Singapore Press Holdings

Singapore Press Holdings Improves Interactive Marketing Services with Logicalis Contact Centre Solution.

Singapore Press Holdings Ltd

Incorporated in 1984, main board-listed Singapore Press Holdings Ltd (SPH) is Southeast Asia’s leading media organisation. In Singapore, SPH publishes 18 newspaper titles in four languages with an average readership of 2.92 million individuals daily. SPH also publishes and produces more than 100 magazine titles, and has stakes in a local broadcasting operator that delivers free-to-air channels on TV and radio. SPH’s portfolio of services also includes the outsourcing of contact centres to aid clients in marketing campaigns and promotions; which comprises call centre support for main-line, enquiry and hotline call-handling. In 2011, SPH posted an annual turnover of S$408 million, and has assets worth more than S$3.8 billion.

Challenges

Contact centres need to continually stream and process client calls in the shortest time possible, while providing accurate measurements for future improvement. An efficient IT infrastructure is essential in facilitating this high level of reporting. However, what SPH had previously was an off-site contact centre solution in a hosted environment. This made it difficult for reports, required by its clients, to be obtained in a timely manner – leading to slow response times, and the inability to adhere to Service Level Agreements (SLAs) committed to its clients.

Expanding on the problems of reporting, Mr. Willy Tan, Assistant Vice President of the Interactive Business Unit (IBU) at SPH shared, “Our clients and their businesses are constantly evolving, and we have to keep track of different contact centre metrics to help enhance business flows and identify choke points. This required a level of customisation that was just not being delivered by our previous solution provider."

Another drawback of the previous solution was its lack of scalability. As the SPH IBU needed to cater to unpredictable surges in call volumes, not being able to scale its operations accordingly was a huge disadvantage.

Solution

Logicalis provided the SPH IBU with an all-inclusive contact centre solution that leverages on Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) technology.

Displaying a great depth of knowledge, the Logicalis team took on a role more akin to that of a consultant than a vendor, offering suggestions that proved instrumental in overcoming the challenges faced by the SPH IBU. In just three weeks, SPH IBU was able to enjoy a seamless transition from its previous off-site solution to an on-premise one.

Benefits

After the successful implementation in November 2011, the SPH IBU was able to obtain greater transparency into its call centre operations, and better understand contact centre trends based on statistics such as average call handling times, agent occupancy, call volume per hour, and abandon rates. These metrics are now used for better case handling and staff training, allowing for improved resource management and productivity.

The clients of SPH IBU are also enjoying an improvement in service delivery timing. With the new on-premise solution, SPH now has full control over its own communications servers and call transaction data, allowing its team to seamlessly extract reports and recordings swiftly – some in real-time – for significant improvement to client response times.

The SPH IBU can also deliver customised reports to its clients – something that was impossible to do before. Mr. Tan said, “The capability to create customisable reports and the relative ease in retrieving these reports for our clients have been a huge benefit for our business.”

Besides supplying the technology solution, Logicalis also provided the solution on a fully-managed service business model – delivering an IT infrastructure that allowed SPH to seamlessly scale its pool of 40 contact centre agents.

Key Success Factors

Logicalis prides its success on its strong commitment to meeting client needs. Mr. Tan espoused the constructive working relationship between both companies – relating it to being “like the close rapport one feels between team members rather than a simple vendor-client relationship.”

Pleased with the quality of service, Mr. Tan commented, “In the previous solution, all our reports and files were stored on an off-site hosted server that was also shared by the service provider’s other customers, making it difficult for us to extract the data. Logicalis took the initiative and acted as our liaison to the previous solution provider for a smooth transition – and that was very much appreciated.”

Praising Logicalis’ project management capabilities, Mr. Tan said, “The team’s dedication to perfection in the delivery of its services was a big plus. They set up the recording system – something that our clients urgently needed, in double-quick time. They were also able to implement the complete solution quickly with minimal disruption, even though it was difficult to extract and export all our data from a hosted database to an on-premise one.”

He also added, “I recall an instance during implementation where workstations needed to be set up just days before going live. It was very heartening to see the team of engineers working round-the-clock to ensure that these workstations would be ready to receive live calls on the go-live day without any disruptions."

Terrific after-sales support was another praise Mr. Tan gave to the Logicalis team. He stated, “I believe that the constant communications Logicalis has provided to us has given us a very positive experience. They have helped us in troubleshooting technical problems, and with our customised reporting, even after project implementation.”

Moving forward, Mr. Tan said that SPH is looking to grow the business with possible incorporation of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools and email technologies into the contact centre solution. “We will definitely strongly consider Logicalis as an on-going partner for these added requirements.”