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For contact centres and sales teams
More conversations per hour, and a record of every one.
More conversations per hour, and a record of every one of them.
A contact centre is a machine for producing conversations, and everything else is overhead. Every minute an agent spends listening to an unanswered ring, working through a dead number, waiting for a screen to load or hunting for the last note on an account is a minute that produces nothing. Multiply that across a floor of agents and a working week and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable quickly.
The second problem is that you cannot manage what you cannot see. Traditional quality assurance means listening back to a small sample of calls, which tells you a great deal about those few calls and very little about the rest. Coaching gets built on anecdote, compliance risk is assessed on a fraction of the evidence, and the reasons customers actually say no never make it into a report because nobody was listening when they said it.
The third is the one that gets firms into genuine trouble. Regulated selling has rules about abandoned calls, about what must be said, about consent and about what happens to a recording afterwards. Getting that right is not just a legal matter, it is a commercial one: the firms with clean, provable process are the ones that keep their contracts and their permissions.
Sound familiar?
- Agents waiting on dead numbers and answerphones
- No reliable record of what was actually said on a call
- Compliance checks done by listening back to random samples
- Wallboards that show activity but not outcomes
What we do about it
- Predictive dialling tuned to your answer rates, inside Ofcom limits
- Every call transcribed, summarised and searchable
- Compliance phrases flagged automatically across one hundred percent of calls
- Dashboards built on outcomes rather than dial counts
A day that probably looks like yours
Nothing here is a disaster. That is rather the point: this is an ordinary day, and the cost is spread so thinly that nobody ever adds it up.
- 09:00Agents log in and start dialling manually from a list.A large slice of the first hour goes on ringing tones and answerphones.
- 10:30An agent finishes a call and spends time typing up notes before the next one.Wrap time adds up across every agent, every call, all day.
- 11:45The same number is called by two different agents from two different lists.The customer is annoyed, and both agents look disorganised.
- 13:20Quality assurance listens back to three calls out of several thousand.Coaching and compliance decisions rest on a very small sample.
- 15:00A customer disputes what they were told on a call last month.Somebody spends the afternoon hunting for a recording nobody can locate.
- 17:30The wallboard shows dial counts and talk time.Nobody can say which of those dials turned into money.
Dialling that respects both your agents and the rules
The gap between a manual list and a properly tuned dialler is mostly dead air. Predictive dialling removes the ringing, the answerphones and the disconnected numbers from the agent's day, so what lands in their headset is a person who has already said hello. That changes the shape of the shift: more conversations, fewer flat stretches, and a lot less of the fatigue that comes from listening to a ringing tone.
It has to be tuned honestly, though. Push a dialler too hard and you generate abandoned and silent calls, which is where firms get into trouble with Ofcom and with their own customers. The right settings depend on your actual answer rates and your call durations, not on a vendor's default, and they need reviewing as the data changes rather than being set once.
Blended working matters too. An agent who can take an inbound call between outbound conversations is far more useful than a floor split rigidly into two teams, particularly when a campaign generates callbacks. Dialler systems are published at £8,000 to £15,000, and cloud telephony at £18 to £35 per user each month.
Transcribe everything, then you can actually see the floor
Once every call is transcribed and summarised, quality assurance stops being a sampling exercise. Instead of three calls out of several thousand, you can look across all of them: which objections come up most, which agents talk over customers, where in the script people disengage, and which openings actually lead somewhere.
That is a coaching tool before it is a compliance tool. Being able to show an agent the four calls last week where a particular objection was handled well, and the four where it was not, is worth more than any amount of general advice. It also finds your quiet strengths, because the best handling of a difficult moment is often sitting in the recording of somebody nobody thought to listen to.
It kills the wrap time problem as well. A summary and the outcome written automatically from the call means the agent moves on rather than typing, and the note that lands on the record is more complete than the one a tired person would have written at half past four. Transcription and call intelligence is published at £600 to £1,500 a month.
Compliance across every call, not a sample of them
If a script has required wording, an automated check can look for it on every single call rather than on the handful somebody had time to review. The same applies to phrases you never want said, to consent statements, and to the point at which a recorded disclosure has to be made. Issues surface within hours instead of at the next monthly review.
The practical effect is that problems get caught while they are still small. An agent drifting away from required wording gets a coaching conversation this week, not after a complaint. That is better for the agent, who was rarely doing it deliberately, and considerably better for the business.
The evidence side matters just as much. When a customer disputes what was said, being able to find the call by number, date or account within seconds and produce the transcript alongside the recording turns a long uncomfortable investigation into a short one. Retention and deletion should be set to your own policy and applied automatically, because recordings you keep too long are a liability rather than an asset.
