Ventura celebrates double success following two award wins at the 2010 Professional Planning Forum Contact Centre Innovation Awards

It was announced this week that Ventura had won two awards at the 2010 Professional Planning Forum Contact Centre Innovation Awards.

The prestigious awards, held in Birmingham, are a show-case for organisations that are leading the way in making their contact centre operations great places to work and to contact. These awards celebrate the achievements of the industry's innovators and offer a benchmark within the industry.

Ventura were recognised for both their innovations in Outbound services and Speech Analytics.

The 2010 Contact Centre Innovation award for Outbound recognised Ventura's pioneering customer-focussed approach to planning outbound collection calls.  They increased right-party connects by 40% and conversion by 20%, using a new data warehouse and analysing demographics to create effective dialling strategies.

"Robert Clegg and his team from Ventura should be very proud of their achievements as they have shown how using existing technology in a new way can deliver remarkable achievements. Moreover, this is just one part of the story as the way this has been implemented and communicated to their staff makes this a fantastic example of how an outbound operation should be run", explains Dave Vernon, Head of Best Practice at the Professional Planning Forum.

Ventura automated reporting and created a data warehouse to generate efficiencies, which enabled a focus on analysis rather than production of data. Linking demographic information from Cameo allows Ventura to contact the right customers at the right time, using "demographic dialling". The dialler is now integrated with workforce management and real-time adherence is shown on plasma screens and managers' PCs. Through effective communication, Advisers understand the changes and see the benefits flow through to their incentive schemes.

"Demographic dialling has been fantastic," comments Alasdair Skeoch, Head of Collections at Ventura.  "It is about the customer experience. You won't get through to certain demographic groups, so it's a waste of effort," adds Robert Clegg, Forecasting and Planning Manager.

The second award win was the Contact Centre Innovation award for Quality and Performance Management for Ventura's pioneering use of speech analytics to focus performance coaching on the key areas for improvement. They reduced AHT by 25 seconds, cut silent time and reduced repeat calls by 10% in 4 months for one client. 

"Call Centre coaching has followed the same pattern for many years.  Speech analytics offers a chance to radically change this to focus on the customers' experience in much more detail.  There are very few people making this happen and every contact centre can learn a lot from the way Ventura have applied this pioneering technology and the results that they have achieved," explained Paul Smedley, Executive Director of the Professional Planning Forum.

 "The beauty of implementing a voice analytics platform is that it gives you a completely objective view on the call," commented Andy McKenzie, Head of IT at Ventura. "It makes a real difference to coaching as a team leader. You can go straight to the part of the call that needs work and coach around that area," added David Pearson, Team Leader and Quality Manager, Ventura.