Spescom, the multinational technology innovator, has been actively supporting the ongoing customer relations initiative by South African power generator Eskom. The electricity company's ongoing drive to enhance service levels received international recognition in the form of the "Power Company of the Year 2001" award bestowed by the leading financial journal Financial Times.
As SA's largest power generator and distributor, Eskom plays a critical role in supporting the country's industries, businesses and farms, as well as the lifestyle of home users and the ongoing upliftment of previously disadvantaged communities. Eskom has been running for over 80 years and provides 95% of the country's power needs, which is approximately 50% of the total electricity demand in Africa.
When Eskom recently upgraded its contact centre systems, the company's world-class CRM (customer relationship management) philosophy was a key element of the specification. This made it essential to achieve a best-of-breed telephony interface that would interact flawlessly with existing systems, as well as proposed future CRM implementations.
The winning Spescom DataFusion solution which was implemented fulfilled Eskom's requirements
Eskom's stringent requirements included: providing a system with potential for growth; smart interconnection of the contact centres to enable call overflow; and proven reliability to provide a solid telephony foundation for Eskom's CRM strategy. Spescom DataFusion proposed a winning solution that more than fulfilled the criteria and was duly implemented.
Paul Fick, MD of Spescom DataFusion, explains how this was achieved: "The Avaya Definity Contact Centre platform provides the essential basic functions that Eskom required. This platform enables the customers to be served in the language of their choice, and to be routed to an agent that is skilled in dealing with their specific service request. Because the platform facilitates networking of the regional call centres with intelligent call routing, the customer's call can be routed to the next available agent with the correct language and service skills at any of the seven sites countrywide. This minimises the customer's waiting time."
In terms of hardware, each centre is equipped with a Definity PBX, plus CTI servers, which is running the Avaya CentreVu Virtual Routing application. The world-class Avaya Call Management System monitors and analyses the performance and efficiency of handling customer queries, with Spescom DataVoice recorders to archive call content. A single centralised Avaya Conversant IVR (interactive voice response) interface allows customers to perform automated self-service functions such as making an account balance enquiry or reporting a power failure.
Because it is a Web-enabled system with multimedia input functionality and full potential for voice over Internet protocol (VOIP), the platform provides Eskom with a significant upgrade path to boost its customer service capabilities in future.
Hugh McGibbon, group customer service manager for Eskom, explains where contact centres fit into the company's operations: "A necessary consequence of the key role that the seven regional Eskom customer contact centres play is handling high volumes of service requests on a 24-hour a day and 365-days a year basis, which range from account enquiries to power supply problems.
"The Spescom DataFusion solution gives Eskom the flexibility and scalability to cope with changes expected in the electricity distribution industry. We now have the ability to configure a single national virtual contact centre to handle the peak volumes of calls that occur during power failures, without moving people to a central location - or to run the contact centres autonomously at other times when there is less demand."
Rapid completion leads to 20% improvement in service level
Spescom DataFusion supplied the key elements of the overall solution, as McGibbon points out.
"The project was completed on time after a challenging 11 months of work - and within the R30 million budget. The scope of the project included the implementation of six key solutions from five different vendors as part of Eskom's overall CRM strategy. Spescom was the major vendor for the Avaya telephony upgrade and IVR installation.
"Following the introduction of the new Avaya equipment five months ago, the service level - as measured by the percentage of calls answered within 30 seconds - has improved every month and is now close to 80% which is the world benchmark which is our objective.
"The virtual contact centre concept that is part of the central design of the solution means that our customers can be served from any of our seven contact centres as if they were a single facility. This is achieved using the new Avaya Telephony system that enables calls to be overflowed between the contact centres. The overflow is currently configured between contact centres that share the same account operations centre and has been activated only for account-related requests thus far. The power loss enquiries overflow is also activated between East London and Westville.
"This is the first phase in the virtualisation, with the goal being to overflow to any contact centre, for any service request, where an agent with the requested skill is available to take the call.
"For disaster recovery the total load of any contact centre can be diverted to the other centres.
"The Spescom IVR utility is a world-class, self-service system for account balance enquiries and is a step towards reducing the high volume of account-related queries handled by the contact centre service agents. On selection of account balance enquiry by keying in the appropriate number, the customer is asked to enter his account number. The balance is then read to him automatically without any human intervention.
Language of choice
"The result of customers using the IVR is that service agents are freed to handle the more complex interactions. Another key feature of the new system is the ability to service customers in the language of their choice and to route the call to a service agent best skilled to handle the call. A choice of at least English, Afrikaans plus the predominant local language is available at each region with a choice of seven languages nationally."
One of the reasons why Eskom selected Spescom was the similarity of approach and standards between the two multinational companies.
"Spescom was a current supplier for Eskom's contact centres and we were comfortable with their style and business ethics," says McGibbon. "Coupled to this, they proposed a world-class system with proven implementation successes in SA at a very competitive price.
"The project was completed on time and within budget. The Spescom implementation schedule was complex, covering seven sites with extremely tough timelines and it was accomplished with the minimum of fuss and almost no downtime. Eskom's operation was hardly affected by this major system installation.
"Looking to the future, now that we have achieved a world-class telephony platform, we can consider whether our current CRM systems are still appropriate or whether we should move to new solutions. Our focus is on contact management and information analysis to provide improved customer service, but we also aim to develop the ability to expand this focus to the other aspects of CRM, such as sales and cross-selling."
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