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Hughes Insurance, first established in 1977, is dedicated to the Irish market. The success of the business is attributed to ‘offering local people great insurance products and competitive prices’.
The company originated as a family run business, selling car insurance through inbound and outbound calls. Hughes currently has over 200 staff in the Customer Service Centre and 11 office branches across Northern Ireland. Strategic growth has given Hughes Insurance the capability to offer a range of online insurance products and services.
Hughes’ previous incumbent telephone system, Nortel, became unable to support the demands of such a diverse and expanding business. Hughes explored the market for alternative contact centre systems. After extensive research ctalk was chosen based on its ‘features, functionality, flexibility and integration capabilities’.
Hughes Insurance work to a mission statement of the following; “To be the most professional, innovative and successful Insurance brokerage in Ireland, and to achieve this through the sale & service of competitively priced, high quality insurance products- backed by superior customer care”.
By being able to tailor to Hughes’ specific needs, ctalk have assisted Hughes Insurance in reaching elements of their mission statement. The transition to the ctalk system allowed Hughes to centralise and streamline their disparate systems into a single product. Thus enabling Hughes to review the administration costs and services and reducing operational costs. In terms of cost efficiency, Hughes has now brought in-house products and services that had previously been outsourced. This has given Hughes the ability to maintain much more control and thousands of pounds cost savings each month.
The main benefit received from ctalk contact centre system is the flexibility it can provide to its customers. Hughes were previously limited by the constraints of their phone system. They are now able to operate with the philosophy, as supported by Kieran Gilmurray, that “by eliminating outsourced products, ctalk have dramatically reduced operational costs and increased the control we have over our own system”.
The Ctalk platform has provided solutions that positively impact operations and provide month on month savings. An example of this is the automatic call backs. This was developed on the Ctalk platform in conjunction with Hughes Internal Developers. The application automatically creates call-backs to customers based on triggers. This project improved both customer retention and agent efficiency levels.
By eliminating outsourced products, ctalk have dramatically reduced operational costs and increased the control we have over our own system.
Kieran Gilmurray explains that ‘Database Lookup’ aids the Management team by providing a product and service that is ‘very powerful, very versatile and very user friendly’. The database lookups allow the agent to see if the caller is a current customer, and if so, routes the call to the correct department, displaying the policy information to the agent. For a contact centre that has in excess of 100,000 customer calls per year on average, this allows Hughes to take more calls with fewer agents whilst giving better service to their customers.
Reflecting on this, Kieran Gilmurray emphasises that the ‘ctalk Monitor is an exceptional tool which allows simple and effective agent analysis and management, particularly with the daily login reports.’ Through using ctalk’s Skills Based Routing, Hughes is able to make their call times more efficient, with a shorter call time, making savings and allowing the agents to provide ‘superior customer service’.
Ctalk Monitor is an exceptional tool which allows simple and effective agent analysis and management, particularly with the daily login reports.
Kieran Gilmurray, Head of Operations
In the short time Hughes have been using their new contact centre platform, the ctalk development tools and data visibility have produced major cost savings, increased efficiency and improved customer service.