At ELOVATE, we pride ourselves on providing a wide range of quality services to charities and eCommerce clients operating within a variety of sectors.

Primary responsibilities and day-to-day activities of the Contact Centre.

Our main activities involve handling inbound calls and emails for a variety of charity and eCommerce clients.  We not only take calls from people that may want to give a donation or place an order, but we also deal with a wide range of customer service queries, returns and refunds, direct debits and subscriptions, product enquiries and general enquiries about the company or charity – these can be via calls or emails. 

Overall, the Contact Centre plays a crucial role in maintaining positive customer relationships, addressing inquiries and concerns, and contributing to the overall success of each charity or company by embodying their individual needs and values.  If someone phones a charity number, for example, it is our job to seamlessly portray that they are calling that charity directly and that goes for every single call, so our Contact Centre team has many hats to wear!

Contact Centre Size and Structure

The Contact Centre currently has 80+ seats and is growing. We have a mix of dedicated resources (i.e., a charity may have a dedicated ELOVATE team that works solely for that charity) and our general team that looks after multiple clients.

Alignment with ELOVATE’s Company Values

The Contact Centre team embeds our company values into everything we do.  There is a real desire to make every interaction the best it can be, and the team is vital in making this happen:

• Team Player:  The Contact Centre aims for a culture of collaboration and teamwork among the team. Agents work together to address customer inquiries, issues, and feedback effectively. Cross-functional communication and cooperation are always encouraged, ensuring that information flows smoothly between different departments to provide comprehensive support to customers and supporters quickly and efficiently.
• Transparency & Integrity: Transparency is maintained within the Contact Centre by ensuring that agents are honest and forthcoming in their interactions with customers.  Agents are trained to provide accurate information and to address customer concerns with integrity/empathy, ensuring that customers feel confident in the information they receive.
• Love What We Do: The Contact Centre embodies each client’s passion for its products or services by ensuring that agents are enthusiastic and dedicated to helping customers. Agents are trained to approach each interaction with positivity and a genuine desire to assist, creating a positive customer experience that reflects each company or charity’s passion for what it offers. We’re always mindful of the fact that even though we interact with 100s of different people every day, each one of those calls, for the person on the other end of the phone, may be the only conversation they have that day, so every call needs 100% effort and care.
• Deliver Excellence: The Contact Centre strives for excellence in every customer interaction by setting high standards for service quality and efficiency. Agents are equipped with the necessary tools, training, and support to consistently meet or exceed customer expectations, thereby upholding the company’s commitment to excellence in all aspects of its operations.  By embodying these values and goals, the Contact Centre becomes a central hub for customer engagement that not only resolves issues and inquiries but also reinforces the company’s brand identity and commitment to its customers.

Additional Contact Centre Services

In addition to handling customer enquiries, the Contact Centre provides a wide range of value-added services designed to enhance customer experience and deliver deeper insight for the business.

• Social Media Management Services– We provide full omni-channel customer engagement, managing interactions across phone, email, webchat, chatbot and social media. Our social media management service allows all customer messages across social channels to be monitored, responded to and reported on in one place, ensuring a consistent and timely customer experience.
• Webchat and AI-Driven Chatbot Service– Customer information is captured upfront and passed directly to agents, streamlining conversations and reducing handling times. Our Smart Chatbot service also supports automated sales and upsell opportunities, recommending relevant products and services based on customer behaviour and values. It can even apply targeted discounts to help complete purchases, significantly reducing cart abandonment without the need for agent involvement.
• Call Capture and Call Insight Reporting– Agents tag the reason for each call immediately after it ends, giving clients clear visibility into why customers are getting in touch. This delivers powerful insight into customer needs, emerging issues and areas for improvement, helping organisations make informed decisions and enhance their overall service offering.

Together, these services allow the Contact Centre to not only manage customer interactions efficiently, but also support sales growth, improve customer journeys and provide actionable intelligence back to the organisation.

Measuring Contact Centre Success

There are a number of ways in which we measure the success of what we do:

• Agent Utilisation and Occupancy: This measures the percentage of time agents spend handling customer interactions, compared to their available working time. Occupancy measures the percentage of time agents are actively engaged in handling calls or tasks. Higher utilisation and occupancy rates indicate higher efficiency/productivity.
• Average Handling Time (AHT): We monitor the average time taken by agents to handle a customer interaction, including call duration, time spent on resolving issues, and any after-call work. Lower AHT often indicates higher efficiency, but this isn’t always the case, especially with charity clients, some of which don’t mind how long it takes as long as there is a positive outcome to the call.
• First Call Resolution (FCR): This measures the percentage of customer inquiries or issues resolved during the initial contact with the Contact Centre, without requiring follow-up calls or escalations. This is something that we are working on just now as the new system allows us to analyse this more closely.
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) Compliance: Our clients have various SLAs in place, and we actively monitor these daily across our dedicated and group teams.

