CNGY in Canada wanted to adopt revolutionary new claims handling software from The Innovation Group. However, they recognised that one of the key benefits of implementing the software, i.e. cost savings in the claims handling process, could not be readily realised with their current organisation of call centres. CGNY used many small call centres spread across the whole of Canada, some of which housed as few as four staff. Our Assignment was to find and reorganise the call centre structure to keep local presence, to enable economies of scale to be gained and to build some resilience into the operation.

Commendium proposed a development strategy starting at very low cost and building into a comprehensive solution. The first stage involved employing a comprehensive call delivery plan. This plan would reside within the telephone network and deliver calls to the most appropriate call centre available. So, for example, a caller in Winnipeg would be delivered to the Winnipeg office, but if that was fully occupied with calls, closed or out of action, the caller would be redirected to an alternative that could serve the call. Using a number plan would be fairly primitive; the number plan can only look at the status of the lines to a call centre to find out if it’s busy, so the next stage was to invest in true load-balancing systems. Again network based, these would pre-route calls much more effectively than primitive number plans. This was to be combined with the establishment of four major centres across the country following the time zones.

Commendium also recommended the introduction of multilingual speaking services to attract and keep the growing the foreign population in the country.