“Stellar’s innovative outsourcing solutions help clients reduce operating costs, improve quality levels and increase revenue and profitability.”
The global contact center software market size is expected to reach USD 47.76 billion by 2025, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Rapid technological advancements resulted in the introduction of the Business Process Automation (BPA), thereby, reducing the workload of customer care representatives. The availability of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) software has resulted in an increase in productivity of customer-centric organizations.
Stellar’s innovative outsourcing solutions help clients reduce operating costs, improve quality levels and increase revenue and profitability. Stellar is a leading global call centre and business process outsourcing provider, with over 6,000 employees across 18 outsourcing centres in Australia, UK, USA, Canada and the Philippines. The company serves a range of clients in the telecommunications, utilities, transport, finance, government and manufacturing industries. In addition to call centre outsourcing, Stellar specializes in document management, workflow automation technology and process outsourcing solutions.
Stellar’s expertise lays in the end-to-end customer journey, delivering an outsourcing offering informed by research, decades of experience and state-of-the-art technological solutions. Named Outsourcer of the Year for the last seven years running by Frost & Sullivan; Stellar have centres across Australia, the Philippines, the US and South Africa; delivering services for a diverse client base that spans a broad range of industries.
Clients work with Stellar to ensure a trusted partnership with a company that will lead them through digital transformation to be on the forefront of the next big breakthrough of customer service. Stellar is passionate about people and passionate about customers, working with agility to ensure our clients keep a competitive edge in their industry.
Leading the Company
Kelli Hayes joined Stellar in 1999 and has performed numerous roles in the business. Appointed permanently to the role of CEO in 2019, Kelli is responsible for leadership across the organisation, encompassing both Stellar’s culture of Open Book Management and strategic direction. Whilst being based out of the Philippines, Kelli most recently headed up Stellar’s Philippines and US businesses.
Kelli’s previous roles with Stellar include four years as Chief Operating Officer, and prior to that Chief Strategy Officer, facilitating Stellar’s market entry into the Philippines and various joint ventures. Kelli has a healthy pedigree in leading Stellar’s sales, project, pricing and commercial teams. They know that the best way to serve their clients is to put together bright, agile teams of diverse and entrepreneurial people who are deeply engaged in their business. The company knows that when staff feels valued, they shine the brightest – so they invest in them as deeply as the clients.
The company’s staff come from all walks of life, and everyone is welcome at Stellar. They celebrate the diversity of their teams and what the variety of cultures and backgrounds can bring to the business. The tenure of their team is unmatched in the outsourcing industry, and that means keeping knowledge, talent and passion within the walls of their business.
The Complete Solution
Stellar’s proprietary software cStar is designed to meet the diverse needs of the clients without needing to license expensive third-party options. It has been built to efficiently handle customer interactions across multiple channels; with functionality across customer relationship management, workflow and case management, and campaign management. They launched cStar in 2002 to handle inbound and outbound campaigns. With each new partnership came new demands and challenges, so they kept building on the software. Today cStar is a mature workflow and case-management solution that we continue to invest in.
It’s the bridge between an organization’s brand, agents and their customer. cStar can be used as a standalone system for the end-to-end customer journey or integrated with existing systems to handle just one element. As the architects of cStar’s code, Stellar can scale it up — or down — quickly and cost-effectively. Their speed to market is second-to-none: whether it’s in implementation, build or updates. The company reuses templates and action customers’ requests in-house.
cStar categorizes, allocates and tracks works across multiple channels. It sorts work based on how important the transaction is, so the customers are serviced in the best order to minimise churn. For each customer, cStar can show a 360° view of different interactions over weeks or months – whether that’s through SMS, email, voice or back-of-house. The suite of reports has been built organically over time as Stellar has looked for new ways to solve client challenges.
The solution is out of the box and can discover the conversion rate, throughput, occupancy, how a specific agent is performing against KPIs, and list penetration. cStar is fully integrated with the Aspect Unified IP dialer. Without a dialer platform, outbound agents only average 15 minutes talking per hour. An integrated dialer and cStar solution means agents spend at least 45 minutes talking per hour.
cStar houses an information services module, with a library of frequently asked questions. The agents will have the answers to their clients’ complex questions in seconds, with rich search functionality ensuring there is no waiting time. Stellar also offers a unified desktop that gives agents everything they need –from scripting and call-flow to customer information, interaction history and agent performance statistics.
