Tourism Ireland, the organisation responsible for growing overseas tourism to Ireland has awarded their worldwide call centre contract to Conduit, following an EU Level 4 tendering process. The contract is worth between €3m-€4m over a three year period.

Conduit went ‘live’ with Tourism Ireland at the beginning of the month and will be handling queries in six languages from 15 markets through out the world ranging from general customer enquiries from prospective visitors to these shores to advertising responses, tourism and travel trade queries and emails.

Tourism Ireland anticipates around 150,000 calls and about the same number in emails to be directed to this centre during its first year. Gary Dunleavy Manager Customer Enquiries Tourism Ireland said: “It is vital in today’s competitive world that we are able to respond immediately and positively to any customer enquiry. We intend to leverage the centralisation facilitated by the call centre and help close the “customer loop” to be able to very quickly feed back important information to our markets – enabling them to further enhance and improve marketing and advertising activities in-market.

Reflecting the growing importance of on-line and e-communications, both Tourism Ireland and Conduit expect the level of email queries to grow rapidly and even outnumber telephone queries over the next couple of years. Commenting on the deal Denis Creighton, Chief Operating Officer, Conduit said, “we are very pleased to have been awarded this new business, Tourism Ireland is a very prestigious client for us to have and we guarantee that we will provide a top class, efficient service to them and to their customers.”

Creighton went on to say, “At present we can say that telephone calls out number email but by end of the contract we fully expect this to be reversed. At present about 150,000 calls are received for Tourism Ireland each year, but we would anticipate by Year 3 of this contract to be dealing with 300, 000 emails and possibly 250,000 calls.”

Conduit, based in East Point Business Park Dublin, employs over 1500 people in four countries, including over 500 people in Ireland. The Company operates six call centres, which are located in Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, and Wales. As well as providing its own-branded directory assistance services, Conduit provides call centre facilities for a number of major blue-chip clients providing customer support, sales and back-office functions on an outsourced basis.

Tourism Ireland’s new €50 million global advertising campaign “Discover Your Very Own Ireland” was launched in New York on Wednesday night. The integrated campaign will drive potential visitors to Tourism Ireland’s website where any specific queries can be redirected to the Conduit call centre.