It has been three months since the last edition of the Unify newsletter, and it’s fair to say that Gamma has been busy during that time. Gamma haven’t slowed in their mission to enhance the way we work and collaborate together, with each passing day bringing news of our customers’ continuing success and progress.
We were beyond thrilled to host our Frontiers event at 8 Northumberland Avenue in June, welcoming prestigious guests and esteemed speakers who shared vital business insights to both our live and online audience. From the power of AI to enabling collaboration from anywhere, there were plenty of key takeaways from our event. If you haven’t already, make sure you catch up on whatever you have missed, as well as find our highlights video alongside this introduction!
We have also just recently assisted nearly half of the universities in the UK ensure that this year’s Clearing process went as smoothly as possible. Institutions relied on services provided by Gamma to handle tens of thousands of calls and ensure prospective students found their place in higher education.
For those who attended Frontiers, you’ll know how highly we value delivering the best customer experience possible. But we’re going above and beyond to make it even better, as we have worked closely with the Institute of Customer Service to make significant improvements. Running a customer feedback survey allowed us to pinpoint areas of improvement, such as response times, and allow us to build a strategy to make these integral changes.
Having taken on board feedback from both employees and customers, we are already seeing some fantastic results, which are highlighted in our recent customer success stories. Learn how a variety of organisations are leveraging tech to enhance their experience internally and externally.
In terms of events, Gamma plan on attending numerous other events in the coming months, such as UCX Europe 2022, Call and Contact Centre Expo and Gartner Symposium. Here, both current and prospective customers get the opportunity to meet our team and discover what Gamma have to offer in terms of improving customer experience and providing a more streamlined and flexible way to collaborate.
It’s also worth remembering that our fantastic support team are standing by to assist customers, whether current or prospective, and ensure that they receive the timely and helpful support they require.
We hope you find plenty of useful takeaways from our latest Unify newsletter, as we demonstrate Gamma’s continued dedication to our customers and providing the best experience possible. If you’re looking for even more content on the latest trends and insights, head over to our Unify content hub and discover what we have to say.
The September edition
GX: Frontiers - Co-creating the future
Co-creating the future at GX: Frontiers 2022
Our Frontiers event in June proved to be another massive success, as both our in-person and virtual audience enjoyed learning from leading experts and thought-leaders.
Hybrid working is now a key consideration for organisations in 2022, with businesses looking to utilise new ways to co-create, collaborate, and take on any challenges they face. Sessions placed a great deal of emphasis on enhancing customer experience and creating a customer-centric culture that will deliver further successes to businesses.
Customer success stories from the likes of Reed’s Head of Infrastructure and Security Sean Whetstone gave the audience plenty to think about, including the need to ‘be brave’ when reconfiguring a business and the importance of building trust.
Keynote speeches from AI expert Nina Schick and former Director General of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller were also met with enthusiasm, as Nina explored the disruptive potential of AI, and Eliza discussed how leaders can effectively deal with pressure.
Head over to our Frontiers content hub where you will find a selection of sessions, including key takeaways from the day, and actionable insights that you can use in your own business.
Clearing 2022
Clearing 2022: why 62 of the UK’s 132 universities now depend on Gamma
With 53,000 students partaking in the 2022 Clearing process, there’s no wonder that nearly half of the UK’s universities (62 in total) relied on Gamma’s solutions to ensure that this process was as smooth as possible.
Cloud technologies, including SIP trunking, contact centres and Microsoft Teams Direct Routing, were provided by Gamma. All these solutions were utilised to meet the demands of tens of thousands of calls, with our systems having the power to connect over 90,000 calls during peak times.
8 universities had access to Gamma’s cloud-based contact centre solution Horizon Contact, which truly demonstrated why 2022 was a ground-breaking year in terms of clearing and omnichannel communication.
