INDIANAPOLIS & CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--onPeak, the largest provider of hotel bookings for the events industry, has improved the customer experience and cut costs using Sharpen Technologies’ agent-first omni-channel cloud contact center platform.
“Sharpen’s intelligent routing and callback capabilities have helped us reduce hold times by about 75 percent,” said onPeak’s senior director of operations John Hunt. “This, among other capabilities, have helped our contact center maintain an average 95 percent customer satisfaction rating, which is higher than our overall company rating of about 93 percent.”
Further contributing to improved customer satisfaction is a better agent experience. “We’re all about quality of service, but we also believe our frontline agents must be happy to provide that,” Hunt said. “Sharpen enabled us to quickly and cost-effectively support work-at-home agents, which has greatly improved the quality of their lives. They no longer have to fight traffic and pay commuting costs. This has left them with more time for their families, which supports our ‘family first’ policy. What’s more, agent sick time has dropped by about 65 percent.”
onPeak’s agents handle, on average, 300,000 inbound and outbound calls annually. With more than 60 percent of them working from home, making routing and other changes quickly and from anywhere is critical.
“Sharpen has made it incredibly easy to manage all these remote agents,” Hunt said. “I can literally whip out my iPhone and set a new inbound call route in one minute.”
Sharpen’s quality monitoring and analytics have been another big benefit for onPeak.
“We look at typical performance indicators, but those aren’t what drive us,” Hunt said. “The beauty of Sharpen is that it gives us a single, easy-to-use system for flexibly monitoring, scoring and coaching agents. The platform’s use of analytics aggregates all this data to give us insights based on what’s uniquely important to us. And this functionality is all included. Those are typically expensive add-on features with other vendors.”
While onPeak’s main goal for deploying the Sharpen platform was to improve the experience of its customers and agents, the company has also realized cost savings.
“We cut ongoing costs by a third after we switched from our on-prem ShoreTel system to Sharpen,” Hunt said. “It was a relief to no longer have to deal with servers, trunks and so on. Now, instead of having to pull in a bunch of IT people who understand all that infrastructure, we can maintain it ourselves.”
While these savings are impressive, they’re even more remarkable given that onPeak has grown dramatically since the deployment.
“We were acquired and had separate contact centers when we deployed the Sharpen platform,” Hunt said. “That left us having to manage three PBX systems with redundant carriers, T1 lines and a number of other telco complexities. The Sharpen platform allowed us to combine our businesses and consolidate centers. As a result, we were able to absorb all these extra costs while actually expanding. And instead of replacing IT staff that naturally attritioned out, we were able to reduce that group by more than half.”
Equally important, Sharpen’s platform centralized what had been multiple segmented business units.
“Our deployment gave us a central system to broker what had been a bunch of siloed communications across our business units,” Hunt said. “That was essential in order to maintain our quality of service following the acquisition.”
Less tangible but no less of a benefit is the personal attention onPeak has received from Sharpen.
“I had been warned that as Sharpen grew we wouldn’t get the same treatment,” Hunt said. “Well, they’ve grown and nothing has changed. Sharpen's service and support teams are super responsive, just like they were on day one.”
About onPeak
In business since 1984, onPeak has become the leading player in the business of providing hotel accommodations for events all over the world. As part of a global network of leaders in the services industry, onPeak has the experience and technology to contribute to the complete event experience, both on and off the show floor. Services include hotel contracting, block management, VIP specialists, marketing, and customer support. The company makes event housing shine through savvy service and bold technology for its clients, customers, hotels and destinations. OnPeak is headquartered in Chicago with corporate offices in Atlanta and New York. Visit www.onpeak.com or call 312.527.7270.
About Sharpen Technologies
Sharpen Technologies is a cloud-based customer experience technology provider that offers an agent-first omni-channel contact center platform. Its solutions address decades-old agent issues responsible for poor customer experiences. Sharpen’s proprietary Agent Experience Score (AXS) gives contact centers a new way to measure and track not only performance, but overall agent well-being. The company’s unique omni-channel approach gives agents a single interface for communicating across multiple channels. A global, cloud-native platform eliminates scalability issues while delivering mathematically unbeatable voice quality. Sharpen was named among the Best Places to Work in Indiana. The company is also a recipient of the Stevie American Business Awards and was named by Nemertes Research as a 2018 “Top Rated” provider of contact center solutions. Sharpen was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in Indianapolis, Ind. Visit www.sharpencx.com or call 855.249.3357.
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