Client Testimonial

“It has been great working with the Contact Centre and seeing their friendly and customer-focused approach to supporting our customers. Their willingness to go above and beyond to support a customer is much appreciated!”

Roseanne Hayter, Volunteer Experience Manager, RNLI

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Having robust security measures and vigilant data protection practices in place is a vital measure for companies and charities to stop sensitive information falling into the hands of unauthorised individuals. Failures in stopping these breaches are never far from the news headlines, indeed, even as recently as this month, we’ve seen Southern Water warning up to 500,000 customers that Russia-linked hackers have stolen their details.

Data breaches can have significant consequences for individuals and organisations alike, these include:

• Financial losses: Dealing with a breach requires significant financial resources. Costs include incident response, legal fees, customer notifications, and potential fines.
• Operational disruption: Breaches disrupt normal business operations, affecting productivity and efficiency.
• Reputation damage: Public awareness of a breach can harm a company’s reputation, eroding trust among customers, partners, and investors.
• Legal and regulatory challenges: Companies may face lawsuits, regulatory investigations, and penalties.
• Loss of customer confidence: Customers may abandon the company due to privacy concerns.

Clients of Elovate can be assured that we go above and beyond to ensure that your customer and supporter data is secure – whether that’s personal information, such as names and addresses, or financial data, such as credit card details.  

We have demonstrated our commitment by implementing various security controls and measures to safeguard our assets, internal data, and client data. Below, we outline the main accreditations that we’re proud to be awarded and explain what the main differences are.

Our accreditations: ISO/IEC 27001:2017

Elovate achieves ISO/IES 27001:17 security certification for the contact centre, web-based order fulfilment solution, and various services including response management, warehouse, and distribution of products including medical products for clients across the UK.

Our compliance with ISO certification is certified by the British Assessment Bureau. It offers United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) certification, and it is the only government-backed body for ISO certification in the United Kingdom. 

ISO/IEC 27001 is a security standard that formally specifies an Information Security Management System (ISMS) that is intended to bring information security under explicit management control. As a formal specification, it mandates requirements that define how to implement, monitor, maintain, and continually improve the ISMS. It also prescribes a set of best practices that include documentation requirements, divisions of responsibility, availability, access control, security, auditing, and corrective and preventive measures.

Our accreditations: ISO 9001:2015

ISO 9001 is a globally-recognised standard for quality management. It helps organisations of all sizes and sectors to improve their performance, meet customer expectations, and demonstrate their commitment to quality. Its requirements define how to establish, implement, maintain, and continually improve a quality management system (QMS). Implementing ISO 9001 means an organisation effective processes and trained staff in place to deliver flawless products or services time after time.

Elovate achieved our first ISO 9001 certification in 2011, and we continue to comply with all the requirements mentioned in the standard. Currently, ISO 9001 certification scope includes a contact centre, web-based order fulfilment solution, and various services including response management, warehouse, and distribution of products and medical products for clients across the UK.

As with the above ISO/IES 27001:17, our compliance is certified by the British Assessment Bureau with UKAS certification. 

Our accreditations: PCI: DSS v3.2.1

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of security standards designed to ensure that companies that accept, process, store, or transmit credit card or debit card information, maintain a secure environment. It helps to protect the cardholder data that your customers and donors share with us during payment and reduces the risk of payment card fraud by increasing security controls around cardholder data.

Cardholder security is a top priority for Elovate. External QSA (Qualified Security Assessors) from leading cyber security consultancy, Security Risk Management (SRM), have assessed our card processes and we are proud to be a PCI-compliant payment processor that invests in tools and technology to protect cardholder data.

Our commitment to safeguarding data

At Elovate, we take information security and data privacy extremely seriously. By complying with the PCI DSS standard, we demonstrate our commitment to safeguarding our customers’ credit card data. These measures protect against theft and fraudulent use on the internet. Furthermore, Elovate ensures the security of sensitive data and personal information, helping prevent credit card misuse and costly data breaches.

Additionally, by achieving ISO security standards, Elovate has established a structured approach to handling client data stored in our systems. This baseline increases trust between Elovate and our clients, assuring all of our stakeholders that their personal information is safe from malicious hackers.

If you have any questions about our commitment to data security, please contact us today.

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