Mark Dunlop, Product Group Manager at the University of Dundee, was appreciative of all the hard work done by Gamma behind the scenes, who “made the clearing process very easy… increasing SIP channel volume for the period and offering the right support. Everything went smoothly.”
Gamma’s Managing Director David Macfarlane was delighted by the adoption of Horizon Collaborate, demonstrating its ability to be an “easily scalable solution for mass calling events” that simultaneously “provides an excellent omnichannel customer experience with outstanding reliability.”
For Sam Winterbottom, Gamma’s Public Sector Director, the importance of A-level results day meant that ‘it’s vital for universities to have a reliable and trustworthy system’ to handle this large volume of calls, with Gamma in prime position to ‘[provide] quick and efficient service and support’.
With the Gamma team able to ‘[excel] at creating robust call and contact management systems’, and digital tools becoming ever more popular among the younger generation, there’s no wonder that universities turned to Gamma to ensure they had the right communication infrastructure in place.
From the responses collected so far from our post-Clearing survey, universities praised Gamma for their efforts, with 100% of respondents rating platform quality, pre-Clearing comms and support received as either good or excellent.
Preparation for Clearing 2023 will begin shortly to ensure that as many universities as possible get the support they need to create a streamlined and stress-free student experience.
Improving our CX & Success Stories
Improving our CX and recent success stories
You may remember that we announced our membership with the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) in the March edition of Unify. We outlined our plans to issue a customer feedback survey to benchmark our performance and help us make improvements.
We are pleased to report that the survey was sent to a broad cross section of our customers during March and April, and we have now collected and analysed the results. We also took the opportunity to survey our own staff to ensure we got a well-rounded view of the current customer experience.
The ICS helped us to interpret our findings, building tangible improvement plans for short, mid, and long-term benefit. We discovered that there are several areas we need to improve on, such as:
- Our digital offering – giving you choice over how you communicate with us and providing quick and meaningful responses. Building out our portals to supply access to quality information at your point of need.
- Business Processes – clarity is needed around our processes and, critically, we need to ensure that these are focussed on reducing customer effort and getting things right first time. Complaint handling emerged as an important focus area.
- Response times – you expect a quicker turnaround on queries. You need clarity on who to contact for what, and this needs to be clear and easy to understand. When you call or mail us, you expect a prompt answer by someone who can help you. We need to do better at tracking our performance in this area.
Our own people have echoed your comments, expressing a desire for more clarity of processes, roles and responsibilities, as well as automation and soft-skills training.
We now have a clear roadmap for improvement which will keep us aligned to customer and employee sentiment in future.
We have already completed a programme of work to improve our inbound call handling, and another to identify key processes for immediate improvement. As a result of this, we are relaunching the customer cease process imminently, with another workstream looking at how we improve the new order placement experience, for both new and existing customers, ongoing.
Next up, we will be celebrating National Customer Service Week in the first week of October, when we will launch some new initiatives designed to drive customer and employee engagement, process definition, continuous improvement, incentivisation of service excellence, and a new approach to issue and complaint handling. Look out for further updates from us in the next edition of Unify.
Our genuine thanks to those who completed the survey; it will be reissued in Spring next year to track our improvement over time.
The Customer Experience Team
Recent customer success stories
Greater London Authority (GLA) enjoys smooth move to new HQ
Earlier this year, Gamma played a key role in the relocation of the GLA City Hall building to its new location at the Royal Docks. The authority’s priority was moving the existing phone lines and numbers across to the new site to enable the move to happen. However, it soon became clear that this was unfeasible, due to the costs involved, and their intractable legacy telephony estate. GLA approached Gamma to upgrade their existing technology infrastructure, whilst also enabling their teams to work from anywhere. This has resulted in substantial savings of around two-thirds compared to the previous system.
RSM UK embrace hybrid working
As part of their mission to drive customer focus, leading consultancy service RSM UK turned to Gamma to implement Teams telephony and carry out company-wide cultural and working practice changes that resulted in substantial savings and an entirely new office experience.
