Transforming our Contact Centre

At Fortem, we strive for long term partnerships, with customer centricity at the heart of that.
Handling over 300,000 repairs annually, we understand that delivering a consistent, high quality service requires more than just operational efficiency, but the correct supporting technology. 

Faced with the limitations of our legacy telephony system posing challenges such as unreliable uptime, lack of scalability, and poor reporting, we recognised that we needed a smart solution. A platform where customer experience is at the forefront, strategically shifting how we serve our clients and their residents.

By implementing Talkdesk, a multi-channel contact centre platform powered by AI, we’ve built a smarter, faster, and more scalable customer service function.

The Results?

Our transformation has already delivered tangible results:

• Reduced hold times
• Improved first-touch resolution
• 90-95% call quality scores

The platform’s AI-driven capabilities allow us to understand customer sentiment in real time and surface themes from live conversations, helping us to anticipate needs, adapt quickly, and ensure a high-quality experience across every interaction.

A Collaborative, Business Led Integration

We formed a cross functional business working group to define what the new platform needed to deliver. This was driven by the teams that would be using the system and their involvement was critical for ensuring the right fit.

From user-led design sessions to hands-on adoption support, we ensured that the platform was built with and for the people who use it every day.

Empowering our Teams

We knew for this transformation to succeed, our agents and team leaders needed to be engaged. Throughout the journey:

• Talkdesk Academy played a vital role in supporting training and adoption
• Team leaders helped design new, simpler call flows
• Automated call backs and announced wait times improved the agent and customer experience early on
• Communications focused on the bigger picture: shifting from a call based mindset to an interaction first model.

We also introduced email as a new channel, helping to streamline communication without adding unnecessary workload. With clients increasingly expecting more flexible options, our agents saw how the system would enhance (not complicate) their work.

For our teams, usability is now a key differentiator. The platform is intuitive, with date resourcing tools at their hands, empowering the frontline teams to make decisions faster and more effectively.

Award Winning Innovation

The initiative was awarded the 2024 Talkdesk Innovator Award, celebrating our contact centre transformation and our strategic use of AI to enhance customer experience across our social housing contracts.

Chris Hone, IT Director at Fortem, shared: “We’re incredibly proud to have received this award. This recognition reflects our ongoing commitment to harnessing technology to transform the customer experience we offer to our clients and their residents. Talkdesk is our multi-channel contact centre platform, the system uses AI to understand the sentiment in calls, to allow us to recognise the themes which allow us to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and continuously improve our customer service.”

As Fortem continues to grow, our contact centre will remain a key enabler of service excellence, ensuring we stay responsive and aligned to the needs of our clients and customers.