About EMRS
EMRS, based in Tasmania, offers the full range of research methods, hosted in-house, yielding reliable high-quality data. The services offered are available to clients throughout Australia and beyond with telephone reach extending internationally and online surveys being conducted throughout the world.
The requirements
EMRS wanted to improve the automation of their contact centre and integrate the dialler activity to the CATI system. Agents were receiving a screen-pop showing the number that had been successfully dialled by the predictive dialler but were manually having to extract the associated customer information from the CATI system. This was a disjointed process for the agent and not a good experience for respondents who might be greeted by a flustered agent who didn’t know the respondent’s location until their details were manually located.
The solution
EMRS changed not only their existing dialler but also transferred to Confirmit as their new CATI system. Using Sytel’s predictive dialler is the best way to get maximum benefit from any sample, it generates excellent performance whilst generating a very low number of silent calls (i.e. abandoned calls). Keeping abandoned calls to a minimum is paramount as respondents are highly unlikely to answer a call from a number that delivered an abandoned call to them previously. The integration between Sytel and Confirmit’s CATI system provides a joined-up experience; the agent only sees the Confirmit applications while the Sytel dialler works seamlessly in the background.
Sytel was able to offer EMRS a cloud solution using Amazon Web Services (AWS), which avoided the need for any hardware to be purchased or installed. This not only made life much easier for EMRS, but the time required to become operational was very short.
Thomas Sturm, Operations Manager at EMRS commented
“I was impressed with how little interaction was required between EMRS and Sytel. The majority of communications were very straight forward and carried out by email, which was ideal because of the time difference between EMRS in Tasmania and Sytel in the UK.”
Telephony communication to the agent is provided using WebRTC, which encrypts all transmissions and provides a fully secure service. WebRTC is ideal for EMRS as the WebRTC softphone negates the need for any desk phones, the agent simply uses a headset.
The results
Sturm added
“EMRS has been able to use agents based in the UK to participate in projects run in Australia. The distance between them is not an issue at all, the voice quality is good and latency is low. When I have gone back and listened to the calls there is minimal delay in questions asked and the answers being given.”
Michael McKinlay, CEO of Sytel added
“We are thrilled that EMRS took our Cloud solution. It has enabled us to show the ease with which it can be deployed, regardless of the customer’s location. Furthermore, the flexible license plans that we offer suit EMRS perfectly as they frequently use the burst license feature to accommodate busy periods that exceed their regular call volumes.”
