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Avaya IP Office implementation delivers efficiency and improved customer service for holiday resort group

Ocean Blue Holiday Group’s Managing Director Theo Whitmont confesses that prior to the implementation of Avaya IP Office, the business, which provides holiday accommodation to families along the eastern coast of New South Wales was “allergic” to technology. However in order to grow the business, and take the next step, it was necessary to change the way that customer interactions were being handled.

“We realised that the way the business was structured was not helping us serve our customers in the best way possible, and was also costing the business when it didn’t have to,” Mr Whitmont said. “The changes that we have made were all about centralisation and specialisation – bringing the communications together into one location to be managed more easily, and enabling us to deliver specialised, professional service to customers.”

Ocean Blue Holiday Group has three properties in New South Wales. One in Parklea, another in Umina and the Head Office in Darlington Beach, Coffs Harbour with 50 employees.

One of the main challenges faced by the business was duplication of staff across the three properties, handling the same type of interactions with customers. Due to this structure, the business had to employ staff at each location to handle individual customer inquiries. This inefficiency, combined with the approaching summer period that brings with it a spike in callers, compelled the company to make some changes.

Ocean Blue turned to Avaya and its certified reseller Advanced Telecommunication Systems for help in overcoming these challenges. ATS designed and implemented a solution that would help Ocean Blue improve business processes, reduce the duplication between the three holiday parks and improve the service it was delivering to customers.

Ocean Blue replaced its aging Panasonic PABX systems with Avaya IP Office 403 platforms at each location. Ocean Blue also implemented Avaya Compact Business Centre and Voicemail Pro and created a customer call centre at the Darlington Beach head office.

Now instead of staff at each location handling inquiries from customers, all calls are routed through the call centre. Each park advertises its own contact number, which enables the call centre agent taking the call to see where the customer is calling from and greet them accordingly.

This structure also allows callers to be placed into a queue when all agents are busy, minimising the number of callers hanging up because they can’t get through. The system also offers callers the option to leave a message and request a call back if they don’t want to wait in a queue. This reduces the time spent on hold and means less customers hang up without leaving their details.

With an average of 400 calls per day leading up to the Christmas and New Year period alone, being able to streamline the call flows to the business and improve customer service in general was an attractive option.

“Now that we have a dedicated sales team in the call centre, we are finding that we are able to spend more time with customers,” Mr Whitmont said. “By centralising the communications, we are also able to manage customer inquiries, staffing and any other issues that arise more quickly and efficiently.”

Ocean Blue has experienced a significant growth in sales since the implementation of the Avaya IP Office solution and call centre. Prior to implementation, call rates stood at about 2625 calls per week, and equated to around 600 bookings. Following the implementation, calls have stayed at around the same levels but sales have increased by 20%.

With the call centre, we are able to manage customers in a more professional way. In the past, we had the same people that were selling a loaf of bread and giving directions trying to handle customer inquiries and bookings at the same time. Now we have a team that is dedicated to helping customers book their holidays, which provides a more professional face to our customers.

“We started with three call centre agents and quickly had to increase that to four to handle the increase in calls. We have also had to extend the hours of the call centre as we are getting more inquiries than ever,” he said.

“We also invested in a data projector, which projects the call statistics onto the wall in the call centre. This provides the agents with a quick snapshot of how many calls are waiting and the time that callers have been on hold for,” he said.

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