About GDCC
With over 170 agents, GDCC are one of the largest fully independent CATI fieldwork companies in Europe.
And they are busy. They operate around the clock 7 days a week, providing international telephonic and mixed mode fieldwork services to leading market research agencies. From a single base in Rotterdam, Netherlands, GDCC run simultaneous campaigns in many languages to many countries, specializing in the EMEA timezones. They utilize a wide range of native speakers to obtain consistently high quality results and have expertise in handling B2B campaigns with more difficult conditions, e.g. low connect rates, high proportion of bad numbers, high proportion of short duration calls.
After many years of their agents working either by dialing manually or through an old predictive system, GDCC were looking for a way to cope with the ever increasing demand from their customers without the expense of expansion or relocation. They decided it was time to upgrade, attracted by the potential increase in agent time utilization, which would mean faster completion of campaigns.
The requirements
The chosen dialing solution had to meet several criteria. The solution must:
- be able to integrate quickly and tightly to their agent desktop CATI products (Nebu, Nipo and Quancept)
- be able to run campaigns with different CATI systems simultaneously
- be able to run in preview mode when required
- provide efficient and flexible call recording and retrieval as standard
- enable easy monitoring of conversations for verification and quality assurance, either locally or remotely, plus coaching when required
- be able to deliver effective performance under GDCC’s typically difficult campaign conditions
- be able to utilize VoIP using desktop softphones
- retain commitment to quality through very low incidence of nuisance calls
- support home workers
- support low cost long distance routing
- support dedicated port utilization per country
The trial
In March 2008 GDCC chose Sytel as a best fit for these criteria, after recommendations from both Nebu and Nipo, and after an extensive survey of the market. GDCC embarked on an extensive in-depth free trial of the Sytel contact center suite onsite. Sytel sent an experienced engineer to the Netherlands to oversee the process. Additionally, Sytel provided comprehensive support, advice and remote assistance to the inhouse IT team both during initial setup and throughout the trial period, in order for GDCC to gain maximum benefit from the Sytel software.
During the trial, GDCC used the advanced configurability of Sytel software to:
- adjust telephony settings to cope with the particular conditions of individual countries and campaigns
- make TDM as well as IP calls
- assign ports to Europe and the Middle East via least cost routing
- archive call recordings to servers offsite
- run campaigns concurrently on several CATI systems.
As with all trials, obstacles arose that needed to be overcome. For instance, communication issues were quickly resolved thanks to Sytel’s close partnership with the CATI providers. And when GDCC experienced very low connect rates, Sytel advised on issues of list organization to bring connect rates up.
The result
Very soon, GDCC were conducting trial projects into Europe and the Middle East, and buying in and configuring new ISDN bundles to make best use of extra dialing capacity. Over the course of the trial, they used the feedback gained through Sytel reporting software to gain maximum predictive value.
At the conclusion of the trial, GDCC found that they were completing campaigns up to 40% faster than expected with their previous system.
GDCC Managing Director Kees-Jan Mars commented
“The Sytel dialer delivers excellent predictive performance on our market research campaigns at amazingly low levels of nuisance calls, and their support is second to none.”
Sytel’s commitment to service excellence plus GDCC’s trademark quality of service continues to be a winning combination.
