Call Centre Management Information System

Management Information System for a Call Centre using Microsoft Access

The marketing department of a large financial institution needed to monitor reasons for customers cancelling or not renewing their policies. They also wanted to compare retention rates between teams, and were experimenting with a wide range of incentive schemes with a view to establishing which were the most successful.

Problem

Our client had specific data capture requirements. The existing data systems, although well built, were not flexible enough to meet new and evolving demands. Their own internal IT department was tied up with larger, long-term projects, so were not able to respond to short turn-around projects with tight time restraints.

The management team wanted to find out why customers had not renewed (or were cancelling) their policies. They needed to capture specific information for analysis later. In particular they wanted to track the number of “saves” by product and by team (Inbound and Outbound). They also wanted to monitor the success rate of various incentive schemes offered.

Allocating calls to the Outbound Team was very time consuming and prone to error. Data was collected from different areas of the corporate database with duplicate data where a customer had cancelled more than one policy. In order to generate call lists for operatives, the batch of leads was manually checked for duplicates, and then split by copying the database.

Information resulting from the calls from both teams was recorded in spreadsheets. However, this format was not flexible enough to split the data in different ways. Staff had tried to build the reports they needed, but did not have the necessary data structure skills to implement their vision.

Solution

Access provided a quick cost-effective MIS solution.

Our client had a clear idea of what they wanted. As the Inbound and Outbound teams had vastly differing requirements, we developed two custom call centre management information systems to reflect the specific modes of operation for each team.

Requirements dictated by the Marketing Department were incorporated. Managers can now quickly identify trends. As different incentives are trialled for both call centre staff and customers, results are fed back to the relevant departments.

Data for the Outbound Team is now automatically extracted from the existing corporate database, and de-duplicated. The multi-user call centre system developed automatically allocates the next lead to each operative. The system developed enables standardised data exchange with offshore teams.

By automating the extraction and de-duplication processes, considerable time has been saved. With consistency now established, accuracy is maintained. Call centre operatives are now able to make one call, with full information about all policies cancelled by that customer.

With built-in custom stats collection, driven by ever changing marketing initiatives, managers now have full and meaningful results. They have immediate access to overall figures split by a combination of factors including by individual staff member, by team, by month (time of year), or by incentive scheme. Comparisons for “saves” can be made between outbound and inbound teams, or offshore and home teams. Incentive schemes can be tracked to establish the most successful.