TieTa's COO Talks Customer Service Outsourcing Strategy

We caught up with Tom Horne, the current COO of TieTa, a new company that allows you to outsource your customer services, in a highly professional and cost-effective way.

Whilst the Oxfordshire-based company initially set up to help companies in financial services, the startup has generated huge demand in assisting clinics and centres who are offering rapid Covid-testing results across the UK.

Background

During April 2020, the UK government brought out a national testing strategy with the aim of delivering over 100,000 tests each day. This led to them asking for assistance from companies across the industry to help meet that target and tackle the rise of Covid-19 across the country. The government required help from specific companies able to supply and manufacture coronavirus tests in order to increase the UK’s testing capacity over the months that were to come.

In the week commencing August 16th 2021, over 230,000 people have tested positive for coronavirus in the UK alone. This is calculated at roughly 31,000 people testing positive on a daily basis, with negative tests also taking place. This demonstrates the continued demand for Covid-19 testing in the UK, with only 76.9% of people having had their second dose of a vaccine by August 22nd 2021.

How did Tieta come about? What is the company’s history?

Tom Horne: TieTa was essentially the customer service arm of MY JAR, one of the UK’s large short-term lenders and over 8 years, we successfully served more than 300,000 customers in terms of loan enquiries, underwriting and collections.

Today, TieTa is an outsourced customer service centre and we are able to assist businesses of all sizes with our local team which is based in Banbury in Oxfordshire.

A client’s technology is very simply integrated with ours, so whether they use Google, Zoho or Salesforce, it is very easy to integrate, up to any customer engagements and provide live reporting back to the client.

How does TieTa help Covid-Testing Companies?

Tom Horne: TieTa is helping a number of clients to better administer and communicate their Covid-19 testing, including general tests, fit-to-fly, day 2 and day 8 tests after the customer has returned from their travels abroad.

TieTa is working with these clinics and centres to make bookings and send results across email, phone, SMS, live chat and social media.

There was clearly a need for good outsourcing in this area, especially when the government published the list of approved clinics which were permitted to offer Covid-19 testing - and they were quite frankly overwhelmed with the thousands of enquiries that they were getting every day. What clinic can suddenly manage that level of volume?

How has TieTa been able to continuously meet the demand?

Tom Horne: TieTa offers an in-house solution which can be deployed rapidly, meaning more customer service agents can become available during busier times. All agents must undergo extensive training so that they can answer any question or situation on behalf of the client.

TieTa was very accustomed to working with clients under strict FCA regulations, so we always had to pay very close attention to detail.

Consequently, the pivot to Covid-testing has felt very natural for us - although we continue to assist a variety of businesses with their customer service, such as those in finance, debt recovery, retail and insurance.

TieTa offers total flexibility for any client, allowing them to use trained agents for as long as they wish, whether it is every day, just the weekends or busier periods. TieTa values high quality customer service and we are proud to always offer flexible contracts and a very personal experience.

For more information visit TieTa.co.uk