−40%
The queue moved to an Omni team around 40% smaller than the in-house one.
Case study · Inbound customer care
Fewer agents. Shorter queues. Far fewer hang-ups.
When a leading telecom operator in Oman handed us its inbound care line, we took a queue of tens of thousands of calls a month from its in-house team, ran it with around 40% fewer agents — and cut the share of customers who hung up before being served from more than a third to under one in ten.
The model
Outsourced end to end. A fixed monthly cost.Inbound customer care for a leading telecom operator in Oman — a fully Omani team, trained on the operator's own systems and products.
⅓ → 1/10
The share of customers who hung up before being served — from more than a third to under one in ten.
−60%
From about a minute and a half to around half a minute.
2×
Calls handled per agent per month, roughly doubled.
The brief
Lower the cost base and lift the experience, at once.
The operator ran its own care line in-house. Volumes were high and lumpy, and the line was struggling: only two calls in three were handled, and the average customer waited about a minute and a half to be answered. The client wanted two things that usually pull in opposite directions: a materially lower cost base and a materially better customer experience. And it did not have time — engaged to work alongside the in-house team, we were asked shortly after to take over the whole operation, with less than a month's notice.
The handover
A new team in under a month, and a promise about when it would perform.
With the cutover date fixed, we recruited, hired and trained a complete new team in the weeks before it. On day one, every agent on the line was new to it — and we were clear with the client about what that meant: a newly trained agent takes a few months to reach the standard we hold them to, and the numbers would show it before they showed the improvement.
They did. And then they did.
The first months were the learning curve we had told the client to expect — and it ended on schedule. The first full month with a seasoned team was the best month the line had recorded up to that point — nearly nine calls in ten handled, abandonment down to around one in ten, the average wait cut to well under a minute. It has stayed in that range since.
How we run it
Staff the call curve, not the org chart.
Roster built from the call curve
The single biggest driver of the improvement: matching agents to when calls actually arrive. The roster is rebuilt from the half-hourly arrival pattern rather than fixed shifts — peak hours fully staffed, quiet hours not. That is how a smaller team answers more calls than a bigger one did.
Shorter calls, without rushing
Average handling time came down by around a fifth, and keeps falling — from knowledge-base and wrap-up discipline, coaching on the top call reasons and removing avoidable transfers. Not from pushing agents to talk faster.
Reporting the client can act on
The client receives the same monthly view we manage by — offered, handled, answered within target, wait, handling time, abandonment — with no smoothing. When a spike lands, both sides can see it, size it and plan for the next one together.
The results
Nine calls in ten answered, by a team 40% smaller.
For the client
- A care line run on around 40% fewer seats than its own team needed, at a fixed monthly cost it can plan around.
- Improvement on every measure it tracks: handled, abandoned, wait, service level and handling time.
- A fully Omani team, trained on the operator's own systems and products, that it did not have to recruit, manage or retain.
- Monthly reporting on the metrics its own management uses — spikes left in and explained.
For their customers
- Nine calls in ten answered — up from two in three.
- The average wait down from about a minute and a half to around half a minute.
- Quicker answers from agents coached on the top call reasons — never rushed off the line.
In steady-state operation the team has handled well over 400,000 calls — and in its best month, almost every call was answered, at an average wait measured in seconds.
Get in touch
Have a queue that needs fixing?
We take over inbound customer care for operators and service businesses across the Gulf, in Arabic and English, with a staged handover and results you can measure month by month.