The challenge was serious one for Shawn Venne. Two of his senior building managers were facing a growing wave of calls from their tenants. And, with the New Chelsea Society about to expand from 10 to 17 properties (and 750 units to 1,000 units) this June, those calls were only going to increase the workload and stressload on his managers.
At the end of the day, if they didn’t find a way to deal with the call load from their tenants, it was going to affect the bottom line of the New Chelsea Society – in unhappy tenants, overworked managers and inefficiency.
“Our portfolio managers were getting frustrated by the fact that they were getting calls all the time,” says Venne, assistant general manager, Business Development and HR. “They were having to answer calls at all hours of the day and night.
“And as we expanded, the call volume was increasing to the point where they weren’t going to be able to do their work properly. Every half-hour they would be getting a call and it would sidetrack them from the job they were doing.”
Necessity being the mother of intervention, Venne sourced a Vancouver call centre that was able to make an immediate impact by stemming the tide of calls to his managers. But more than that, TigerTel Communications Inc. (www.tigertel.com) became a business-solutions partner for the New Chelsea Society by providing a comprehensive strategy for handling its challenges, building morale and increasing tenant satisfaction.
“What I liked about TigerTel was the way in which they approached our problem,” says Venne. “They were prompt and professional and designed a custom solution for us.
“They set up a single number for all the calls to go to. Then, someone at TigerTel answers those calls as if they are a member of the New Chelsea team.”
The New Chelsea Society is a non-profit society and registered charity with 37 employees that creates and manages affordable housing for seniors and families. Together with TigerTel, they designed a comprehensive process by which it can evaluate and assess the nature of each call. As it turns out, 80 percent of the calls can be handled by the TigerTel staff, freeing the New Chelsea managers to focus on their jobs. Emergency calls, as defined by New Chelsea, are escalated to a higher level and are forwarded to the appropriate manager.
“TigerTel will also e-mail us every call that comes in, which is an added benefit that we didn’t even realize we would be getting,” Venne says. “This way, we have a record of every call, where before, when each manager was taking individual calls on his cell phone, we didn’t have those records.”
Venne is also impressed with the value. “I was very pleasantly surprised by the low cost. I thought it would cost thousands of dollars, but that wasn’t the case at all. We tested out TigerTel on three properties and the total cost was less than $300 a month.”
He estimates that, by using TigerTel’s services, New Chelsea will save more than $12,000 this year in efficiency and time saved for its managers.
According to TigerTel’s Mary Anne Straw, what makes the package so efficient for New Chelsea is TigerTel’s pricing model, which charges their clients per minute of agent time.
“We bill our clients based on their usage requirements,” says Straw, vice-president for Western Canada. “Pricing packages reflect the client’s needs. Beyond minimal requirements, we bill our clients based on usage required.
“We’re also a 24/7/365 operation. If Shawn wanted to provide this service in-house, he would have to hire at least six people to be on the phones full-time to cover the 24/7 requirement. We are in a shared environment – with more than 550 clients. We can get a number of calls past midnight several times a week from New Chelsea tenants, and it’s efficient for us and for them.”
TigerTel’s unique business model allows it to handle customers from sole proprietors all the way up to national and international companies in industries such as computer hardware and software, online pharmacies, travel agencies, and home improvement products.
When one thinks of a call centre, immediately an image of a cubicle farm in India or the Philippines comes to mind. But for TigerTel, local sells.
TigerTel has positioned itself as a boutique call centre with 50 employees in its Vancouver office to give great local customer service. At the same time, TigerTel can draw on a team of 500 additional employees in 11 other centres across Canada for larger campaigns and accounts.
It’s that attention to customer service that has New Chelsea expanding its use of TigerTel to the rest of its properties this month. One of the big advocates is Tom Peat, the West Side portfolio manager for New Chelsea.
“We’ve been using TigerTel for three months now and I think it’s fantastic,” Peat says. “We had a lot of issues that TigerTel has helped us address.
“I was concerned that we needed to be covered in the event of a real emergency. On a stat holiday all our site staff are off. My question was, ‘Who responds?’ I felt that it was time for the society to look at ways to address emergency calls after hours. TigerTel helps us answer that question.
“Using TigerTel will also save us money by being more sensitive to the needs of site staff, as they won’t have to take as much downtime from stress or overwork. We have had managers who have had to take time off because of stress of the job.
“As managers, it felt that we never got away from our jobs. You just can’t be at your job 24-7 – it’s just not healthy.
“And it’s better for customer service – for our tenants. We’re able to respond more quickly to calls because they are e-mailed to us in an organized fashion and we can prioritize more easily. Everyone wins.”
Not only was the TigerTel service reducing the number of calls getting through to the managers, it was eliminating a lot of conversations that often extended to 10 or 15 minutes of chitchat, which over the course of a month or year added up to a lot of dollars.
“It allows our response time to real emergencies to be much quicker,” Peat says. “There are no dropped calls now, and everything is written and documented.”
What also gave Venne comfort was the track record behind TigerTel, which can trace its history back 50 years and is a leading Canadian-owned call centre organization in the country.
“A lot of the clientèle that TigerTel are working with, we were already familiar with,” Venne says. “And as we talked to other companies about call centres, people were familiar with them (TigerTel) in the industry. And after our initial experience with them, it’s clear they provide great value.”
It’s an equation that others in the marketplace have recognized, especially in the current business climate, where companies are looking closely at their communications needs, and questioning whether handling them in-house is the most efficient method.
Despite the fact that call centres tend to be impacted negatively by downturns in the economy, TigerTel’s Vancouver operation has grown during the past 12 months.
“Vancouver has had some core growth during the recession and I attribute that to a strong management team,” Straw says. “This branch did well. Vancouver took on almost 60 new clients in the last year. What we have found is that many companies are trying to cut costs. We try to help them realize how we can help them save.”
Inherent in the growth strategy of TigerTel is a constant drive for innovation. And underlying that innovation is the core principle of delivering customer value.
“We look at processes of each client to ensure we meet and exceed their needs and they get the best possible service,” Straw says.
With New Chelsea, TigerTel has opened up the conversation about how other service offerings can help it gain further efficiencies.
“We don’t do any customer service for New Chelsea yet, but there is a lot more that we can do for them,” Straw says. “For example, we might offer scheduling, or a customer service line that allows prospective tenants to enquire about a rentals, and schedule appointments to see the rental. We can also do outbound campaigns, where we might inform tenants of new policies.”
Other TigerTel services include order lines, lead capture and generation, reservations, and tier-one technical support that frees techies (often at software firms and companies that offer after-sale support of a product/service) to concentrate on higher-value work. “TigerTel is able to support any customer interaction through phone, e-mail, or web,” says Elton Chan, business development manager of TigerTel.
More sophisticated offerings include Outbound B2B and B2C contacting (surveys, customer-touch programs, lead generation, direct sales) and employee check-in programs as mandated by the Workers’ Compensation Board in BC for employees who work alone (security guards, service type companies, etc).
And, on the cutting edge of the industry, TigerTel integrates into several customer relationship management systems, can handle secure credit card transactions, and can also communicate via Email, web chat, or SMS Text Messaging.
All of TigerTel’s innovation is driven by the desire to help its customers reduce costs and provide a value added service to its clients.
The New Chelsea Society has certainly realized significant cost savings by using TigerTel’s services, but perhaps more importantly, they have improved morale and helped deliver better service to their tenants.
And that, to any business person, sounds like a pretty good deal.