How a system enhancement led to a 35% saving on wages
You’re probably familiar with the concept of the call answering service. A call is made. A message is taken. Message is passed on.
But of course, there are call answering services… and there are call answering services. Ones that simply take that message and pass it on – the ‘chicken shed services’ and others that work to represent their clients with dedicated scripts and questions, call quality feedback mechanisms and personalised call answering.
The kind of top end call answering offered by Face For Business. Top end call answering that doesn’t come about by accident. As you’d expect, there’s been a whole world of planning, development and careful collaboration behind its development. In Face For Business’s case planning, development and careful collaboration that started in 2011 with launch in June 2012.
Says MD, Andy MacGregor, “We put out tenders to companies as far afield as London, Cardiff, and Bournemouth and of course Kaleida in Manchester. We had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted, we sat down with the contenders and went through the brief with each.
In the end though it was a pretty straightforward decision to go with Kaleida. They had the best experience of integrating with telecoms. The price was there or thereabouts. That they were also based in the North West also helped, but certainly wasn’t a deal breaker for the others.
And we’re glad we did. Choosing Kaleida has proven to be an extremely wise decision.”
Here’s one reason why.
Automated Message Parking
Designed to handle one call at time the PA’s quickly found that they were getting bogged down organising messages from previous calls and unable to take new ones. The simple solution was to employ more staff to make sure those calls were being answered properly as messages from previous calls were dealt with.
That was until Kaleida technical account manager, Andy Holmes suggested a message parking system that allows PAs to take new calls before going back to deal with existing messages. Up to five messages flagged amber or red depending on how long they’d been waiting to be forwarded.
The result of the new message parking system? 
An enormous 35% saving on wages.
“It’s amazing,” says Andy. “A really innovative addition to our system devised and implemented by Andy and his team. Not only are we saving money already, we’ve strong growth plans so that 35% will equate to literally hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of savings in the near future.”
And it’s not just hard cash savings that Kaleida have helped deliver. There are the competitive advantages too.
Call Feedback
A feedback option for example that allows clients to listen in to calls. A feature that’s unique in the call answering market.
As well as clients going online to retrieve their messages or emails they can also go to a portal where they can listen to recordings of all their calls. This allows them to give Face For Business proper call feedback allowing them to hone scripts and call handling techniques.
Says Andy, “No-one else in the marketplace does this. Kaleida have been really smart putting this together.”
Number Recognition
And it’s the same for the customer phone book that recognises numbers and means that PAs can quickly identify callers and address them more personally.
“These innovations are definitely helping us win more business,” says Andy. “Along with our individually crafted scripts. For example, our PAs will collect email addresses or for estate agent clients we’ll ask callers what property they’re looking at. Whatever the client wants.
Always there when we’ve needed them, never afraid of a challenge and full of really creative problem solving ideas, workflow recommendations and UX input that our team work through in User Acceptance Testing (UAT). We’re very, very happy with Kaleida.
They’ve been tolerant of me too. I’m not a techie person. I’m in business, all I want to do is achieve a goal. They’ve done really well helping us succeed in that.
Which, after all… is what this is all about.”
