Capita resourcing adopts SRC Speech recognition service for recruitment campaign

Capita Resourcing, the UK’s market leader in the provision of volume recruitment services, has signed a two-year contract with SRC to use the SRC ContactCapture(tm) speech recognition system for its telephone recruitment services. The agreement follows the success of a pilot for Northamptonshire Fire Service that resulted in widespread enthusiasm and praise from callers.

The service automatically collects the name and address details of callers and identifies which vacancy they are requesting a job application pack for, using SRC ContactCapture, a packaged speech recognition system that handles calls 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with all calls answered immediately.

Each year we handle thousands of recruitment campaigns on behalf of our clients and despatch around half a million application packs to prospective candidates, said Jenny Mayes, Director, Capita Resourcing.

Historically we relied on human call centre agents to handle these requests, but inevitably this lead to challenges planning the resource required to manage fluctuations in demand and also meant we were unable to handle calls out of hours.

The impact of introducing a speech recognition based service to eliminate these issues was evaluated during a pilot for Northamptonshire Fire Service. Capita surveyed a random selection of callers and asked a series of questions with which callers could agree or disagree on a 5-point scale. The service scored very high satisfaction levels, particularly in areas of efficiency and professionalism, with comments including: Instant, quick and simple; Good idea for time saving; Simple and clear to understand; Wish other companies would use these services; First time I have used this type of service and I was impressed.

Commenting on the responses, Jenny Mayes, Director, Capita Resourcing, said, We’re delighted with the positive feedback we received from the survey. Even callers who commented that they would have preferred to speak to a human agent said that the automated service was far preferable to waiting in a queue for the call to be answered and that it was both user friendly and professional.

These results, coupled with the impact speech recognition has on reducing operational costs, made the decision to fully adopt SRC ContactCapture for our recruitment campaigns very straightforward, she continued.

The two-year contract between Capita Resourcing and SRC means that Capita’s other high-profile public and private sector clients, will now also be able to benefit from the SRC speech recognition solution.

Achieving acceptable call waiting times and delivering high levels of customer service whilst controlling costs has always been a challenge for call centre operations. With the introduction of the SRC ContactCapture speech recognition service, Capita have been able to eliminate call waiting times, reduce costs and deliver excellent customer service levels, said SRC CEO, Chris Hart.

We’re delighted that Capita Resourcing has recognised speech recognition’s potential and that its many high profile customers will now benefit from the SRC ContactCapture service.

The SRC ContactCapture service can handle tens of thousands of calls per week and is hosted remotely on SRC’s carrier-grade ISE (Intelligent Speech Environment) platform, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Other customers of SRC’s mass-market automated telephony solutions include Lloyds TSB Registrars, Freeview (BBC, BSkyB and Crown Castle), Archers Direct (Cosmos Holidays), Hemscott, Sports Loyalty Card, Commercial Collection Services, Park Group, Coral, Tote and Littlewoods.