Consumer Programs Incorporated, or CPI Corp., is “The Portrait photography industry’s unquestioned leader in quality, value, and service!” As they say, “Our objective is to get customers to return again and again and enthusiastically recommend us to family and friends!” To that end, quality assurance is one of CPI’s number one objectives.
Darla Earhart, Director of Customer Experience, CPI, has been in the specialty retail and photography services business for fifteen years. When CPI first came to TelStar Hosted, they were testing another hosted call center service provider. “We needed something for distributed agents. We did not want to purchase equipment. We faced a lot of challenges with [our first hosted contact service provider], such as manageability. There were no statistics like the Supervisor Application that TelStar has, so there was no way to manage activity. [The other hosted contact center provider] also had a lot of technical issues, a lot of down time. They were down a couple of hours more than once a day and that is time that we have gotten back now with TelStar,” Darla explains.
TelStar Hosted has helped CPI to improve their performance significantly. “We could have been much more cost effective and efficient had we used Telstar from the beginning,” Darla says. TelStar Hosted has given CPI a real-time way to manage their calling. “For performance management, the live call monitoring and coaching features have been invaluable.”
CPI has taken advantage of TelStar Hosted’s remote agent capability and improved CPI’s ability to assure quality. “TelStar helps us to supervise in real time, and monitor recorded calls for quality assurance. We do a lot of sales over the phone and quality assurance is very important. [With TelStar,] we can manage locations and know who we really have on our team, interfacing with our customers. With TelStar in place, I can make quick changes when I need to and stay involved with the business,” Darla notes.
TelStar Hosted has also helped CPI to increase agent productivity and reduced CPI’s call center management requirements. “Putting callers on TelStar’s dialer, the Supervisor Application, managing scheduling, and using TelStar’s reports, contributed to our productivity improvement. Because of the Supervisor Application, one centralized person can manage many representatives and pull reports for each location, so the corporate support is much less. With [the hosted call center service provider we used previously], it would have required 6 people to manage the same number of representatives,” Darla commented.
CPI also needs the flexibility and scalability that TelStar Hosted provides. “Scalability is important; there is seasonality in our business around Christmas, and we will ramp up again for Easter. During peak times we need flexibility,” explains Darla.
CPI has benefited from TelStar Hosted’s rapid deployment, personalized training and support. “One of the best things about Telstar, they moved very quickly we were up and trained in no time. The training was very thorough, and Phil did a great job walking us through and related it to our business. And the support afterward has been phenomenal. TelStar is always available for us,” Darla says.
“TelStar is much less than purchasing another system, which is costly. We eliminated downtime and improved our sales by using TelStar,” Darla concludes. “I guess I would say that if I were a small business owner or a large corporation and needed to do company services using the phone, and if quality assurance is important, I would recommend TelStar. The customer service has been outstanding. We love the product and the service and the support that we’ve received and we’d love to give [TelStar Hosted] all the business we can offer. We love the scalability and working together. We love what TelStar does!”
For more information about CPI Corp., see www.CPICorp.com or call 1-800-669-9699.
To find out more about TelStar Hosted Services, see www.telstarhosted.com or call 1.877.483.5782.
