Sage Life selects ATIO as its contact centre partner

Sage Life has chosen ATIO Corporation as its partner for the contact centre recently installed at its Johannesburg head office. As part of a R2 million deal, Sage Life has purchased licences for 36 seats using ATIO`s ContactPro solution. Although only 15 seats were activated at the time of going live, it is expected that the centre will grow to 100 seats within the next two years.

Shaan Watkins, Head of IT and Programme Management of Sage Life, said: In looking for a new contact centre, we had two main objectives. Firstly, we wanted a cost-effective but inclusive environment where we could enhance normal customer contact activities and introduce additional call centre functionality such as interactive voice response (IVR), voice recording, e-mail and fax functionality integrated with our backend systems. Secondly, we were looking for a modular solution that was scalable with our future requirements. We decided to go with ATIO`s ContactPro solution which offers us all the elements we need in one solution."

The main business objective for the contact centre installation is to further improve customer service and to create additional channels to provide better service to our valued brokers, agents and clients.

The contact centre installation took place over a weekend and contact agents were trained in the technical aspects of using the centre at the same time. The contact agents were excited to move to the new system where their personal environment has been enriched.

Tony Singleton, Director: Operations at Sage Life, commented: "I have been very impressed with the ATIO team, specifically the attention to detail, professionalism and their focus on tailoring the product to suit our exact requirements. The ATIO team has been on hand to help our agents and to smooth out the type of unforeseen problems you get in any new installation."

The agents occupying the 15 seats currently installed are handling the policy services environment where queries can be answered and administrative functions, such as address changes, can be performed. The contact centre also handles quotes for sales and investment related functions for agents, brokers and end user clients. The contact centre currently handles around 21 000 calls per month and call volumes are expected to double within the next two to three months. The objective for the next two years is to grow the contact centre to around 100 seats and gradually migrate all the servicing departments within Sage Life to the centre with an ultimate target of handling 90% of all client interactions through the contact centre.

Watkins said: "We have installed the contact centre to enable us to offer top quality service to our clients and to further increase process efficiency. The contact centre will also play an important role in our customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence initiatives. At present we also have limited interaction with legacy systems. The second phase of the project will therefore be to fully integrate the contact centre with our backend systems and the third phase to fully automate the process. We have chosen EDS, our outsourcing partner together with ATIO, to assist us in building a seamless process environment."