Travel agent Thomas Cook has completed a £500,000 upgrade of its four UK call centres, creating a single 'virtual' contact centre to improve operational efficiency.

The company is using specialised software to handle calls faster and route customer requests to the most appropriate operator.

'The same number of sales agents are now able to sell more holidays, while we can keep customers happier by putting them through to someone who specialises in the type of holiday they want,' said head of capacity and yield Simon Priestley.

Thomas Cook employs some 950 call centre staff who handle between 50,000 and 80,000 calls per week for holidays ranging from round-the-world backpacking trips to Caribbean cruises.

'The software helps us break down calls into any one of 25 separate categories of specialisation, then route to the first available agent in any of our four call centre sites,' said Priestley.

The contact centre software, provided by Aspect Communications, has halved the 'time to answer' for around two-thirds of customers calling the company and increased the percentage of successfully handled calls from 89 per cent to 94 per cent.

The result is a 250,000 drop in abandoned customer calls since the new technology was installed.

For future improvements, Priestley hopes to deliver a more multimedia-based system by integrating the contact centre with the Thomas Cook website.

'I think there's a lot of potential for improvement through closer integration. We could put options for web browsers to click a button and receive a call from a sales agent to discuss the page they're viewing or help them find what they're looking for,' he said.

Priestley also hopes to deliver more feedback via text message, helping to improve communications between call centre staff and customers.

The project started last summer, and the software went live at the end of November.