22 March 2007
120 staff ensure £358 per minute is taken on Comic Relief opening night
Kingston Communications' first ever dedicated Comic Relief contact centre ensured that behind the scenes on Friday night, a total of 3270 calls could be processed, resulting in donations in excess of £107,500.
Seventy phone lines at the contact centre, based in Hull, were staffed by volunteers from across the company with each volunteer needing to react quickly and efficiently to deliver an average of £358 in donations per minute over the course of Red Nose Day evening.
Michele Settle, Marketing Director at Comic Relief said, "The kindness of volunteers like the staff at Kingston is essential in making Red Nose Day such a success each year. The contact centre team's careful but speedy processing of donations has so far helped Comic Relief to raise a total on the night of £40,236,142."
Jason Rewse-Davies of Kingston Communications said, "This is the first time we've worked with Comic Relief and it's a great pleasure to give our time for such a worthy cause. The team worked incredibly hard to ensure that the call centre could handle as many calls as possible and all donations were processed smoothly."
The Kingston team were able to seamlessly handle all of the Comic Relief calls that poured in on Friday night due to a robust system that was installed to handle the massive volume and direct calls quickly to the available team members. Full back-ups were in place to ensure that calls could be automatically rerouted to other Comic Relief teams around the country should there be a problem.
Online donation forms were completed for each donation with a paper based back-up in place.
