The Manufacturing, Engineering and Related Services Sector Education and Training Authority (Merseta) has invested R2.7 million in an all-in-one contact centre application suite to manage its contact centre interactions.
Merseta hopes the solution will save it up to 40% on its telecoms costs.
Interactive Intelligence's regional sales director for the UK and Africa, Dave Paulding, says Merseta installed the company's Customer Interaction Centre (CIC) solution in Johannesburg.
Paulding explains that CIC is an inclusive application suite to manage all contact centre interactions on one platform, and allows for voice over IP (VOIP).
"Some of the features of the CIC include speech-enabled interactive voice response and automatic call distribution with built-in multi-channel queuing, among others," Paulding says.
Merseta contact centre manager Fabian Brown says the authority installed the new system in February after researching new technologies, in an attempt to find solutions that could help reduce costs. Brown says Merseta was interested in CIC because it did not require any third-party integration.
"We paid R2.7 million for the solution, and this included a telecoms system and IT network upgrade."
Brown believes the contact centre solution will benefit its 20-seat contact centre, and 180 national back-office users, in three ways. Firstly, inter-branch calls will be made at no cost to the company because they will be done on Merseta's wide area network, using VOIP.
Secondly, Merseta says the new platform will enhance customer relations by connecting clients to available back-office users.
"With the old switchboard system, the agent would have to transfer the call 'blind', not knowing whether that person was available," says Brown. "Now we are able to see the availability of the back-office staff, and if the person is not available, we can offer our client some options."
Thirdly, Brown says the solution will aid Merseta by ensuring it only has to maintain one contact centre as opposed to several.
"We used to have seven standalone switchboards and had to maintain all of them; yet, with this new platform, we only have to maintain one central contact centre and we hope to save on maintenance costs," says Brown.
Merseta deals with up to 14 000 calls a month from companies that pay skills levies, Seta training providers, and individuals wanting to apply for the learnerships and mentoring programmes. Brown says the solution can be configured so that other Setas can piggyback off the network, instead of buying a new contact centre system.
Share
