Allied Global Holdings differentiates
services, minimizes overhead costs,
and successfully competes with
CastelConnects®.

CastelConnects® Empowers Collections Services Provider to Boost Agent Performance, Create and Modify Campaigns in Seconds, Extend Switch Life, and Deliver New Services.

Competing successfully in the highly competitive collections industry requires constant attention to service differentiation and delivery, optimized agent productivity, and peak utilization of technology investments. To meet these demanding business needs, Allied Global Holdings, Inc. (AGHI) implemented a CastelConnects® predictive dialer.

A six-time winner of the prestigious Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies award, AGHI is a leading international provider of accounts receivable management services, including debt acquisition, first party outsourcing services, and traditional third party contingency collections. Based in New Market, Ontario, AGHI operates call centers in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

CastelConnects Delivers

“We selected CastelConnects because it offers a diverse suite of tools that let us deliver high value, market-leading services to our clients in a cost effective manner for them—and for us,” says Phil Newfeld, AGHI’s Senior Vice President of Operations. “With this dialing solution, which includes an integrated soft switch, we will be able to boost our business volume 60 percent without adding staff. At the same time, the dialer enables us to roll out and modify campaigns in seconds and offer the new services, like virtual campaign support and message blasting, that our clients want, with the performance levels they demand. In addition, because our dialer is seamlessly integrated with our collection Management System, we can respond instantly to calling list changes.”

AGHI selected CastelConnects after a careful evaluation of available alternative technologies. “We’d been relying on Castel dialer technology since 1998, but when making business critical decisions, no vendor should be allowed to rest on their laurels,” Newfeld explains. “We compared Castel to competing solutions on the basis of features, functionalities, costs, and benefits. And even after this rigorous evaluation, CastelConnects was the clear winner.”

CastelConnects Switches

The driver for change was a growing customer base and growing call volumes. “With Castel Connects we could achieve a throughput of 250,000 calls per day for significantly less than the cost of adding a similar capacity to our legacy switch,” Newfeld says. “Equally impressive, since CastelConnects is native to our hardware platform, we did not need to incur any additional hardware, software, or implementation costs to achieve the seamless integration we wanted between the dialer, our switch, and our mainframe platform.” With an integrated dialer offering on the fly call suppression, AGHI is now able to be instantly responsive to changes in call lists as they are received. If a customer pays a bill, AGHI’s client sends notification, the server receives the notification, and the call list is automatically updated in real time. On the flip side, if clients want to add names to call lists, this can similarly be done instantaneously with a feature called campaign refresh.” A small benefit? Newfeld doesn’t think so: “Winning and keeping business is all about delivering the best possible service levels all the time, and with these CastelConnects features, we gain an important edge over many of our competitors,” he says.

CastelConnects Streamlines

To further improve results, AGHI relies on their dialer’s answering machine detect feature that lets them either hang up automatically when an answering device responds to a call, or route the call to an automated message delivery system. “With the ability to flexibly respond to answering machines we can let clients decide how they want to manage these situations,” Newfeld says. “But equally important, agent time is not wasted on calls unlikely to yield immediate results. This is a key benefit of the dialer since as many as 40 percent of all calls are terminated by answering devices.”

Call throughput and agent productivity are also enhanced with a feature called opportunity queuing. With this capability, if a call is connected when an agent is unavailable, a message is played to the consumer until an agent can respond.

As a result, what used to be dropped calls are now turned into connects. “Our goal,” Newfeld says, “is to get the best possible results for our clients by making sure that our agents engage in actual collections activities on as many calls as possible, and that as many consumers are contacted per unit time. With CastelConnects, we can achieve both of these objectives.”
Actual interactions with customers, whether by agents or messages, are specified by campaign parameters. To expedite campaign creation—and fine tuning—AGHI’s predictive dialer solution includes an easy to use interface that lets the company specify who gets called when, how connects are handled, how answering machine answers are handled, what is said in each of these situations, and how unanswered numbers are re-routed for another try. “The campaign tool is so efficient,” Newfeld says, “that where other dialers we looked at required several minutes to create or modify a campaign, CastelConnects can complete these tasks in just a few seconds.”

CastelConnects Scales

With CastelConnects’ agentless messaging feature, AGHI is also empowered to create virtual campaigns. “As we scale our business, we can now offer clients a very cost effective way of reaching out to customers that does not require any agent involvement,” Newfeld explains. “In essence, once we specify campaign parameters, the dialer does it all, dialing, leaving messages, and re-routing unanswered calls.”

“This is a competitive business,” he concludes. “Unless you can meet—and exceed—evolving industry needs, you won’t survive. With our CastelConnects predictive dialer, we are now equipped for the future.”

Download this Case Study as a PDF