The Brief

Since deregulation of the utility industry began in the late eighties, our client has been competing with an increasing number of electricity suppliers. However, deregulation has also provided an opportunity for the company to provide gas to its customers. In such a dynamic market, customer acquisition and retention becomes vital. Unfortunately, this utility company was finding it difficult to source the required number of experienced agents to service its telemarketing needs. So, it came to RESPONSE.

The Solution

This initial requirement was soon met by RESPONSE and such was the success of the first campaign that the utility company began to outsource more and more of its campaigns to us. Today, RESPONSE handles a wide variety of campaigns for this client, with more than 150 agents working for our client at any given time.

Our solution encompasses:

RETENTION MARKETING

• handling multiple tactical inbound marketing campaigns for core brands and affinity partners
• inbound/outbound assurance calls
• mandate processing

ACQUISITION MARKETING

• multi-campaign strategy: winback; up-sell; acquisition and affinity cross-sell
• overflow capacity for client's head office sales team
• working with client marketing team to test new routes to market, including e-commerce and affinity partnerships

GENERAL CALL CENTRE

• tactical call handling, often at very short notice
• virtual call centre creation, often at very short notice

The Results

The quality, flexibility and robustness of our approach has given our utility client an invaluable resource for its customer marketing and customer relationship management. Our partnership makes a significant contribution to the success of this client in the marketplace - This company now supplies gas and electricity to more than 2.5million homes in the UK.

Our client now applies a number of elements of RESPONSE's best practice model to its in-house operations and, indeed, uses them as a template for its relationships with other outsourcers. At RESPONSE, we now handle up to 10,000 calls every week and have helped this company to add an extra 40,000 in a 12 month period.