What do you get when you cross Echo with the RAF?

Our Bristol contact centre recently hosted a visit from 'outreach' personnel from our client, The Royal Air Force. We regularly hold update meetings to ensure we are fully aligned with our clients' needs, and these sessions provide a great opportunity to brief agents who work on our different customer accounts. However this time our colleagues at RAF Careers suggested a somewhat more physical approach...

As a team leader I'm active on the contact centre floor and the news of an RAF 'team building' and educational day at the RAF's suggestion was initially met with some reluctance... I think some of our advisors envisaged a hard line assault course being built on the contact centre floor - complete with brick walls, ditches and hard-line sergeants shouting encouragement!

However, on the day we all had a great time further strengthening the Echo/RAF relationship. 20 advisors in two groups spent a couple of hours with two RAF outreach officers Flight Lieutenant Charles Paffett and Sergeant Dyfan Pierce, who took us through a brief classroom session and then made it much more interactive by running a series of physical team-building sessions. Our agents were certainly put through their paces under the RAF instruction but, as you can see from the pictures where one or two agents are actually smiling, our agents really did enjoy the day - although I'm not sure they will admit it!

Echo has helped RAF Careers with its multi-channel recruitment strategy - answering calls, fielding emails and managing social media interactions on Facebook and Twitter for a number of years. Our team provides information to potential recruits, makes outbound calls to warm leads, and also shares in-depth analytics with RAF Careers to help them optimise their advertising spend.

So in answer to my original question, the answer is when you cross Echo Managed Services with the RAF you get impressive results - for example a 400% increase in registrants of interest following an Echo outreach project.