Case Study

RNIB

Background

The Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) is the UK's leading sight loss charity, offering friendly support, expert advice, Talking Books, and a wide range of products and training to help people with sight loss learn new ways to get on with everyday life. There are around two million people in the UK with sight problems and every day another 100 people will start to lose their sight. RNIB helps rebuild lives devastated by sight loss.

The Challenge

RNIB's trading division, which sells cards and a range of gifts online and via a catalogue, finds the lead up to Christmas to be an exceptionally busy time. Traditionally, temporary staff were recruited to help with fulfillment during the most active trade period. This method of dealing with additional work, however, proved to be costly and problematic.

Claire Bagnall-Hunt, Marketing Manager of Trading at RNIB, said: "Twenty to 25% of our total expenditure was going towards fulfillment and using temps made it difficult for us to be as professional as we would have liked. It became clear that we could offer better service if we outsourced the operation."

The Solution

RNIB put out a tender for the fulfillment of the trade business and Remploy Offiscope found itself head to head with two very well-known and experienced specialist warehouses.

As a not-for-profit, ethical company, however, Remploy Offiscope was the perfect match. "On all levels - service, cost and ethics - Offiscope hit exactly the right note," said Claire. "Its scalable operation also offers us the flexibility we couldn't get in-house, bringing in additional trained staff during peak times."

Offering a fully-integrated outsourced solution, Remploy Offiscope took on a number of tasks on behalf of RNIB, including dealing with telephone orders and queries, picking and dispatching all gifts and cards efficiently and creating a bespoke online reporting system. Equipped with excellent customer service training, the Offiscope team also encouraged callers to make donations over the phone, processed payments and dealt with all orders and enquiries coming from the RNIB online shop.

The Outcome

Outsourcing fulfillment to Offiscope has made a huge and important difference to RNIB's trading division. During the busiest weeks in the run-up to Christmas, the percentage of potential customers ringing off before calls were answered reached 48% under RNIB's in-house operation. With Remploy Offiscope manning the phones, however, this is now well under 5%.

Claire said: "With Offiscope's online reporting system, I now have an extremely valuable tool that gives me real-time access to sales and a clear profile of our customers which helps us understand who they are and gives us the ability to market to them more effectively."

In addition, donations are up 10% which, Claire says, is to some extent a result of Offiscope's telephone training. RNIB's trading division has also enjoyed a 19% increase in turnover, which Claire attributes in part to the efficiency and accessibility of the new outsourced fulfillment team.

And here, team is the right word: "Sometimes, it's obvious to customers when departments are outsourced, but in this case it truly feels like Remploy Offiscope is part of our organisation," Claire added.