has gone beyond its SLAs (service level agreements) and KPIs (key performance indicators) to provide ideas and innovation that have changed the whole way that the housebuilder does business with new processes and strategy, resulting in more cost-effective and customer-centric contact.

One stand out example of a recommendation that was made to improve business performance has been in the area of managing web enquiries. Through segmentation and prioritisation of requests, Barratt’s was able to reduce its monthly overheads by 42% and at the same time increase the number of appointments and footfall to developments by 10%.

Although voice calls represent a large part of customer contact, Ventrica is also communicating with Barratt’s customers via other mediums such as web chat. Barratt’s Ed McCoy, Head of Sales says, “We’ve been impressed with how Ventrica has managed web chat to engage with our on-line visitors which in turn has helped improve conversions and the number of appointments. We also appreciate that we can reduce our costs too, as Ventrica’s advisors are able to manage multiple live chat conversations at once – something that’s not possible on the phone.” The introduction of webchat has also had a positive outcome, with customer satisfaction surveys reporting the popularity of the new channel, its ability to provide differentiation against competitors that are not using this channel and also a reduction in web abandonment rates.

Barratt’s Ed McCoy concludes on the effects of the company outsourcing its customer service “It helps us to support our philosophy of putting customers at the heart of everything we do.”

Secondly, Ventrica is also in the running for ‘Best Medium Contact Centre of the Year’. Since 2010 Ventrica has achieved significant year on year growth and in the last 12 months the business has grown by 70% and acquired several new clients including some well-known high street brands. Supported by a 92% client retention rate, a healthy pipeline and the expansion of the site, the next 12 months are geared towards significant further growth.

Our award winning 330 seat capacity state of the art contact centre business specialises in all aspects of customer communication and substantial investment has created an amazing staff working environment and a technical infrastructure of the very highest order. Our company has been built by a team of professionals with over 100 years of experience in the outsourced Contact Centre sector who have, over the years, provided customer management services for some of the world’s best known “blue chip” companies.

Our value proposition focuses on providing the technical infrastructure, process expertise and middle management experience you would expect from the UK’s largest contact centre outsourcers, but with a more personalised and service driven approach. Ultimately there are fewer good ‘medium sized’ contact centre outsourcers left in the industry due to them being acquired by larger organisations and Ventrica has very much been built to service this gap.

Aside from English our multilingual team covers the following languages – French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch and Danish. In 2017 we’re adding Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese speakers to our team!

Led by Managing Director and founder Dino Forte, our management team are experienced, dynamic, people focused, and have built an outstanding reputation for delivering innovative contact centre support solutions for both private and public sector organisations. We are absolutely determined to deliver an outstanding service on behalf of our clients and their customers. We work closely with every client to understand their brand values and ethos and then ensure this is embedded in the services we provide on their behalf.

But it is our people that are at the heart of business and the drivers of success. Employee engagement and the willingness of our clients to truly partner with us in the drive for continuous improvement ensures that we are able to deliver and overachieve on the desired metrics in sales, service and customer satisfaction.

Ventrica is also leading the way in the shift to service via social media and has invested in the appropriate technology and developing of skill sets to provide customer service, insight and output via these channels. The experience gained in the more traditional service and sales channels is being applied into this arena and allowing that knowledge and understanding of how best to engage with customers to be provided in context of the overall customer journey and the multiple points of dialogue possible in today’s digital world. Today brands are being defined by what customers tell each other it is, as opposed to what they tell the customer, so it’s vital that this area is seen as a service driver. See our Digital Website for more information www.ventricadigital.co.uk.

We are keeping our fingers crossed for the awards ceremony. Wish us luck!