Agie Charmilles UK aims to keep customers satisfied with service upgrade

A £10,000+ investment in NEC's 'My Calls' telephony solutions has, in just a few months, delivered real business benefits and improvements that have far outweighed the original investment cost. Says Owen Pennington, customer service business manager at Agie Charmilles UK: "We employ 34 staff at our facility, and well over 60% have direct customer facing positions – applications engineers, technical help desk staff, sales and customer service personnel etc. Our client base is about 2,000-strong and from that there are approximately 750 – 800 'active' customers that are interfacing with us regularly. The investment we have made has helped us monitor, manage and improve the customer service we provide across the board." Within the customer service department is a highly visible call monitoring system – directly linked to the company's customer database – that displays service and support requests in real-time, via a central TV screen. "The new system has made us much more efficient in handling customer queries," says Mr Pennington. "We took the view that if we can't measure our response times accurately, how can we possibly hope to improve our customer service levels? "We now monitor every call that comes into the company and the system ensures that all queries are routed to the correct department." Displayed loud and clear and in red are those calls where the customer, for whatever reason, aborted the call. "These are known as abandoned calls," Mr Pennington explains. "We all know that being in a telephone queue can be frustrating, and that customers can hang-up as a consequence. But the new system logs the call and highlights it in red, enabling us to call the customer back in a matter of minutes. Considering that many businesses have no facility to track, capture or respond to missed and 'abandoned' calls – this is a major step forward." Agie Charmilles also uses its call monitoring system to identify underlying customer issues. Continues Mr Pennington: "The system flagged-up that one particular customer had called in over seven times in one month, regarding his 5-axis machine tool, which was out of warranty and which was not covered by a GF AgieCharmilles preventative maintenance contract. "After further investigation, it transpired that poor maintenance was the root cause, so we arranged a site visit and organised maintenance training for the customer. "The problem disappeared and the customer is happy – but the trend was initially identified by our monitoring system, which enabled us to respond effectively."