Centaur Media

About Centaur

Centaur Media PLC is a leading UK-based business information and media group that provides marketing and information solutions to buyers and sellers within several high value professional and commercial market communities. Its principal focus is on digital solutions, supported by a strong portfolio of events. It currently operates in 10 vertical market sectors and its core strategy is to lead selected market communities with a diversified yet complementary portfolio of market-leading content-based marketing brands, events and business-critical information and workflow solutions.

The Challenge

Centaur approached Macfarlane to empower its customer services team with technology. It wanted to get away from constantly ringing phones on desktops and provide tailored first-class customer service to subscribers and non-customers alike. At the time, it had no easily accessible method of obtaining call data and outcomes.

The Solution

Macfarlane provided Centaur Media PLC with the UK’s first software-based Contact Centre System. Amongst its many advanced features was a Management Information Statistics module that transformed Centaur’s reporting and intelligence around why people were calling and what then occurred within the organisation.

Following a successful implementation and bedding in period, the Macfarlane Contact+ system became a key part of Centaur’s customer contact strategy for customer service. Over time, the number of customer service agents grew and the breadth of services offered through the centre expanded.

A very close working relationship was built between the two companies with Macfarlane using its wide-ranging industry knowledge and experience to assist Centaur in building a robust and forward-looking customer contact plan. When Centaur moved to new offices, Macfarlane was able to assist and worked out-of-hours to help achieve this.

The Value

Macfarlane’s expertise, experience and technology has enabled Centaur to concentrate on providing excellent customer service and innovative features to its readership and event attendees.

The implementation of Macfarlane’s latest multi-channel customer contact centre system, Contact+, ensures that Centaur is able manage contacts well into the foreseeable future.

London Richmond of Richmond-upon-Thames

The Client

The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames is situated in South West London, England, Its vision is for Richmond to be the best and one of the safest boroughs in London, one identified by its green character, historic buildings, high quality appearance, vibrant high streets and outstanding schools and services. A place where businesses can thrive and citizens can help change neighbourhoods for the better, including supporting the most vulnerable of residents.

Macfarlane and Richmond

Since the opening of the Richmond Council customer service centre, the Council has focused heavily on service quality improvement. It introduced a number of new customer ‘touch points’ (including a telephone contact centre and self-serve transactions on the website), invested in new Macfarlane customer contact technology (as detailed below), intensively trained its customer service personnel across all service areas, and instigated a customer service plan, ‘Putting Our Customers First’. Macfarlane, involved from the outset, have continued to work closely with the Council to ensure that this far-reaching plan is delivered.

The Journey

The Macfarlane platform delivers an extensive and robust set of services including intelligent call handling with skills-based routing, management information, interactive voice response, computer telephony integration (CTI), call recording, quality monitoring, customer satisfaction survey, and support for home working.

The Macfarlane solution integrates closely with Richmond’s front line applications such as work-force management and the Council’s existing Lagan Enterprise Case Management software to ensure that all contact centre functions work together seamlessly.

The Benefits

The use of advanced contact centre technology has made a huge difference to improving customer satisfaction, advisor performance, call quality and first call resolution according to Dawn Cooper.

“It also gives us a lot more flexibility in the way we handle calls. It’s easy and fast to add new services to the Contact+ system (such as Highway Changes, and Integrated Switchboard,– while the automated Customer Satisfaction survey module enables us to measure improvements and gain valuable feedback from customers on an on-going basis. Overall, it means we can be a lot more responsive to customers.”

Northampton Borough Council

The Client

Northampton is world famous for the natural beauty of its landscape, and its strong and historic tradition of arts and crafts. Northampton Borough Council is the largest district council in England. It has won Customer Service Excellence awards as a result of improving customer choice, enhancing service levels and cut wastage.

The Council has:
 Increased the strategic scope of its customer contact strategy to incorporate additional methods of contact
 Extended the number of services delivered through its Customer Contact Centre
 Engaged with Macfarlane to assist with the implementation of its Customer Contact strategy with the Macfarlane system at its heart

An extensive range of over 50 Council services are now provided through the Contact Centre including: Housing Repairs, Housing Customer Services, Cleansing (waste, graffiti etc.), Complaints, ‘Councillor Contact Centre’, Environmental Health, Housing Needs, Tenancy Support, Council Tax, Benefits, Rent Income and switchboard answering for general enquires. These calls are serviced by 50 agents, handling around 6250 customer calls per week.

Macfarlane and Northampton Borough Council

Since 2006 when Macfarlane supplied the contact centre system to Northampton BC, they have worked together in partnership with the Council to provide a number of other services and systems.

These include a choice-based lettings (CBL) system for housing, Disaster Recovery (DR) consulting, integration to the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, increased number of agents and further council services.

Most recently Macfarlane has been engaged in a project to upgrade Northampton BC to provide them with the capability to handle multimedia conversations via web-forms and instant messaging as well as voice.

The Journey

Throughout the relationship, Macfarlane have worked with the Council to understand their needs and translate these into solutions that add measurable value and efficiency.

In discussions on the future of the Council’s customer contact strategy, Macfarlane articulated the benefits of increased channels of contact which would enable the broadening of access to the council’s services and staff.

The Council saw the value of the proposition and based on Macfarlane’s strong partnership approach and excellent working relationship, entrusted them to translate the requirements into deliverables and outcomes.

The Benefits

Northampton Borough Council are able to provide its customers with multiple methods of contact based on their location, time of day and preferred device (phone, mobile, PC, tablet, laptop).
This broadens the scope and reach of the council, ensuring that accessibility to its services is widened and that contact with the organisation is focused, efficient, and of high quality.
Macfarlane looks forward to continuing to work with the council on further phases of its Customer Contact Strategy with the introduction of multi-channel capability with Contact+.