About PCM
PCM is one of the largest direct marketing and communications companies in Poland, specializing in outsourced customer acquisition and retention for high-profile clients throughout the EU, such as DHL Express, Hewlett-Packard, Orange and Reader’s Digest.
Poland, according to recent surveys, is the fastest growing contact center market in Europe, resulting in part from growing international awareness of Poland as an outsourcing destination.
In 2007-08, PCM approached 12 companies, including Sytel, with the aim of sourcing integrated desktop and telephony services to modernize and upgrade their operation in Warsaw. They had become aware that manual dialing was no longer viable in today’s climate, and that a richer feature set would enable them to far better serve their clients, make better use of their agents’ time and streamline the entire operation.
The requirements
PCM presented Sytel with an extensive list of requirements, including predictive dialing, IVR, agent scripting, reporting and call recording. The Sytel system had to provide:
- Call blending
As a multi service contact center, PCM needed to be able to pull agents off predictive or progressive outbound campaigns in response to inbound spikes. - Inbound IVR
To make best use of their agents’ time, full function IVR was required to acquire account details, perform database lookup and provide screen pops for the agent - Agent scripting
Agent scripting, as well as providing tools for building and delivering web-based scripts, had to provide:- support for HTML email, SMS, instant messaging and chat
- support for custom dictionaries to provide language- and campaign-specific support for their agents
- support for legacy scripts written in Visual Basic
- instant script update capability on the fly
- support for verification of sensitive data, such as personal ID and bank account details
- a facility for making notes during a call
- a facility for calling a number back before taking another call
- Reporting
Extensive reporting should be web-based, enabling home-working supervisors to monitor agent activity and perform coaching across all PCM sites out of business hours. It should provide both real-time information for agents and supervisors, and historical reports for billing and performance monitoring. In the busy PCM environment, the reporting system should be able to service many simultaneous client requests. At any time, PCM needed to be able to track all interactions with a particular consumer. - Call recording
All calls needed to be recorded, with an easy search mechanism for later retrieval - A Polish interface
In order to provide ease of use for their staff, all screen interfaces had to be in Polish - Scalability
Should be able to quickly and seamlessly handle increases in numbers of agents in response to demand - Resilience
To minimize downtime and lost revenue, the system had to be able to recover within minutes from any network, hardware or software problem. - Ease of integration
A number of legacy integrations had to be performed, including with Microsoft Active Directory and PCM’s existing Avaya PBX.
The trial
Sytel was one of only a handful of systems selected for further consideration. In order to demonstrate the Sytel system’s flexibility and its ability to provide the exhaustive feature set required (and more besides), Sytel delivered an entire system including hardware and software to the PCM site. PCM had full access to Sytel technical support throughout the trial period.
PCM then launched an extensive program of substantial testing, proving and familiarisation.
The result
After considerable deliberation and comparison, PCM selected Sytel to supply telephony and desktop applications for 400 outbound seats. Several factors proved to be decisive:
- Exceptional outbound performance
During the first weeks of operation, campaigns were being completed up to 50% faster than expected. - Exceptional support
Sytel’s level of email and phone support at all times gave PCM the confidence and peace of mind to move forward - Exceptional flexibility
Sytel’s ability to meet stringent and diverse criteria made it a close fit and an obvious choice - Competitive pricing
Sytel provided a winning combination of full feature functionality and competitive pricing
Managing Director of PCM, Jan Załęcki commented
“We are delighted with the performance of our new system. It makes far better use of our agents’ time, increasing our effectiveness by 33% on average. And the fast time to project completion, enabled by Sytel’s outstanding support, means we can offer an extensive feature set with unparalleled performance much sooner than we could have expected.”
