Background

Directline holidays is one of biggest independent online travel agents in the UK, selling holidays, flights, city breaks, cruises and skiing holidays online & over the phone.

Their Croydon based call centre handles all sales and post-sales calls generated by their websites.

The problem: Growing Pains

Consecutive years of rapid growth made it difficult for directline-holidays.co.uk to forecast their call centre growth requirements and growing missed call rates masked the number of unique callers or repeat calls and the real "demand peaks". With a product where one single sales call can literally be worth thousands of pounds, this was an issue that was clearly detrimental to the company's profitability.

The Solution

To counter this, directline-holidays.co.uk selected OrderlyQ for its reporting facility, IVR, and superior queuing facilities.

When queues build up, OrderlyQ gives each caller an estimated wait time, and encourages them to hang up and call back after that time. When they do, OrderlyQ recognises the caller and puts them straight to the front of the queue, to be answered straight away.

Matthew Flint Sales Director at directline holidays said "because our call volumes are volatile, OrderlyQ helps us on three fronts; firstly the queuing facility helps to flatten demand peaks, secondly the reporting allows us to implement the optimum number of staff and thirdly it's a far better experience for our customers whose place in the queue is "saved" throughout the day. It's difficult to overstate the value of OrderlyQ - but the call queuing alone must save us the equivalent of 20% of our staffing costs"

The successful introduction of OrderlyQ has been aided through real-time call reporting; allowing directline-holidays.co.uk to monitor data for individual callers and at the same time, calculate the number of repeat callers. The ease of understanding call data has been helped by both the quality of OrderlyQ's visual reports and the impressive levels of up time from a system which is both robust and accurate.

Ongoing Improvements

An excellent level of service is maintained through continued consultation between OrderlyQ and directline-holidays.co.uk allowing both parties to ensure that the system is tailored towards their needs and that any ongoing improvements can be made efficiently.

Matt King, Managing Director of Orderly Software (the producers of OrderlyQ) said "We're thrilled that our suite of solutions has been so effective at improving performance at directline holidays. It's great to work alongside a company that is so dedicated to customer service, and the overall caller experience. We look forwards to helping directline holidays fulfil their callers' needs in the future."

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