South Gloucestershire Leisure Trust (SGL) has installed a new telephone system to improve the caller experience.

SGL, which operates five Leisure Centres across South Gloucestershire in partnership with South Gloucestershire Council, made the move after a review of how it was managing incoming calls.

James Clifford, head of marketing at SGL, said: "SGL leisure centres were contactable via several local telephone numbers which were published in site literature, on the SGL website and in usual associated directories. In 2008 SGL identified that over a 12 month period 130,000 calls were made to their leisure centres. Of the 130,000 calls only 41 per cent were answered leaving 59 percent - 77,000 calls - engaged or unanswered. This equated to unhappy callers, over 300 complaints and a significant amount of lost bookings and revenue.

"The front-of-house, customer service advisors were regularly working flat out dealing with face-to-face customer bookings and enquiries; so it was down to chance as to whether the phone got answered."

Clifford contacted Class, who had provided inbound solutions to other leisure trusts, in order to improve the overall caller experience with relatively low start-up and running costs. He also wanted to be able to accurately measure call handling performance, call trends and with it staffing requirements.

A bespoke solution was built including publishing a single memorable 0300 number to cover all sites, smarter call routing and creating a back office call centre to remove the bottleneck at front desks. SGL also has access to historic and live data.

As a result of the new system, 94 per cent of inbound calls are answered, call waiting times are significantly down and complaints are down to 0.

Mark Crutchley CEO, said:" I have to commend Class, with 94 percent of our inbound calls now being answered, Class' 0300 solution has demonstrably improved SGL's customer service levels and with it our image and customer satisfaction."