Talk Me Through It (TMTI)

Talk Me Through It (TMTI) is a returns prevention company. It provides third-party pre and post-sales customer support services to 23 clients. These include large electrical goods retailers such as Argos and ASDA, plus electronics manufacturers such as Vestel, an international TV manufacturer for companies including Bush, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Alba. 

“Our contact centre handles around 10,000 calls each week,” explains Gareth Wemyss, Contact Centre Manager at TMTI. “Customers might get in touch because they don’t know how to operate a new device or if they’ve lost the instruction manual for an older appliance. We also deal with more complex issues like software updates or faulty components.” 

He continues: “Agents can fix over 80% of customer issues over the phone. This means we play an important role in helping our clients maintain higher margins while protecting the environment by reducing the likelihood of goods ending up in landfill. 

Each TMTI client has different customer support needs, some even have different opening hours, so Gareth is the first to admit that it’s a complex business. 

Gareth recalls that the previous solution’s reporting and analytics weren’t always accurate. “We tested it several times and kept getting unreliable results. Anyone who’s run a contact centre knows the importance of accurate SLA and KPI data, so you can imagine how frustrating this was for us. For example, in our old system, the time to answer was recorded from the moment the call hit the queue to when the agent answered the call. That’s not time to answer; that’s time on hold. Little things like that soon start to skew data, creating an unfair picture of agent responsiveness.” 

He elaborates: “Data is always our number one priority for our clients, so we’re delighted that Node4’s contact centre deployment delivers much more detailed information and far more accurate reporting. This includes dropped calls, calls answered and calls waiting.” 

Access to reliable call centre data also helps Gareth and his team ensure calls are distributed fairly across all agents. “On our old platform, agents could group in and out of different client support areas as they saw fit. We found some were avoiding more complex, technical calls, which wasn’t fair on other colleagues,” Gareth remembers. “With Webex, we can control which groups they join and ensure everyone takes their fair quota of the more complex and straightforward calls.” 

As providers of post-sales support, Gareth and TMTI’s leadership team know the importance of continued care and support for customers after their initial purchase. So, they particularly appreciated Node4’s ongoing consultancy. 

“A business like ours needs much more than a contact centre installation company,” he notes. “Webex offers a lot more customisation than our previous solutions. That’s great for us as each customer has different preferences and procedures that we need to accommodate. But you need a diligent, knowledgeable installation team, like the one we got with Node4, to do all the fine-tuning and make those subtle changes. We also appreciate the ongoing education they’re able to provide, which ensures we’re always getting the most from the solution.” 

As part of the ongoing consultation and education, Node4 and TMTI have been exploring future strategies for integrating AI into the contact centre. “Everyone has a different perspective on AI,” Gareth acknowledges. “But as a tech-driven company, we recognise the importance of embracing it to stay ahead. That said, our goal is not to replace people, we don’t believe that’s feasible in a contact centre environment. However, there are certainly areas where AI can provide valuable support. We’ve built various tools with AI, some examples have been fantastic, while others have been a disaster, reinforcing the need to find the right balance between human expertise and AI.” 

He explains further: “We’re a medium-sized enterprise with a skilled team of developers, but building our own AI solutions from the ground up isn’t currently the best use of our resources. By partnering with Node4, we can focus on delivering specific AI projects for our clients while benefiting from their expertise in developing our phone systems. Their combination of AI capabilities and Webex expertise is quite unique in the market, making this collaboration a significant advantage for us.”