We’ve won the bronze award for the ‘Outsourced Contact Centre of the Year’ at the coveted 2021 European Contact Centre & Customer Service Awards (ECCCSAs).
This follows a year of high performance, including accelerating a two-year transformation plan into two months due to the impact of the pandemic, moving to a work from anywhere model, and continuing to improve our employee communication, engagement and wellbeing. We also ensured operational resilience for our clients, handling huge spikes in volume while simultaneously improving the quality, speed, and effectiveness of services.
Now in their 21st year of running, the ECCCSAs celebrate organisations that are delivering excellent customer service and operational efficiencies, driving innovation and can demonstrate that they value and invest in their people.
During the first UK lockdown our contact volumes quickly spiked. Despite this, we worked with our partners, Foehn and Genesys, to seamlessly migrate our employees to home working, move our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and desktop infrastructure management to the cloud, while introducing remote recruitment and training programmes. We also championed channel shift and automation opportunities to improve first-time resolution for customers and to give employees time back to work on more complex tasks. For example, reducing financial reporting processing times by up to 95%, using chatbots to handle 34% of general queries for an automotive client and being able to issue new HR starter packs in one minute compared to ten previously.
This builds on the overall success of our contact centre, which has seen us handle nearly 4.4million contacts over the last 12 months, remain above target for customer satisfaction (CSAT) and resolve 84% of customer queries at first point of contact. For one automotive client we’ve also delivered over 5000 customer retention leads and achieved 100% rate for finance deals being validated and paid on the same working day.
We’ve also successfully implemented 120 customer change controls, virtually trained and onboarded 175 employees in four weeks, made nearly £35billion in supplier payments for central government, provided over 107,000 hours of internal training, and in our recent survey 94% of our employees who took part agreed that Arvato is a pleasant place to work and 97% agreed our workplace culture is accepting of diversity.
John Wybrant, Chief Operating Officer, Arvato CRM Solutions said: “It’s very rewarding to have been announced as a winner for these prestigious awards and to be recognised for the excellent work we’re delivering for our clients across the private and public sectors, especially in this challenging and unprecedented year. It demonstrates the hard work and dedication of all of our teams to deliver strong results, innovation and outstanding customer service for our clients and their customers, through combining technology, experience and people.”
Helen Wilson, Chair of the ECCCSA Judges and Global Chief Experience Officer at Ipsos commented: “My goodness have we got a competition this year. The quality of the entries is outstanding and demonstrates just how far the industry has come during a time of great change and uncertainty. Being recognised at these awards is something to be proud of.”
You can find out more about these awards here – congratulations to everyone involved!
