Benchmarking for a national airline
Virgin Blue
With the unexpected collapse of the Australian airline Ansett in September 2001, Virgin Blue airlines approached Stellar with an urgent requirement for supporting call center facility to meet rapidly increasing call volumes.
The Challenge
Virgin Blue required an outsource partner who could support peak call management, as well as provide the flexibility to grow the size of the reservations and customer care service to manage business growth.
The key challenges in the development of the service included the need to meet very short establishment timeframes, and to replicate the company’s culture and customer service style.
The Solution
Stellar sourced a site in close proximity to the client’s Brisbane headquarter.
The service required an aggressive 3-week start-up to locate, fit-out, recruit and train an entire 50-seat call center from contract signing to “go live”. Stellar demonstrated their ability to proactively provide transition solutions within client expectations and met all timeframe requirements.
From this interim arrangement, Stellar migrated the service to the Richmond call center facility in 2002 and expanded the size of the workforce.
The introduction of competing low cost carrier Jetstar in 2004 meant that Virgin had to increase their sales focus. As Stellar supported 40% of the client’s call traffic, it was imperative that Stellar assisted in driving sales results further in a predominantly service driven culture.
To achieve this Stellar:
- Re-trained staff to understand the concepts surrounding needs-based selling, and how needs based selling is an extension of excellent customer service.
- Utilized Stellar’s incentive plan to reward and drive both quality and sales results.
- Supplemented our clients own sales process with our own unique approach of “proactively managing future expectations”.
- Introduced regular competitions supporting sales outcome that are fun to participate in, but also drive healthy competition and high individual and team performance.
- Acknowledged stronger sales focused agents and used them to mentor their peers.
After a successful five-year relation, Virgin Blue made the decision to move their reservations center offshore.
Stellar assisted by providing a flexible onshore service during the transition period.
The Result
Some highlights of Stellar’s achievements during the 5 year partnership included:
- Rapid three week start-up of a new call center site to meet urgent client requirements
- Constantly exceeded our clients sales results for both ‘conversion rate’ and ‘value per conversion’
- Consistently exceeded all service levels on a daily, weekly and monthly basis when compared against clients internal call center
- Successfully migrated the call center from Brisbane to Melbourne to increase telecommunication cost efficiencies
- Replicated clients unique corporate culture and progressive style of ‘customer service flair’
- Provided a flexible workforce capable of ramping up and down to meet the seasonal nature of the travel industry
- Consistently achieved call quality measures aligned to clients unique service approach
- Provided pure benchmarking service to identify revenue generation opportunities, cost reductions and customer satisfaction improvement initiatives
- Provided facility to pilot new processes prior to rollout across the client’s own call center
- Assisted with client’s subsequent transition to offshore call center location
