Teleforge Communications, a tier-3 voice solutions provider focused on providing carrier-grade voice services to medium and large enterprises and call centres, has announced it has saved Maodi Attorneys, a black-owned debt collection based in Kempton Park, 50% on its monthly telephone costs, as well as doubling the number of calls being made by its 50-man call centre.

This was confirmed by Tebogo Maodi, founder and director of Maodi Attorneys.

“Since signing with Teleforge as our telecommunications provider, we have, on average, doubled the number of calls made per agent. With our better agents, call rates have tripled – if not more.

“This has had a tremendous impact on our operations – and overall efficiency levels. In terms of our debt collections, we continue to increase every month with new accounts paying. It is not easy to put a figure to it, but our collections have doubled – and continue to increase.

“The installation has been up to our expectations – if not beyond. The service rendered by Teleforge has certainly been in line with their undertaking and we are satisfied that there has not been any downtime attributable to them.”

Maodi Attorneys is arguably one of the largest black-owned debt collection company in South Africa.

Teleforge’s main target market is companies with a telephony expenditure of R20 000 or more per month with a specific emphasis on call centres. Customers are selectively chosen to ensure very high overall service levels are maintained at all times.

Andrew van Niekerk, a director of Teleforge, says: “The company provides multiple redundant data and voice routes to ensure the highest possible voice quality and reliability at all times.

“The company partners with all its clients to ensure that they get the best possible hardware and software solutions, the most reliable and cost effective connectivity – and the best service in the industry. We do this so that our customers can focus on what they do best – running their business, and not their IT department.”

The company offers full integration with many different industry solutions by providing a seamless back end telephony engine to provide various services to the call centre agents and managers. It also provides an operator panel and advanced reporting tools that allow managers and quality control personnel to monitor call quality and check for improperly trained staff, unauthorised usage, perform new employee training and coaching, and retrieve call recordings.

Van Niekerk says Teleforge becomes the total communications solutions provider, ensuring voice and data systems are up 99% of the time, guaranteed.

One of the methodologies used by Teleforge is predictive dialling, a state-of-the-art mode used to call a large number of contacts within a short period of time. The system optimises the agent’s talk time by reducing the idle times between calls by freeing up the agents from manual calling and ringing time.

Predictive dialling gathers statistics concerning the duration of calls, how long it takes for calls to be answered, and how often calls are answered. Additionally, when an agent is about to become idle, the system places several calls, ensuring that agents are always connected.

Predictive dialling is also useful in call campaigns to call a large number of contacts and to maximise the working time of agents.