Initial UK challenge and current activity 2023-date

The initial challenge was to deploy a sufficiently skilled team of 10FTE UK agents to boost results on motor finance debt collection being achieved by its in-house operation. With results from day one exceeding target, our client rapidly gained the confidence to expand our remit to incorporate handling of broader customer service enquiries at specific times of the day in order to free up its own teams to focus on complex customer needs.

A 22 FTE UK team now undertake inbound and outbound collections, including payment processing following the decision by MFS to divest itself of its existing platform/partner. In late 2023, the client’s confidence in the calibre and commitment of our agents meant they expanded the team’s scope of activities to incorporate non-regulated white mail, email and ad hoc back office customer service tasks. The precise number of FTE allocated to each activity is determined by evolving, often unpredictable levels of demand, requiring the team to adopt a flexible approach.

Rather than add totally new dedicated resources, which would have been costly and inefficient for our client, Sigma Connected were able to supplement and train the existing collection agents on the additional customer support requirements because our expert WFM team built integrated resource plans to ensure the right number of people were in place to meet demand across both campaigns. The net result has been a consistent and flexible resource supporting the additional activities for very little additional cost.

Sigma Connected has consistently met or surpassed all key collections and other activity performance metrics every month in 2025 on both services, as the following table from our most recent quarterly business review with the client illustrates.

Quality of customer and business outcomes is helped by the fact our agent team is highly tenured, with annualised attrition under 10% in 2024 – a remarkable feat given the general challenges with attraction and retention being routinely reported by the UK domestic contact centre industry since the Pandemic. This exceptional retention is testament to Sigma Connected’s overarching people proposition and the specific incentive scheme we have co-created with the client and introduced last year.

Our sustained success in the original collections line of business is testament to the innovative customer engagement and collection strategies created from the forensic analysis of customer contact and conversion data produced by our expert data analyst and strategy team, as much as the calibre of our agents.

Additional services in South Africa 2024-date

Our exceptional performance and record of continuous improvement gave the client’s key stakeholders total confidence in Sigma Connected’s ability and willingness to go the extra mile in all aspects of service delivery. It created a genuinely strategic partnership and led to the award of additional customer service contracts in 2024 and 2025, all implemented in South Africa to deliver cost reduction and enhance flexibility in its overall operations.

We started by implementing a general customer service team of 16FTE in March 2024. Once we had proved through a period of overwhelming green scorecards against all KPIs over the ensuing 12 months that the quality of customer experience matches that of UK delivery, the client asked us to double the team size in 2025.

Prior to this ramp, we implemented a second service in South Africa in October 2024 that focused specifically on managing first emails and later inbound calls relating to the UK motor finance Discretionary Commission Arrangements issue that has been the subject of extensive media scrutiny and under judicial/FCA review.

This activity remains ongoing, largely as a result of sustained demand driven by unpaid and unplanned media coverage, for example articles published by Martyn Lewis providing email templates for customers and entails deployment of a team now numbering 30FTE. Once the judicial review is complete and the FCA makes its ruling, the client expects a surge in enquiry volume, so having this nucleus of experienced staff in place has been incredibly useful beyond taking pressure off its other operations. Because level of demand has been hard to predict, Sigma Connected has shown enormous flexibility, for example multi-skilling agents across both this and the general customer service activity, and recalibrating shift patterns.

As with the UK collections team, we have delivered exceptional levels of agent tenure and engagement in South Africa. Monthly attrition is below the already market leading average of 3% Sigma Connected recorded across all client services since the beginning of 2024 which our benchmarking shows to be 50% better than any known BPO in the Western Cape.

This exceptional commitment has driven a level of knowledge and enthusiasm that has been instrumental in us achieving overwhelmingly green scorecards for every KPI governing operational efficiency and quality. In fact, reports produced for our most recent monthly business review with the client in June 2025 shows we have achieved our highest ever CSAT score of 4.5 and sentiment score of 4.33 that month, and an impressive 95-96% QA score against a target of 90% for every month of 2025.

This has undoubtedly played a part in the client deciding in July 2025 to extend our scope of services even further by entrusting Sigma Connected with the addition of a small team focused on managing customer enquiries relating to Leasing. We expect the scale and scope of our collaboration and specifically South African operations to continue to grow further in coming years.