Improving the reliability of UK’s largest independent healthcare services provider
Practice Plus Group approached Gamma with the challenge to upgrade its legacy telephony system, with this transition yielding numerous benefits that included a more reliable service that operates at a lower cost.
Learn what it’s like to work with Gamma from the people who matter most – our customers. Read our latest case studies here.
Where to meet us
Events – where you can meet us
Gamma are thrilled to be exhibiting at some of the industry’s biggest events this year. Our Events page provides further details about where you can come and see us!
DTX Expo
12-13 October 2022, at the ExCel Centre, London, Stand Q44
DTX Expo is acknowledged as Europe’s biggest digital transformational event, providing participants with the chance to network and learn from both their peers and leading experts, which promises to further drive their business forward.
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2022
7-10 November 2022, Barcelona
Gartner arrives in Barcelona for a conference that explores the latest tech, insights and trends that are shaping the future of IT and business, as well as covering key topics and challenges facing CIOs and their leadership teams.
Call and Contact Centre Expo
22-23 November 2022, ExCel Centre, London, Stand CC-E30
Known as Europe’s leading call and contact expo, Call and Contact Centre Expo is the perfect place to discover what businesses can do to future-proof their operations and enrich their knowledge of how to improve their customer experience capabilities.
Meet your support team
Meet your support team
Our support teams are the voice of Gamma and as such are an important part of who we are as a company. In every edition we plan to introduce you to staff who are making a difference for our customers. This time it is Rona, Martin, Vlad and Iain’s turn to be profiled.
Rona Sannachan – Customer Support Technician
“My name is Rona and I work for the direct support team! I really enjoy working for Gamma and every day I learn something new. I have a pet cat who is called Zelda who is a year old, and I enjoy playing video games and going out for meals. I am currently enjoying playing World of Warcraft Classic.”
Martin McBean – Customer Support Technician
“My name is Martin McBean, I joined Gamma back in November/December of 2020 as part of the direct support team. Before joining Gamma, I completed a degree in music and enjoyed performing as a bassist in bands at a number of festivals around the UK. I learned a lot about teaching practice during my degree as well, and have been able to develop and apply those skills in my role. Most of my hobbies include gaming in some form or other, both video and table tops.”
Vlad Stefaniu – Customer Support Technician
“Coming from an IT background I joined Gamma as a support technician tasked with offering assistance on our entire product stack, and currently I am transitioning to a senior technician role. I really enjoy working in this challenging and dynamic environment and look forward to the complexities the new role will present.”
Iain Hamill – Senior Technician
“I work within the direct support team to provide knowledge to other members of the team through an assist channel, we also deal with customer escalations and internal Gamma escalations as a team to meet the customers expectations. I feel very fortunate to work with such an amazing team of technicians.”
We’d like to congratulate Martin, Vlad and Iain on their recent promotions. It is great to see them progressing within Gamma, whilst continuing to deliver exceptional service to our customers.
Keep a look out as we introduce you to more members of your support team in upcoming editions.
Your first port of call for Direct Support
Need support? Here’s a helpful reminder!
Level 1: Gamma Service Desk
- Phone: 0333 014 5333
- Email: [email protected]
Level 2: Team Lead – Direct Voice Support
- Contact: John McKeen
- Phone: 0333 043 8179
- Mobile: 07458 025 733
- Email: [email protected]
Level 3: Team Lead – Direct Data Support
- Contact: Rebecca Hemphill
- Phone: 0333 094 8262
- Mobile: 07458 025 894
- Email: [email protected]
Level 4: Direct Support Manager
- Contact: Ross Moran
- Phone: 0141 611 5118
- Mobile: 07458 031 049
- Email: [email protected]
Level 5: Head of Direct Support
- Contact: Siobhan Byrne
- Phone: 0333 240 3370
- Mobile: 07818 699 270
- Email: [email protected]
