Red Funnel

Hi, my name is Murray Carter, and I'm the Customer Services Director here at Red Funnel. Red Funnel is an integrated transport and travel business which runs ferries from Southampton to the Isle of Wight. It's been in operation since 1861.

Hello, my name is Chris Elliott. I'm the Contact Centre Manager at Red Funnel. From a communication perspective, we're looking to enhance our customers' experience. Customers are using new channels, such as social media, to interact with us. It's vitally important to us to provide a customer-centric network where
they could communicate freely, easily with our business during times such as delays, cancellations, or just general customer service enhancements, such as inquiries on timetable information, or potentially an issue on board that could arise. It is important to Red Funnel that we evaluated these and recognize them in real time.

Previously we've had a call centre, which is very reactive. It dealt with voice-only communications of customers, generally for sales or inquiries. We wanted to increase the productivity of our team by making it into a contact centre where we have the capability of dealing with omnichannel communications, integrating emails and social media through the contact centre as well.

Our Cisco phone system is no longer meeting the needs of our business. Customers are choosing to communicate with us in the wide range of multimedia platforms. Our contact centre is now prepared to enhance our customers' experience and practically publish and reply to customers via social media solutions.

What I have done is increased productivity of our staff and certainly improve the action plan for our staff to deal with customer communications. We've certainly seen an improvement in terms of customer satisfaction and feedback as a result of that initiative.

Red Funnel's customer engagement strategy has proved to be a great success. We use skills-based routing to ensure that our customers receive the best possible customer service by ensuring that an agent fully capable, qualified, and trained to handle their inquiry, responds to their query. We bring social media monitoring to evaluate areas that would improve and enhance their customer journey. We have decreased our complaints by 16%, but more importantly, we have increased our compliments by 116% year on year.