It's everyone's local notice board.

The platform brings together C2C and B2C buyers and sellers to meet: 13.7 million visitors each month, generating 400m page views per month, over 34,000 new listings a day, 250,000 new listings a week.

The brief was to manage back office processes ensuring the safety of the site’s users and the enforcement of site policies, and to deliver a world class customer service to buyers and sellers.

solution: safety at the core

arvato established 4 customer-centric teams, consisting of 44 people:

1. The General Support Team provides customer support for C2C users. The team is responsible for delivering strong customer service in line with the Gumtree brand’s customer-centric ethos.
2. The Premium Support Team provides customer support to C2C and B2C paying users.  The team delivers inbound email and inbound and outbound phone support with high-service level and customer satisfaction expectations.
3. The Safety Team delivers a range of processes to detect and prevent suspicious activity on the site using Gumtree technology, as well as providing inbound email and outbound phone support offering advice to users to enable them to trade safety and successfully.
4. The Policy Team is responsible for reactive content screening processes, using Gumtree technology, to enforce site policies.

successes: cleaner site, more satisfied customers

Supported an increase in customer satisfaction to consistently reach more than 80%

services: complete customer service

• General support (inbound email)
• Premium support (inbound email, inbound phone, outbound phone)
• Policy management
• Site safety management
• New product rollout support
• Business customer support
• Fulfilment

It's everyone's local notice board – generating more than 250,000 new listings a week, and attracting 13.7 million visitors and 400 million page views a month.

As the business grew, Gumtree found it was spending increasingly more time chasing overdue payments. To improve its cash flow, Gumtree decided to outsource its credit control function to arvato to benefit from arvato’s finance expertise and track record in accounts receivable & debt collection services. The task was to develop a speedy and efficient process for improving cash flow and collecting outstanding balances.

solution: to dedicate an experienced team

To manage the outstanding debts, arvato created a customised dunning and collections process and appointed an experienced, highly trained team of credit controllers and collectors to the Gumtree business. Individual team members were assigned to particular customers to strengthen the relationship with customers and provide them with a consistent credit control partner, which in turn supported process efficiency and maximised cash collection rates.

Timelines for dunning and collections were agreed and a sophisticated reporting system was established to keep Gumtree up to date with accounts status, payments and collection rates.

successes

• Significant debt reduction: collected approximately 70% of outstanding debts within a short timeframe
• Major cash flow improvement: increased collection rates by more than 200% (2010 v 2009)

services: complete customer service

• Complete Accounts Receivable and Collections Service
• Credit control services
• Suspension and un-suspension
• Collection agency services
• Process reviews
• Regular credit control/collections reports