Spescom DataFusion is providing the equipment and systems at the new Cape Town contact centre of the Budget Group of Companies, which is supporting the trend for overseas companies to outsource operations to South Africa.
Budget is one of the UK's leading insurance intermediaries, with over 800,000 customers and some 1800 employees. The company's future plans involve doubling its customer base by 2006 and increasing its staff complement accordingly. It was consequently realised that the needs could not be met solely from the UK labour market.
"The immediate need is to use the local call centre to handle calls to the UK centres in the evening and provide a base for expansion that will support Budget's future goals," says Paul Fick, MD of Spescom DataFusion.
"Spescom DataFusion was well-placed to assist, since we have a long-term relationship with Auto and General - sister company to Budget - and we could facilitate the negotiations for connectivity with Telkom. Essentially, we offered the right solution as well as a one-stop shop so that the customer could have a single point of contact to implement the deployment."
"Spescom has made a significant contribution to our project," says Steve Loose, Director of Fusion Outsourcing Services, Budget's operating company in South Africa. "Not only has the company provided useful and creative technical expertise and a quick efficient service, it has also provided a customer-centric solution that adds real value to the business.
"We have been particularly impressed by their active contribution during the testing process. In fact, we view this as a partnership, not simply a customer/supplier relationship."
The Spescom DataFusion solution allows Budget to operate the South African contact centre in real time with the UK. With support from both Spescom and Telkom, an infrastructure has been created which gives a truly seamless customer experience, with quick connections, clarity of call and the transfer of key management information.
"We ran a trial until the end of November 2003, which established the reliability and capacity of the system," says Fick. "The initial investment has provided all the equipment needed for 165 agents and we were able to organise all the hardware needed, including desktops and file servers, as well as the central Avaya call centre technology.
"The intention is that Budget will invest as much as R100 million in the local economy over the next few years and this is an outstanding example of how local staff and technical expertise can support overseas companies with benefits for all parties involved."
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Spescom is a multi-national technology innovator with direct operations in the US, UK and South Africa.
The group is publicly listed on the JSE Securities Exchange SA (Spescom Ltd), and on the NASDAQ OTCBB: SPOC (Spescom Software Inc).
Spescom addresses the information and communications technology market providing both products and solutions to connect to the network economy, as well as enterprise software to manage information and knowledge.
Specifically, Spescom provides solutions in the areas of access network; enterprise information management; multimedia transaction recording; broadcast; customer contact centres; and test & measurement.
Spescom markets its products worldwide through appointed partners and distributors under the eB( brand for its enterprise software, and the DataVoice( brand for its multimedia transaction recording solutions.
Spescom's global customer base consists of multi-national organisations including leading enterprises in the utilities, telecommunications, transportation, financial, banking and insurance sectors.
Worldwide, customers include Siemens, British Telecoms, Network Rail (formerly Railtrack), Lloyds of London, Barclays Bank, Abbey National Bank, WH Smith, Caterpillar, Bechtel, AmerenUE, Entergy, Bombardier, Ocean Energy, Sempra Energy, Telkom, SABC, Old Mutual, Eskom, Transnet, First National Bank.
For more information on Spescom, please visit www.spescomsoftware.com and www.spescom.com
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