Eon

Co-hosting: the best of both worlds

Energy company E.ON UK is one of Britain’s leading gas and electricity suppliers, providing utilities services to domestic, business and industrial customers nationwide.

Keen to win new business customers in a competitive market by telling them about the savings they could offer over their existing gas, electricity and elephone suppliers, E.ON selected KC Contact Centres to deliver an outbound customer acquisition programme.

E.ON’s requirements were clear: they needed a skilled, motivated and numerate telemarketing resource that could generate interest amongst prospects, answer questions about E.ON’s services and work out quotes.

E.ON also needed the ability to win new business quickly, with the flexibility to upsize and downscale the operation rapidly.

KC recommended a co-hosting solution, where E.ON would use KC’s infrastructure and telemarketing team, but have E.ON’s own small business sales manager on-site at the contact centre to maintain close involvement with the day-to-day delivery of the campaign.

The presence of E.ON’s sales manager increased the pace of learning amongst the KC team – who all took part in E.ON’s accredited training programme – and gave the flexibility to act fast to change the sales approach when necessary.

In this way, co-hosting offers the best of both worlds – an outsourced solution that saves them time and money while maintaining the customer experience by having staff based at the contact centre supplier’s premises on a long-term, or even permanent basis.

A flexible, skilled, telemarketing resource

For E.ON UK, the co-hosting partnership with KC Contact Centres delivered significant benefits.

As well as giving E.ON the flexibility it needed to move fast in line with changing market conditions, it also provided access to skilled telemarketing personnel. This in turn led to a substantial increase in business – over the period of the contract KC was E.ON’s top performing outsourced partner, generating £4.7m evenue for E.ON from more than 34,800 sales.

As E.ON’s Head of SME Sales commented, “The relationship with KC has worked well, providing us with exactly the resources and flexibility we needed to carry out our outbound customer acquisition programme.”

“Not only has the partnership enabled us to tap into a pool of people of exactly the right calibre and standard to do the job, it has given us the flexibility to upsize and downscale the operation much faster than we could in-house.”

“And of course, the commercial benefits are considerable. We’ve found a partner that can deliver the right amount of sales – at a correct cost for sale.”