CALLCARE

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I manage the support team for a software company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CALLCARE, and what were your goals??

Callcare were hired to take out-of-hours calls from clients and, based on priority, either email the details for triage during office hours or wake up our support team.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Selected by my predecessor, but main criteria were being UK based and having reasonable pricing structure.

Describe the project in detail and walk through their service package, including any calling tools used.

The project was to provide out of hours telephone answering, following a simple script to decide whether to route the incoming query / issue to our 24/7 engineers or to email it in for triage during office hours. The initial call flow was designed in collaboration with CallCare, and was simple - the onboarding process was pretty good. We were routing calls into and out of CallCare via Twilio,

Who did you work with and what was the feedback process like?

Their implementation team were good throughout the onboarding process. Changes were implemented in under a week. Post-implementation support was really patchy. Emails went unanswered, calls unreturned. A simple change to our scripts took 3 months to implement, and was so badly communicated (silence from CallCare) that we spent the third month re-implementing the service with a different company.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the service?

Call answering service was ok. Staff were poor at pronouncing our company name, which makes me suspect the training levels aren't great. Project was abandoned due to CallCare's lack of engagement in modifying scripts. We are still being billed though - in spite of them failing to meet contractual commitments.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

All comms is via email. No apparent project management going on.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Onboarding was good.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Responding to emails, meeting commitments, generally communicating what is going on. Better training of staff - some appeared to not have seen the scripts before, and it was often painfully obvious they were reading from a script. The better companies tend to have staff who can make it sound converational.