Flare Design
What we do

Practical expertise, built inside contact centres.

From five seats to five thousand: health checks, service delivery strategy, standing up new capability, transforming existing operations, and managing the technology vendors and BPOs around them.

Where we start

Two ways we arrive. Often the first.

Most of our work arrives by word of mouth: someone who watched us do it once calls us the next time, or recommends us to the person who has just inherited the problem.

When it has already gone wrong

Late, fast, and into difficult situations.

A good share of our engagements start after the programme has stalled: the platform is live and the floor is worse than before, or the build has run long and the large consultancy has rolled off. That is the point at which someone who has seen it before is worth more than another workshop.

We can arrive late because we know the landscape: the platforms and their failure modes, the vendors and how they behave under pressure, and what a contact centre needs on the Monday after go-live. We stabilise first, find the real bottleneck second, and then decide what of the original plan is still worth keeping.

What you get: a working operation within weeks, a plain account of what went wrong, and a recovery plan sized to what is actually broken.

Our usual way, given the choice

Early, before the commitments.

What clients tell us matters most is the early engagement: analysis of vendor proposals before anything is signed. That is what removes the change control and rework that uninformed planning produces later, and it puts the business on the front foot when defining solutions and dealing with vendors.

What you get: a decision you can defend, made in the right order. The four pillars below are that order. Technology is last on purpose.

The four pillars

Demand, people, process. Then technology.

  1. Customer demand

    Remove the waste

    Most contact volume is a symptom. Before anyone designs a channel, we find out why people are contacting you at all: which enquiries are avoidable, which are a failure somewhere else in the business, and which are the calls you actually want.

    That means demand analysis by intent, not by queue. Utterance and intent modelling, communities of interest, and an honest look at what self-service can genuinely resolve rather than deflect into another channel.

    What you get: a demand model by intent and value, a list of contacts that should not exist, and a self-service scope that will hold up in front of your customers.

  2. People and operating model

    Optimise the workflow

    Technology cannot fix an operating model. We look at how work actually flows through the centre: learning pathways, the operating rhythm, span of control, and how much complexity an agent can reasonably hold before quality drops.

    We have run these floors. The design has to survive a Monday morning, a system outage and a new starter — so it is built with the people who will run it, not handed to them.

    What you get: a target operating model, workforce modelling by case type, skill and geography, and the coaching and quality framework that makes it stick.

  3. Process

    Find the real bottleneck

    Every contact centre has a list of quick wins. We are more interested in the root cause — the one bottleneck that the quick wins keep working around. Often it is not where the business thinks it is.

    Digital-first does not change this. Cases, back-office work and assisted channels still need their workflow defined, measured and fixed, or the digital channel simply generates them faster.

    What you get: current-state process definition, the bottleneck named with evidence, and a future-state design that a vendor can build to without interpretation.

  4. Technology

    Enablement, last

    Only with the first three understood can you write requirements for a platform that fits. We specify, evaluate and select — existing systems, cloud CCaaS, a BPO, or building from the ground up — and we hold no reseller agreements with any of them.

    Then we support delivery with the practitioners each stage needs: requirements, speech and IVR design, automated testing against real customer utterances, UAT, and on-site hypercare through go-live with the agents who have to use it.

    What you get: fit-for-purpose requirements, a defensible selection, and a migration that lands — with the change management that decides whether it does.

Platforms

People ask what technology we work with.

Here is where our expertise lies. We have helped organisations migrate to and from the major contact centre platforms, including:

  • Amazon Connect
  • Genesys
  • Cisco
  • NICE CXone
  • Avaya
  • Mitel
  • and others

Alongside the platforms themselves: CRM and case management, workforce management, speech and IVR, and automated testing.

We are independent. We hold no reseller agreements and have no bias toward any vendor, so the recommendation is always the one that fits your operation.

Method

Agile, with the detail of waterfall.

Agile delivery is good at building; it is bad at knowing what to build. Our practitioners have already done the discovery a business analyst would spend months on, because they have run the operation being redesigned. Clients describe it as getting the speed of agile with the detail of waterfall.

Start with a conversation.

Tell us where the pressure is, and we will tell you honestly whether we can help.

Get in touch