The Customer
Leasedrive Vehicle Management was formed in 1983 and has since been delivering a fleet management service to corporations offering car benefits to their employees. Leasedrive VELO is a result of the merger of the Leasedrive Group and VELO in January 2007. The company is now the UK's largest independent privately-owned vehicle management group with a combined fleet of around 17,500 cars serving UK business to business customers.
The service offering that Leasedrive VELO provides to its customers involves assigning a dedicated telephone number to each corporate customer and that then routes through to a call centre team or third-party supplier. Attached to the dedicated line is an announcement with options for the customer to select. Each team has its own list of special customer requirements including hire, maintenance and breakdown. This high level of customer service is essential when some of the customers can be contracting over 1000 cars at any one time.
Business Challenges
During 2004 Leasedrive had just been bought in a management 'buy-in / buy-out' deal and with a large cash injection the management team agreed to invest in people, infrastructure and IT and awarded the voice communications contract to CC (Corporate Communications). This investment was to be a significant change and turning point for the business.
CC has implemented three major stages in Leasedrive's IT development, firstly in 2004 with the Avaya Definity Prologix telephony system, then in July 2005 CC took over the management of Leasedrive's voice circuits and lease cost routing services, and in March 2007 CC increased the Leasedrive VELO announcement availability by significantly upgrading the Prologix telephony system.
CC Solution
In 2004 Leasedrive started out with an Avaya Definity Prologix telephony system. The project at that time was to migrate two divisions of the company - daily rental and car leasing - into one business office for 200 people in Wokingham, Berkshire. CC provided consultancy skills for the merger and onsite integration.
CC upgraded the Prologix system and improved its incoming trunk capacity to the switch to support twice the amount of incoming lines, provided skills based routing and Avaya Call Management System reporting tool and as Leasedrive had substantially grown its core clients to 50 and had more than 2000 daily rental customers, CC increased the number of extensions from 100 to 250.
The actual move took place over a weekend in August 2004. CC was onsite for the integration project a week before hand to complete training with the staff and during which time CC loaned a second Prologix system to save Leasedrive having to dismantle the entire system, move it to another location and then rebuild it. In loaning the second system CC minimised the telephone down time.
Paul Newman, Group IT Manager, Leasedrive VELO said "CC's integration work had no downtime on the business either during or outside of office hours. If we had not told the staff of the development work and entire system upgrade they would not have known. It was like performing open heart surgery; CC kept the business heart beating and then sent it back to work."
In July 2005 Leasedrive VELO awarded its outsourced managed services to CC for its BT telephone lines, support, consolidation of billing, lease cost routing, provisions and maintenance.
"When we outsourced the management of the BT relationship to CC it delivered a number of different benefits and cost savings to our business. In the first instance we saved on an overhead to manage BT and in addition with CC's strong buying power to drive down our telephony per minute cost, they have saved us hard cash. By migrating the managed service to CC we now have a 24 hour help desk team which provides a better service to us and our customers. Working with CC I no longer worry about the management of BT and that's a weight off my shoulders. CC provides a single point of contact to manage all the various suppliers. Whether we need CC for consultancy or support their service saves me time."
With the merger of Leasedrive and VELO in January 2007 the business had out grown the capacity of 128 available announcements. Instead of having to change the entire switch, CC swapped out the IVR processing end of the switch and increased the announcement availability to 512 allowing call volumes to reach almost 23,000.
"The merger certainly put pressure on the team over the last few months. It's a familiar story that in the case of IT the harder the work the less you get noticed. We know that we've done a good job because no one else can tell anything different has happened. We don't get praised, to us its just business as usual."
Business Benefits
In a commodity driven business such as car rental, any major problems on the telephone lines could turn a happy customer into a distressed one. From January to March 2007 Leasedrive VELO sold 100,000 rental days in a quarter, on average 40,000 rental days a month, it is vital that business at this level is not lost to a competitor. CC managed services ensures that Leasedrive VELO's customers can get through to their dedicated account team.
"We know that we set our levels appropriately in the market place and enjoy working with a smaller player that we can mould to fit our customer bespoke requirements. CC has shown commitment to us, to proper support and to effective training. Without a doubt that has had a positive effect on our service to our clients and subsequently on our bottom line. There were many similarities between the two businesses' approach to customer service and that, coupled with CC's knowledge and experience, secured the contract. CC has, in fact, provided on-going support and maintenance for our telephony requirements since 2004."
"When it comes to how the project was managed overall I would give CC 10 out of 10. As the relationship with CC has grown they have added even more benefit, always correct and on time."