Dashboards built on outcomes, not activity
Most wallboards measure what is easy to count. Dials made, calls answered, average handling time, agents in a ready state. All of it is real, none of it is the thing you are actually trying to grow, and a floor managed purely on activity metrics quickly learns to produce activity.
The more useful view runs from the outcome backwards. Which lists, which times of day, which openings and which agents produce sales, appointments or resolutions, and at what cost. That usually reveals uncomfortable but valuable things, like a list everybody assumes is good being propped up by one agent, or an afternoon slot that produces far more per hour than the morning nobody wanted to change.
For that to work, the phone system, the dialler and the customer records have to be joined up rather than three separate reports reconciled by hand in a spreadsheet on a Friday. When they are, the reporting stops being an argument about whose figures are right and becomes a conversation about what to do next.
Real examples
Illustrative cases drawn from the kind of work we do. Tap one to see what happened and what could have been done. We do not name clients without their permission.
The first hour that produced nothing
The case
A team of twelve agents starts at nine, dialling manually from a spreadsheet. Between unanswered numbers, answerphones and numbers that are no longer in service, most agents have had two or three real conversations by ten. Nobody is slacking. The list is simply doing what unfiltered lists do, and the flat start to the day takes the energy out of the floor before it has begun.
What could have been done
A dialler tuned to that team's actual answer rates, so agents receive live conversations rather than dialling into silence, with dead numbers filtered out of the list rather than discovered one at a time. The measure that matters is conversations per agent hour, not dials.
The complaint nobody could answer
The case
A customer complains that they were told something on a call six weeks ago that was not correct. The centre has recordings, but they are stored by date and extension rather than against the customer, and nobody is certain which agent took it. Two people spend most of a day searching. By the time the call is found, the complaint has escalated purely because the response was slow.
What could have been done
Every call transcribed and attached to the customer record, searchable by number, account or date. The relevant call is found in seconds and the transcript can be read alongside the recording, so the response goes out the same day while the customer still feels listened to.
The script drift nobody noticed for a month
The case
An experienced agent gradually stops using a required piece of wording, not out of any intent but because it slows the call down and the rest of the pitch works well without it. Quality assurance samples a few calls a week and does not happen to hear his. The gap is only found during a client audit, by which point several hundred calls are affected.
What could have been done
Automated checking for required phrases across every call, flagging the omission in the first day or two. It becomes a two minute coaching conversation instead of an audit finding, and the evidence that the rest of the floor is compliant is available immediately rather than assembled under pressure.
What contact centres and sales teams usually ask us for
Dialler systems
Predictive, progressive and preview diallers for outbound teams. Set up, tuned, and kept compliant with Ofcom rules on abandoned calls.
£8,000 to £15,000
VoIP and cloud telephony
Business phone systems that follow your team anywhere. Number porting, call routing, voicemail to email, and call recording where you need it.
£18 to £35/user/month
Transcription and call intelligence
Every call, meeting and voice note turned into searchable text, with summaries and actions extracted automatically. Accurate on strong regional accents.
£600 to £1,500/month
Custom CRM and business systems
The system you actually need rather than the one you can rent. Built around your process, integrated with what you already use.
£20,000 to £40,000
Cyber security and Cyber Essentials
Certification, hardening, monitoring and staff training. The paperwork your customers and insurers keep asking for, and the protection underneath it that actually keeps you trading.
£3,000 to £6,000
Common questions
What does a setup like this cost?
Dialler systems are published at £8,000 to £15,000, transcription and call intelligence at £600 to £1,500 a month, and cloud telephony at £18 to £35 per user each month. What you actually need depends heavily on seat count and on whether you are regulated, so we would rather scope it against your call volumes than quote a number that turns out to be wrong in either direction.
How long does a migration take, and will we lose calling time?
Number porting has fixed timescales set by the losing provider, so that part is not something anyone can rush honestly. The usual approach is to run the new platform alongside the old one with a small pilot group, prove it on real calls, then move the floor across in stages. Cutting a whole centre over in one evening is possible and rarely worth the risk.
Do we own the recordings, the transcripts and the data?
Yes, and you should insist on it. Recordings, transcripts and customer records are yours and exportable, retention is set to your policy, and your numbers remain yours to port. Given the compliance obligations sitting on top of this data, anything less is a problem waiting to happen.
Will it connect to our CRM, or is this another system to keep in step?
It should write back to whatever system already holds your customer records, so outcomes, notes and summaries land in one place rather than two. Most mainstream systems connect well. If yours is older or heavily customised we will test the connection during scoping and tell you plainly what will and will not flow.
Our managers are not technical. Who runs it day to day?
Your team should be able to run campaigns, adjust lists and pull reports without needing us, and that is a training question rather than a software one. We set up the dashboards with your own outcomes rather than generic ones, train the team leaders on live campaigns, and stay involved through the first few weeks while the dialler settings are tuned to your real answer rates.
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