TSS is one of several call centres used by eircom, the principal provider of fixed-line telecommunications services in Ireland. It has 110 seats and 140 agents, with capacity to handle 1.8 million customer contacts per annum (or 9,000 per hour). In 2005, management of the call centre was outsourced to Capita.

TSS provides the telephone support for eircom’s marketing campaigns. Agents make outgoing sales calls to existing and lapsed eircom customers and receive incoming calls in response to radio and direct mail lead generation campaigns. Currently, about 55% of calls are outbound and 45% inbound.

With campaigns to increase the take-up of broadband and related products, such as remote storage and PC security products, and to win back lapsed customers or migrate existing customers to more suitable tariffs, TSS is a high performance sales environment.

As a result, it is often the first to experience new call centre technologies. Since 2000, eircom has introduced a new CRM system (eCOM) which integrates disparate systems into a single front end for much shorter call times; a predictive dialler that has increased the number of customer contacts per agent, per day from 30 to 60; call recording for performance monitoring; and sophisticated reporting tools.

In February 2007, following its success at the ContactCentreWorld awards, TSS became the first eircom call centre to go wireless when, overnight, agents’ corded headsets were replaced with SupraPlus wireless models from Plantronics.

Annette Hickey, head of TSS, said that the contact centre was an obvious choice for wireless working because agents are young, highly motivated and being sales people do not have to stick so closely to PC-based scripts.

“This is a sales environment, so agents have more of a conversation with customers,” she said. “The agents that are best at communicating with customers are typically extrovert and to ask them to sit down for six and a half hours a day would not suit their personality.”

Universal praise

In a vox pop conducted by Business Info, TSS agents were universal in their praise of wireless working. They found that being able to move around while making a telephone call helped them be more assertive and articulate arguments better; made it possible to confer with colleagues and resolve queries during a call; enabled them to walk to quieter areas of the office when necessary; and improved motivation, for example by enabling agents to mark up sales on a board as soon as they are made. Some of those questioned even said that they felt less tired at the end of the day.

These comments are borne out by TSS performance reports. In the 12-month period that covered the introduction of the wireless headsets, employee satisfaction rose to 85%, sick leave declined to 5%, agent churn fell by 50% and productivity was higher than in any other Capita contact centre in the UK or Republic of Ireland.

Wireless headsets may not have been responsible for all these improvements - they were only introduced half-way through the reporting period - but Annette has no doubt that they have played a major part in motivating call centre employees. “Agents are more animated. It’s as though they are speaking to the customer themselves face-to-face,” she said.

Robust and reliable

For Capita, the cordless headsets also have benefits. Because there is no cord to get tangled up or pulled if an agent walks away while wearing the headset, they have proved more reliable than TSS’s old headsets. Audio quality is good, there is no need to buy and replace batteries and there are fewer wires, creating a cleaner, tidier working environment.

The only criticism of the headsets made by agents is that they are not always put back in the chargers properly so that you could come in the morning and find that your headset had not recharged fully.

Generally, though, the nine-hour battery life is more than adequate and proved very useful on October 26, RTE Telecom’s Telethon Day, when between 09.00 and 01.45, the Eircom TSS call centre took 11,000 calls helping to raise money for good causes in Ireland.

Having introduced wireless headsets so successfully to TSS it cannot be long before eircom extends the practice to its other call centres. Where TSS leads, others soon follow.