The Company

Golley Slater (GS) is a 20 year old direct marketing company that is widely recognised as the leading outbound telemarketing agency in the UK. From its facilities in Cardiff, GS offers B2B direct mail, campaign fulfillment, database management, and inbound multi-channel campaign services. GS customers include Sony, Tiny Computers and Mitsubishi.

The Challenge

GS’ long history of success is based on its ability to quickly assemble high quality, high impact marketing campaigns at a reasonable cost. To stay ahead of the competition, GS constantly looks for ways to use information systems as a means to improve the accuracy, timeliness and efficiency of outsourced marketing services. Customers are the ultimate winners when GS advances its IT capabilities.

Over the years, GS has made significant investments in all aspects of IT technology, including communications systems, database management, and business automation software. Recently, GS invested in an Avaya INDeX platform, an advanced telephone system capable of managing high volumes of inbound and outbound calls. For GS, the biggest challenge was how to seamlessly integrate Avaya into the disparate array of data sources and bespoke marketing campaign projects, while automating the workflow of its fifty telemarketing agents. Lack of integration prevented GS from truly maximizing the return on its IT investments.

Integration is easier said than done, especially in a business as dynamic as GS. For each campaign, GS receives data from customers, validates the data for quality assurance, and incorporates the data into a tailored process that meets very specific strategic marketing objectives. GS IT support personnel used a variety of tools from DOS to Windows to create campaigns and integrate data sources, but the development process was slow and stretched internal IT resources to the limit. As a consequence, telemarketing agents often wasted time manually looking up and dialing telephone numbers because their campaign systems did not integrate into the Avaya PBX. It was difficult to create management and customer reports. Training was becoming a costly problem.

The Need

GS had to find a solution that could rapidly develop and deploy campaign projects, readily interface with in-house systems, customer’s databases, and the Avaya PBX, and provide a stable environment to support business growth in the short and medium term.

GS’s project team identified the following key attributes it hoped to find in its next generation development environment:

The Solution

GS identified Pierbridge as the one vendor who could deliver on every requirement, and more.

Pierbridge’s Composer provides GS with a graphical development environment than enables non-programmers to quickly create and deploy projects in a fraction of the time required by other tools. Composer’s data integration wizard makes it easy for GS IT personnel to link multiple data sources, including in-house databases, Avaya PBX, and customer data in a code free environment, saving time and valuable IT resources.

Even as Pierbridge Composer enables IT to control deployment and user administration at a server level, Pierbridge radically improves productivity at the desktop level by generating workflows that automate how agents access and process customer information, maximizing their interactions with the contacts. Agents use a browser-based user interface to screen dial and receive screen pop where caller’s are recognised, automatically log calls, and launch follow-up communications. Pierbridge Interactive Desktop includes an onboard “Live View” module that enables managers to monitor the status of all multi-channel transactions in real time. GS can now generate accurate and timely reports to optimise campaign management.

Best of all, because Pierbridge is build on Microsoft .NET standards, the system is flexible, scalable, and robust enough to grow as GS grows, adapting to evolving Internet-based technologies, a key to GS’s future strategy.

The Results

Tim Jessen, Financial Director of GS said

“We hope to see The Pierbridge Suite used to develop our inbound business in the very near future. Pierbridge Composer has unique features which has allowed us to target prospects accurately and deliver valuable service through the resident multi-channel facilities like Email, SMS and Fax. The Power Dialler has improved our agent productivity by at least 300% through increased call rates.”

Ross Yarton (IT Manager) stated that he was now able to develop campaigns faster than before and deliver them to the desktop in ways that were very familiar to the agents reducing the need for extensive retraining. He also stated that the CTI inherent in Pierbridge Contact Centre dramatically improved their return on investment for both the software and the telephony hardware.

The Future

GS prides itself on offering solutions to its customers which it knows it can handle profitably for both itself and its customers through reducing costs, increasing call flow and speeding up campaign development. With the power of Pierbridge, GS is free to market expanded and more flexible new telemarketing capabilities

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