Real estate | Call Center Case Studies

Company: Oxford Properties Group

Profile

Oxford Properties operates an extensive building maintenance organization that services over 25 million square feet of premium office space across Canada.

Challenge

Good tenant relations is a key to success in the real estate business. The extent of Oxford's real estate holdings required its maintenance staff to respond to building maintenance requests quickly and efficiently. A recent tenant satisfaction survey indicated there was room for improvement in the following areas: ease of contact, response times, and satisfaction with problem resolutions.

Solution

To provide the best possible service experience for their tenants, Oxford's management team identified three primary objectives:

§  Eliminate confusion by consolidating three regional centers into a single, multichannel center

§  Adopt a service level commitment for the contact center to answer 90% of calls within 10 seconds.

§  Establish a target of having a service person on site within 30 minutes 95% of the time.

To realize these goals—and to ensure that their building maintenance group was a positive asset that would strengthen tenant loyalty—Oxford selected Bell Canada's call center project management resources to assist its internal team in designing an innovative program, called 310-MAXX, to manage the 30-minute service mandate on orders coming into its building maintenance organization.

With the 310-MAXX program, Oxford tenants simply make a service request call to 310-MAXX from anywhere in Canada or log on to Oxford's building maintenance Website. To turn their vision into reality, Oxford Properties also partnered with Bell Contact Centre Solutions to assist in the start-up and management of the contact center.

The first phase focused on preparing the new, centralized, multichannel facility to handle the increased traffic. This included adding or upgrading the following elements:

§  Megalink Access Services

§  PBX

§  310 service

§  In-house cabling

§  A Symposium server and Symposium set installation

It also involved providing extensive professional services to help with the hiring of CSRs and supervisors, initial CSR training, metrics to measure and manage advances in the center, change management to involve contact center staff in implementing "best practices." This major corporate effort was supported by having all of the key ingredients in place, including top-down sponsorship from the president and CEO, a dedicated team of over 45 people who implemented the changes, the involvement of every telephone agent, and training to close any gaps in knowledge and skills.

Benefits

The modified call center and enhanced communication resources were up and running in seven weeks and provided the following benefits:

§  Customers can now submit service requests directly, 24 hours a day, via phone or Web and can track the status of their service request online or by calling 310-MAXX.

§  Once the job is complete, customers receive confirmation via e-mail.

§  Tenants and Oxford Properties alike can use the Web-enabled tracking system to monitor request patterns and predict future maintenance needs.

§  92% of customer calls are answered in 10 seconds, on a daily basis.

§  Productivity has increased by 106%.

§  Quality has increased by 100%.

§  Purdue University's Call Center Benchmarking Study ranked Oxford's improved system #4 in its industry group.

§  A national disaster contingency plan was implemented.