Travel Agency

Based in Middlesex, UK, this client is a travel agency, providing online flight, hotel and insurance booking for customers across the UK.  The company also offers promotion travel packages through regular advertisements in major newspaper and magazines. Many customers call the company’s hotline to seek travel advice, purchase flight tickets, or book hotel rooms. The company has enjoyed a rapid growth since its inception.

The company needed a call centre solution to support their call centres in the UK and India

In 2008, as part of its expansion plans, the company sought to establish a call centre in Delhi- India, to handle its booming travel enquiries and booking needs. The company had planned to recruit up to 25 travel consultants in India to answer calls and provide booking services over the internet telephony.

The main challenge the company faced was in effective communications between the two locations.

• How can they route incoming calls to their Indian branch at affordable calling rates without compromising their service quality?
• How can managers in the UK monitor and supervise the service quality provided by their consultants in both the UK and India?
• Will their business processes and communication between the staff be negatively affected by having their sales operations split across two different continents?

The company’s manager understood that the choice of a suitable phone system will be key in whether their expansion plan can succeed. To ensure the success of their call centre operations, the company desired a system which can address these issues and provide advanced features that could expedite productivity and streamline communications across both sites. The company invited several telecom vendors to provide their quotes, including vendors of major brands. However, none of them has impressed as much as the VoiceSmart Phone System, with both its competitive pricing and its broad spectrum of innovative features, many of which precisely address their requirements. The system’s flexibility allowing users to make calls out through both the PSTN and the internet (VoIP) and the unique ability to integrate multiple VoiceSmart PBX systems across the world has proven it to be an ideal solution for their expansion plans.

Two VoiceSmart Phone Systems have been installed in, and fully integrated between, sites in Delhi and London

The competitive price of the VoiceSmart Phone System also makes it affordable to install two separate systems for the company, one in the Delhi, India office, and the other in their Head Office in London, UK.  No VPN is needed.  Both sites can have their separate phone systems that can work independently if needed to be. Phones on both sites are also fully connected as if they were part of a single system, despite being located continents apart. Since then, two VoiceSmart business phone systems have been installed for the company, one in the Delhi office and the other in the London office, and have been seamlessly connected together.

How has the company benefited from VoiceSmart

VoiceSmart PBX Phone System allows the company to:

• Make free calls between their UK and India offices: calls between the UK and India are through the internet telephony using VoiceSmart’s proprietary protocol and are completely free of charge.
• Route calls flexibly from UK to India and vice versa: sales enquires to the hotline first reach the business phone system in the UK office from the PSTN network and then are re-routed automatically to the India office via the Internet. Travel consultants in India can also call their customers in the UK whilst only incurring local UK call charges. In this case, the system automatically routes the call via the Internet to the Head Office in the UK and then re-routes the call via the PSTN network.  Hence only UK local tariffs apply to those calls
• Transfer/pick up calls from London or Delhi and vice versa. The VoiceSmart PBX systems at both sites are fully integrated. Calls at one site can be transferred or picked up by users at the other site.
• Provide visibility of their consultants’ calling status: VoiceSmart’s business phone system provides visible status of every single user (busy, available, offline, diverted).  Staff or managers at each branch can see easily who is available or online, improving communication efficiency.
• Permit managers on either site to listen in to consultants’ dialogues with customers for training or monitoring purposes: VoiceSmart’s call barging feature allows authorised managers to listen to their staff’s calls.
• Route incoming calls automatically to different sales groups in the UK or in India based on pre-set rules: depending on time and types of promotional advertisements, the company sometimes wishes to change routing rules as to which group of travel consultants should first receive calls. VoiceSmart’s group features allow very flexible and easily changeable routing rules.
• Utilise different telephone providers and media to add flexibility: the company can choose to route outbound calls via either the Internet (through a variety of Internet telephony providers) or the local PSTN line depending on the needs at the time, such as call cost to various numbers (e.g. mobiles). In addition, the company took advantage of the ability of Internet telephony providers to provide and route geographic phone numbers in an alternative location, for example, a London number answered directly on the Indian system. This means that even if the India site is operated independently of London, it would still retain a London number for incoming calls for the benefit of UK callers.
• Benefit from resiliency and fault-tolerance of external networks: since the system can make and receive calls using both the internet and the local PSTN, the company benefits from an unparalleled level of resilience if any problems occur with the telephone provider or the medium itself (PSTN network or internet connection). If either provider or medium goes down, both inbound and outbound calls can be routed through another provider or medium automatically. As well as this, the system is also able to take advantage of an additional ADSL internet connection that is already present at each site if the main internet connection develops a fault.
• Handle call queues and playing greetings or music when consultants are busy: when all travel consultants are busy, calls can be answered automatically with a customisable welcome announcement and placed in a queue. Calls will be automatically transferred to the next available consultant.
• Record calls automatically or on demand: for training and monitoring purposes, the company chooses to record all sales calls dating back for months. Authorised managers can easily access call records for reviewing purposes. The capacity of recorded calls can easily be increased by additional hard drive space.

The VoiceSmart System does not only address the company’s initial challenges when setting their call centre in India, but offer many additional features which have improved productivity and communication.