Canada Post makes it easy for customers to find what they want:
A sophisticated solution with no upfront investment

Until now, when customers and potential customers needed to reach you, all you had to do was make it easy for them to find your phone number and address. If you were marketing to customers outside your local calling area, you may even have considered adding a toll-free number. But one of today’s biggest consumer segments has found other ways to communicate. Teenagers are talking to each other via instant messaging, both on their mobile phones and on the Web. They’re using text messaging to vote for their favourite “idols”. And more and more adults are joining them in embracing these new technologies.

Not surprisingly, marketers are paying attention. Many companies now invite their customers to contact them via some form of instant messaging or Web communications, in addition to the phone. They’ve recognized the value of being available to their customers, and of allowing their customers to choose the method of communication.

At first glance, you may think that creating a “multi-channel contact centre” to handle all those different contacts would be prohibitively expensive for all but the biggest companies. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be. It is actually possible for you to exceed your customers’ expectations and raise the bar on your competition, without any new capital investments at all.

You can now access all the features of a fully functional contact centre without owning a centre of your own. In fact, this idea makes so much sense that some large corporations are also taking advantage of it in order to test new concepts before committing to the expense of rolling them out. Read on and you’ll see how Innovapost, a small division of Canada Post, is using virtual contact centre technology to provide an innovative new service.

Innovapost creates fetch™

Recently, Canada Post recognized that many consumers want to know more about products or services they’ve seen advertised and may also want to request samples and offers, but they’re reluctant to provide the advertisers with too much personal information. After all, just giving your e-mail address to one unscrupulous marketer can result in an inundation of spam from hundreds of different sources.

To solve this problem, Innovapost, a subsidiary of Canada Post, developed fetch, a unique program designed to provide Canadians with the information they want (and only the information they want), while screening their personal details from advertisers.

fetch uses leading-edge technology to deliver information to consumers and sales to marketers, in a way that benefits all concerned. Participating marketers simply feature the fetch symbol in their advertising, informing consumers that more information is available to them through the program. When consumers see the fetch symbol in magazine or newspaper advertisements, on billboards, television or online, or when they hear the fetch sound on radio, they can call a toll-free phone number, send a text message from a mobile phone or log on to the fetch Website. fetch then delivers the requested information, sample or offer to the consumer, on behalf of the marketer.

Because consumers have trusted Canada Post with their personal correspondence for 150 years, they can be confident that their requests will be kept anonymous, their privacy will be protected and they won’t be added to any mailing lists.  In turn, advertisers have an innovative, cost-effective way to reach consumers, maximize their media spend and almost instantly track and adjust campaigns.

Testing the idea

The first step in taking fetch from concept to reality was to run a pilot, for which the city of Calgary was chosen. Because the program was still being evaluated, Canada Post was not ready to invest millions of dollars in building a dedicated contact centre operation. Yet fetch had to be kept separate from other Canada Post operations to ensure that it did not impact them.

“We wanted to isolate fetch into its own world, where it wouldn’t rely on any existing structures,” says Christine Hamilton, Senior Consultant with Innovapost, the division that provides Canada Post with its information technology. “That meant it had to be easily deployed into its own stand-alone microcosm. And because we didn’t know how it was going to go or what would come out of it, we needed a very flexible tool that we could customize on the fly.”

Innovapost consulted with a number of providers, but all the available solutions were time-consuming and would have required considerable up-front investments. Then Dave Laquerre, Innovapost’s Senior Consultant, Application Management and Development, Telephony Services, met with his TELUS contact and heard about TELUS CallCentreAnywhere, a hosted software solution.

“It wasn’t ready yet,” says Laquerre, “But I told him we need it now. TELUS made some modifications that allowed us to have it a couple of months early, as a pre-production Beta.”

An excellent start

CallCentreAnywhere is a complete contact centre solution hosted by TELUS. That means the actual system and its hardware reside at TELUS, where it’s available to TELUS clients on a monthly “per seat” basis. Instead of a capital investment, clients have a predictable, fixed monthly cost. They can offer multi-channel communications to their customers, have their solution up and running in as few as 12 days and leave all maintenance and support to TELUS.

Launched in January, 2005, the fetch pilot takes full advantage of CallCentreAnywhere capabilities. Twelve organizations have signed on, offering Calgarians more information about a variety of products and services, including groceries, financial services, real estate, health-care products, communications, entertainment and more. “Most requests come in through text messaging and the Web,” says Hamilton. “CallCentreAnywhere gives us the ability to handle everything.”

All the agents are based in Ottawa and have readily embraced CallCentreAnywhere. “They’ve found it really easy to learn,” says Hamilton. “It’s not a complicated system. Agents have their own small Web site with all their scripts and documents, so they can quickly load in anything they need. They can also redirect messages, change hours, and reroute phone numbers to a different voicemail box – it’s all very self-managed.”

Key benefits

From Hamilton’s point of view, one of the major benefits offered by CallCentreAnywhere is its reporting capability. “I don’t have a manager standing over the agents,” says Hamilton. “But because I can quickly go through daily reports, I can manage everything virtually.”

She’s also been impressed by what she calls “a contingency plan built right in”. When network power problems affected the Ottawa office, the fetch agents were able to work from home, quickly and easily connecting to the system using their regular phone lines and Internet connections.

“Based on the pilot, we’re really pleased,” she says. “We like the features being introduced on an on-going basis. Also, I really appreciate the ability to make changes on the fly. When we need something changed, we can do it ourselves. But perhaps the biggest advantage for us is that TELUS has been there with us from the start, working through issues as they come up. They’ve been very responsive.”

The fetch program has been successful in Calgary and gained renown elsewhere too. It was recently nominated for a World Mail Award in the Innovation, eCommerce and Marketing categories. As the pilot proceeds, Canada Post is evaluating it carefully with a view to expanding the program to other markets.