Commitment to Ufindus Customers

At Ufindus I have been stating for some time now that we are working hard to improve our reputation and systems to ensure our customers get the administration support to go with our excellent products. It is clear to me that we have made substantial progress and continue to make further strides every day.

Ufindus grew very quickly to one of the UK's largest internet brands and I am afraid that our previous systems did not keep pace with the growth of the business. This lead to a culture where customers expected us to let them down, not call them back, not answer their questions and generally be very unhelpful, all after enduring long queue times to have the phone answered by us. I am confident now that this is not the case.

I sat with the Ufindus support senior management team today and we watched the call queues to see typical wait times and during the 90 minutes we were in this meeting there were no queues.

In addition we reviewed the Ufindus QAD workflow queues and the amount of oustanding issues were incredibly low. In total we had just 56 waiting cases in our pending queues which had not been assigned to an agent to deal with. These, which are a fraction of the typical outstanding work in the past were to be split between over 30 agents. Typically it takes on the new Ufindus support centre agents around 20 minutes to effectively deal with a case and so we have about 3 hours work in total excluding cases that agents are already dealing with.

That's pretty impressive and even more so when you consider that we log 100% of cases against our previous support centre that dealt with around 80% of calls.

Again, I hope the Ufindus customer base is feeling the difference and I know they are. We are getting plenty of feedback now that the changes we have made at Ufindus are meaning our team is much more responsive to our customers than you would find at an average support centre in this or most other industries.

100% support at Ufindus

I have been posting for ages about how good support would be with our new systems and although I am sure we have some way to go still but at Ufindus we have made a significant change during the last three weeks .

Ufindus has always previously operated on the traditional support centre model with customers calling and at busy times people getting one of those annoying queues. For us it was very difficult to balance supply and demand as all traditional call centres know. As I posted previously we have developed a brand new system for Ufindus support that completely changes how we operate and this is now mostly implemented across all our teams. The system allows extensive tracking and quality control of agents work which is of course very significant but something even more significant is the change to how we answer the phones I believe.

In the past, Ufindus would traditionally answer around 80% of calls with the remainder of callers hanging up because they preferred not to wait. Sometimes this was because of long wait times but often it was because customers expected long wait times so as soon as they heard a message they hung up. Now at Ufindus we answer over 98.5% of calls in under 25 seconds including queue time and each and every issue is logged immediately into QAD and each case is not closed until the customers says it is resolved. In the rare case that a Ufindus support agent closes a case before the customer is satisfied, the case is reopened when the customer lets us know and the agent is penalised and will have to answer to their manager!

To summarise we have gone from answering about 80% of calls before March 24th to answering over 98.5% of calls following the introduction of the new support centre and QAD. I am very proud of the team who are working hard at Ufindus to make sure we go from being a company with a reputation for unsatisfactory levels of support to a company that has excellent levels of customer support.

I know our customers are now feeling the benefit and there are yet more changes afoot. The management team at Ufindus realise that it is no good having a world class product without world class support and we aim to ensure that is what we deliver in the future. We have very high standards and have learned a lot from our customers and are putting those lessons into practice throughout the business.

Budget Planning

I am currently heavily involved in budget planning for 2007-2008 and onwards for the Ufindus part of the group.

What is really apparent is that we should be able to provide our much improved levels of support while actually cutting costs to the business. In fact the introduction of QAD has meant that we actually have gone from dealing with 85% of calls on average to 100% now. In addition all calls to our support centre are answered in seconds not minutes. That is some turn around.

QAD helps us balance our work flow and challenges our teams to be more responsible towards customers as any dissatisfaction from customers is directly reflected in the agents performance tables. This is most certainly having a direct improvement on the quality of our dealings with our customers and our levels of complaints have plummeted.

We still have a lot to do but we are sure our customers are feeling the benefit of our improvements and we are feeling the benefit of this much more focused support approach. In the past Ufindus support was provided alongside Easyspace support, two very different businesses. Now all Ufindus support is provided by Ufindus and any feedback about failings in our processes are directly reported back to the management team for a more hands on and efficient approach. This in turn will eventually lead to cost savings for the business I am sure.