The Unique Offerings
Self-service Interactive Voice Response (IVR) gives organizations a chance to deliver a superior customer experience and show customers how they value customer’s time. Hence, don’t give them hold music. Help them help themselves. IVR can streamline the process for a company and its agents, doing some of the legwork behind the scenes. Voice biometrics can assess your customer’s authentication and button commands can guide the customer to the best person to help them. Instead of waiting on hold, the customer can help themselves.
When they get through to an agent, they can jump into the conversation with the background and context have already taken care of. Reducing the demand on the agents ultimately drives costs down; with the simpler transactions taken care of without a human touch. Stellar offers a spectrum of IVR – from simple inbound to complex pre-routing and outbound services that use speech recognition and text-to-speech.
The unique features include voice biometrics customer authentication, self-service for support ticket queries, automated telephone surveys, automated collections solutions, customer appointment management, and 100 percent cloud-based platform: with data centres in Australia and USA.
The company also offers rich insights that are held within the customer phone calls, but with millions of interactions a year, it’d be impossible to manually monitor each one. It’s the trends one can only see when one has the ability to listen across all agents and customer segments. It’s the timing of flare-ups in customer complaints in relation to the organizational marketing campaigns and also read the emotions the customers’ exhibit and how these translate into sales, churn or NPS results.
Stellar’s speech analytics can uncover trends with complaints and escalations. It also displays when to intervene in a customer’s journey to make sure they don’t lose their business, it also teaches about why organizations have repeat calls and what can be done to avoid them. Stellar also helps to answer questions like is there a specific billing issue that could be avoided with a change in the website content? Could forgotten payments be avoided with an SMS blast?
Stellar’s solution also assists in investigating internal processes and ensure there are no gaps in agent knowledge to streamline the contact centre operation. It also offers the provision of identifying cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, increasing revenue, and truly understand the voice of your customer and translate insights into NPS improvement.
Stellar’s speech analytics solution analyses voice calls and transforms them into text, pulling out customer sentiment through the identification of key customer language triggers and indicators. It automatically applies keywords, so calls can be sorted by specific issues. After a few days, trends start to develop, and we can uncover quick wins for your business. The solution works at improving customer satisfaction, reducing churn, uncovering competitor intelligence, discovering service issues, improving agent performance and reporting on campaign effectiveness.
To deliver a superior customer experience, each function in your business needs to operate as smoothly as possible. An efficient and organized back-office is a well-oiled machine, eliminating wasted time and misspent resource. Stellar provides extensive back of house processing for our clients. They’re spread across different industries, with a wide range of transaction needs. Their range of transaction types is varied and extensive, and they will continue to add to it as their clients move into new areas and discover new challenges.
Whether its credit card payments, direct debit management, disconnections, complaint emails, refund processing, travel bookings or ombudsman liaison – Stellar has delivered it and exceeded their clients’ expectations. Stellar has the capability to find the best solution for any particular needs, their multi-skilled agents can handle back of house functions as well as customer-facing, to maximize efficiency. Stellar can deliver a ‘right shore’ solution, with a mix of services delivered in Australia the Philippines and the USA. Or they can offer flexible scalable solutions to fit any organization’s objectives.
Moving Towards the Future
Stellar for the days to come will keep innovating their proprietary cStar software, which offers a scalable and flexible solution for back-office workflow campaigns whilst providing the highest levels of automation, efficiency, data integrity, security and detailed operational and performance reporting.
They want to make it a point to offer as many benefits to their existing clients in terms of major cost savings, increased efficiencies and streamlining organizational workflow.
Customer care was how Stellar started in 1998, with just one client and one call centre. From these humble beginnings they have grown their footprint and their capabilities, but at the core, they are still passionate about people and passionate about customers. Their approach is to work collaboratively; engaging with clients, suppliers and the internal functional areas to plan, design, and deliver services and solutions that delight the clients and their customers. Stellar does it by building long-lasting relationships with clients, incentivizing the staff to truly understand their business and goals through their profit-sharing program. “Your success is our success, and we consider ourselves true partners with our clients. Our dedicated and passionate teams will put your customers first,” states the company website.
