Call centres are busy places and nowhere more so than at the British Gas call centres in Leeds, Manchester, Southampton, Leicester, Edinburgh and Cardiff. With a corporate wide customer service continuous improvement programme in place, British Gas is relying on Connectvision digital signage to keep their staff focused on delivering customer service excellence.
The British Gas call centre in Leeds with over 1,000 people working in two shifts from 8am to 8pm, is typical of the challenging working environment that business managers and internal communications staff face when aiming to motivate and inform employees.
British Gas is using Connectvision to zone and schedule digital signage content to LCD screens positioned at the end of each call centre desk at Cardiff, Edinburgh and Leeds. Distributed to over 700 screens in the network, the Connectvision system contains a mix of 70% local and business unit messages and 30% national British Gas news.
The call centres consist of three business units: Premier Energy, Energy First and 'Pay As You Go'. Each of these units is individually reflected in the on screen content via the use of different colour ways and by the scrolling display of localised real-time telephony data that is automatically extracted from the Avaya switch.
Each desk screen presents a rolling sequence of imagery and multimedia messages featuring - in priority order - national, business unit and local news. Although British Gas' intranet is the primary internal communications channel, Connectvision is used to supplement it and provide a rapid response means of communicating - for example, a competitor price rise announcement.
"Employees like the Connectvision system,” says the Intranet Manager. “We keep messages to 20 words or less - people just don't have time to read more. Moreover it means the message font is sufficiently large so that it can be seen by employees furthest away from the screens.”
Given the number of words and screen size, the role of the Connectvision screen content is to point people to where to find more information. For instance, when an announcement about the British Gas, managing director, Phil Bentley's latest blog is displayed there is a spike in network activity as employees check out his comments.
At British Gas headquarters in Staines large LCD screens are used in the open plan offices. Here the screen contains multiple information sources. The largest screen area is given over to corporate news content, while the two smaller parts of the screen feature news from the British Gas intranet and internal RSS news feeds.
The same Connectvision system is used to schedule and display content on both the small call centre and large corporate screens, with consistency of presentation across the business essential. Both the British Gas corporate and business teams have received training and use customised screen templates, making it simple to quickly add new messages. Each team relies on a network of contributing authors to supply material for distribution within Connectvision.
"In total Connectvision reaches over 17,000 British Gas staff each day,” says the Employee Communications Manager. “We've made Connectvision an integral part of the workplace. Every employee has line of sight to at least one screen. In some cases we've enabled sound on the screens where we can play briefings to all team members at their desk rather than disrupting the working day by moving people to another part of the building to hear the briefing. This has worked really well.”
Looking ahead British Gas plan to use Connectvision to deliver real time Key Performance Indicators to each screen by business unit, numerous 'live' feeds on large screens and enable sound on every screen to cascade messages even more effectively.
“Recently our Cardiff call centre won the European Call Centre of the Year award at the European Call Centre Awards, as well as the Best Improvement Strategy and the Best Centre to Work for; Connectvision was definitely a contributory factor in us winning these awards,” he concluded.