Spark Response has been delivering bespoke outsourced contact centre solutions for over 20 years. Today, we handle around five million customer interactions every year, across our inbound and outbound contact centres, covering telephone, e-mail and white mail communications with the capability to handle live chat, SMS and voice recognition contact.

Outsourcing the contact centre aspect of your business to Spark isn't just about what we do - it's about how we do it and why we do it well.

Among the features and differentiators of Spark are our people, our team-oriented culture and the stakeholder mentality of our management team; our tenure - well over an average of over six years across our business; and of course the North East accent - named the most popular regional accent in a recent call centre survey (see location).

At Spark, we believe that excellent customer service is vital to the continued success of our clients. From order taking to aftercare, enquiries handling to complaints management, our inbound contact centre team works hard to ensure the customer experience is managed effectively and efficiently. With a constant focus on training and development, our team leaders and trainers work alongside our advisers to ensure client standards and service levels are met and maintained throughout the campaign.

Our outbound division works on behalf of a clients across vertical markets selling products and services as well as conducting telemarketing campaigns, surveys and questionnaires, often in highly regulated marketplaces where quality and compliance are key. We believe that a great sales team, a focus on technology, good data management and a fantastic outbound management team give us what it takes to drive sales, improve customer penetration rates and generate quality business leads whilst reducing your cost of acquisition.

One of our critical contact centre success factors is the wide range of bespoke and tailor-made campaign packages we offer. We operate using a number of commercial models and operational structures...

DEDICATED
Some campaigns require a fully dedicated team. Whether that be volume-driven or due to the nature of the call, a dedicated team at an hourly rate works for many of our clients, both inbound and outbound.

BUREAU
One of the major benefits of outsourcing contact centre services is that a blended environment, with agents cross-trained and multi-skilled to handle calls for a varierty of companies, allows clients to share the knowledge, experience and expertise of its call centre workforce. Our bureau campaigns can operate using a price per minute or price per call model with a menu of charges for all supporting activity.

DEDICATED WITH OVERFLOW
This platform works by deployment of a core dedicated team, usually at an hourly rate, with an overflow facility to the rest of the contact centre on a bureau environment. This allows clients to maximise the utilisation of their core team whilst ensuring minimal call abandonment rates.

OVERFLOW AND OUT-OF-HOURS
We handle elements of campaigns that require overflow support, whereby for example we provide 20 overflow seats to a dedicated 100+ seat operation handled in-house or via another outsourced partner. Our inbound contact centre is open until 10pm and at weekends, so we are also able handle calls for large campaigns outside of their standard office opening times.

TESTS AND PILOTS
Test and pilot campaigns tend to be outbound. We are able to rapidly deploy a number of dedicated agents to a short-term campaign in a matter of days. Usually, pilot campaigns are established on an hourly rate, with the opportunity to shift gradually toward a risk/reward commercial model once penetration/lead generation/conversion rates have been established.

ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT
Our 'pure' contact centre campaigns tend to be managed within the contact centre. For larger and end-to-end fulfilment and contact centre campaigns, we have a dedicated team of account managers who look after day to day account management, development and reporting. The main function of our account managers is to act as the 'eyes, ears and voice' of our clients in dealing with not only the other operational areas of our business but also third party partners and suppliers.

We view the role as being the driving force behind campaign activity, developing revenue-generating ideas and cost saving opportunities, analysing product movement and gathering competitor intelligence.

Our suite of contact centre reports provide our clients with:

PROJECT INCUBATION
We work with a strategic partner who specialises in contact centre 'incubation' projects. Spark is a business of size and scale and we handle calls for clients who require anything from an equivalent of 5 to 50 contact centre seats. Our incubation programs are designed to accelerate the successful deployment and development of smaller contact centre projects with the potential for growth. The onus here is on adding entrepreneurial focus to early-stage, test or pilot campaigns. Our strategic partner will provide a dedicated approach to optimising, integrating and transforming your campaign, with the end-goal in mind of transferring the operation to Spark as an established campaign.