Making Contact With Your Customers
In the current economic climate with companies investigating all cost cutting opportunities, Pageboy Contact Centre has seen a huge increase in demand for its range of outsourced office functions including telephone reception, virtual switchboard, customer service helpdesks, sales and order lines.
Established in 1972, originally as a paging company for doctors in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway, Pageboy contact Centre’s efficient service quickly attracted many different types of businesses and since then it has provided a host of tailored options to meet clients’ needs.
Ken Colley, managing director, believes Pageboy Contact Centre; with its proven track record in the provision of tailored services has a lot to offer, particularly during the downturn.
“We were probably one of the first call/contact centres in Europe to provide a personalised, continuous, 24-hour, 365-days-a-year service. The quality of our service is evident by the number of years our clients have been using our service. Many of our clients have been with us since the 1970’s and we have a very high level of continuous and repeat business.”
Two of Pageboy Contact Centre’s most popular services at present are its outsourced telephone reception and virtual switchboard, both of which are available in a number of different formats to suit individual company needs and budgets.
“At the most basic level our staff can answer client calls using the client company’s name” said Colley. They can put callers on hold and patch them through, or take messages, all done from our own office base. Research shows 80 percent of callers won’t call back when greeted with an engaged tone and seven out of ten callers hang up when connected to an answering machine”.
As the average cost of a receptionist is €25,000 per year, plus benefits, our answering service allows companies to make a 70 percent saving on this overhead alone.
Moving up a level we can answer calls and then provide sales, orders or technical support, as required. The necessary information is accessed on-screen by our staff, allowing them to give accurate prices or advice to the caller, again the client can make savings of 70 percent or more by outsourcing this service to us”.
Over the past 12 months Pageboy Contact Centre has experienced a significant increase in the number of clients using this service due to staff cutbacks, driven by the need for greater cost control on overheads. “They knew they needed to improve bottom line costs in order to survive” said Colley. “Some of our clients have taken the option to cut back the hours worked by reception and sales staff, and in this instance use our service to supplement reception or telesales duties”.
Outsourcing has come of age in recent years, as companies have begun to appreciate the money saving opportunities it presents.
“We were recently engaged by a customer who had employed eight customer service personnel, each paid €30,000 per year,” said Colley. He had to make two redundant in order to save costs, but aware that the company was missing out on valuable sales calls, we were hired to provide an ‘overflow’ service. How this works is that if the six remaining customer service representatives are busy when a call comes through it is automatically re-directed to our staff, who, answer in the client company name and provide the necessary support. The cost benefit is clear. We charge €12,000 per year for that overflow service, so the customer is saving €48,000 per year”, he said.
With a combination of a forward thinking approach, attention to detail and great people skills, Colley is confident that Pageboy Contact Centre sets the benchmark for the highest possible standards in customer contact support in Ireland.
“We invest in our people and technology, to ensure we provide a professional and quality service. We are also able to offer an extensive array of services that can be tailored to each client’s specific requirements, now or further down the road”.
Services provided by Pageboy Contact Centre include, telephone reception, orders and sales lines, direct and media responses, appointment and event booking, reservations and customer service lines including emergency helpdesk, call overflow and product recall.
Pageboy Contact Centre has a wide variety of companies, from different sectors on its customer list, varying from international household names to small family businesses, acting as their frontline in all areas of communication.
“We give a commitment to provide a reliable, high quality service combined with a full understanding that we are representing your company in a confidential manner when dealing with your customers. Pageboy Contact Centre, a well established, 100 percent Irish owned business, can offer a 24 hour service with no set up fees, are factors that are also proving very attractive”.
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