Johannesburg, 01 Sep 2008
Micros South Africa, a provider of point of sale and hospitality solutions, has seen a significant improvement in the operations of its Johannesburg-based contact centre that includes the intelligent management of calls and resultant enhanced services since partnering with KSS Technologies (KSS).
The company, which essentially features four contact centres in one, servicing its Micros (point of sale solution); Opera (property management solution focused on the hospitality industry), Fidelio (older version of Opera) and CLS (another property management solution) products, had been struggling with call visibility.
"We had no visibility of our calls and could not determine how many were coming in, how many callers were waiting in the queue, the duration of each call and which calls were abandoned," explains Hylton Proctor-Parker, Micros Support Operations Manager at Micros South Africa.
The solution
As a result of the above challenges, Micros Fidelio decided to upgrade its contact centre infrastructure, partnering with KSS. It recommended, supplied and implemented Cisco's latest Unified Communications manager, CallManager
6.1 (an upgrade from CallManager 4.2); as well as IP Contact Center Express (IPCC) 5 (an upgrade from IPCC 4); and the Datavoice's Libra Voice Recording solution.
The solution, which took a relatively short period to install, with minimal disruption, now services Micros South Africa's 60 contact centre agents as well as 200 users countrywide.
Looking at the products, CallManager 6.1 is a software-based call-processing system, which tracks all active VOIP network components; these include phones, gateways and conference bridges. The IPCC Express 5 solution offers automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), and computer telephony integration (CTI) on a single platform.
Additionally, the Libra Voice Recording solution provides fail-safe recording of all voice transactions for legal purposes, which minimises risk, quality assurance and training or productivity measurement in contact centres.
The benefits
"The new system provides Micros South Africa and, more importantly, the contact centre with the visibility it needs. With the integration of a dashboard for example, it can now determine how many agents are logged on; how many calls have been dropped and, importantly, how the calls were handled - in a simple and easy to interpret viewing format," explains Lyn Andrews, Sales Executive at KSS.
"Moreover, due the to the system's intelligent design, calls can be moved over - after a certain time period - to Micros agents if the Opera contact centre is busy. This regulates the workload, ensuring calls are not abandoned but readily attended to."
Adds Proctor-Parker: "The Libra Voice Recording solution now allows us to manage our KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) such as agent response and etiquette; improve quality assurance; and - from a legal perspective - mitigates risk as we can ensure all our calls are recorded for reference and referral purposes.
"Also, we can now intelligently determine how many calls were dropped, investigate why this occurred and rectify it accordingly. This improves the efficiency of our contact centre and overall service delivery.
"Furthermore, as a result of the system we have been able to restructure our contact centres, configuring them in a way that enables the agents to attend to calls in the most effective manner possible."
Due to the systems dynamic and automated nature, a voice recording will now tell customers what number they are in the queue and how long they will be holding on for before being attended to.
"This can also be changed according to the needs of the contact centres, shortening the time period until calls are moved over to the next team - dynamically adapting the infrastructure according to the amount of calls and so forth," says Chris Kok, Project Manager at KSS.
Proctor-Parker concludes: "The solution has allowed us to create a contact centre infrastructure that supports our clients in an intelligent, efficient manager. This ultimately improves our service delivery, providing us with a competitive advantage."
Share