Siemens enables public to spy on Big Brother housemates

Spyline, the Big Brother II project that enables ardent Big Brother II fans to spy by audio on any one of the housemates any time of the day or night by dialling the 082 288 9007 number, has reported some remarkable statistics attesting its success. Since the commencement of Big Brother II on 23 July 2002, a total of 52 000 minutes (866.6 hours) of listening time has been recorded.

Aspect, a mission-critical, custom-built call centre solution from Siemens Enterprise Solutions, a business unit of Siemens Information and Communication Group, is being used to make this possible.

An audio-device is attached to each Big Brother II housemate, which is in turn connected to a call centre. The concept of Spyline was initially to allow callers to spy on their select housemates when a visual is not accessible. However, an additional benefit is that it also allows viewers to spy on housemates when they are not observable on screen.

Up to 240 callers are able to phone in at any given time and listen in to their selected housemate for a maximum of 10 minutes. Peak times of calls are between 14h00 and 15h00 and the average call duration is 52 seconds.

"We believe that an average of 1 000 calls per day testifies to the popularity and success of the project, especially taking into account that the spyline number has only been advertised on the DSTV channel and not on any other media platform." said Hylton Keshwar, Account Manager at Siemens Enterprise Solutions.

"The concept of a Big Brother spyline immediately appealed to us. We were optimistic that the idea would prove to be successful and confident that we would be able to prepare the custom-built call centre technology solution required in the short time period."

Procenter Group, a call centre team within Siemens Telecommunications, fully committed to the challenge and took it from concept design through to on-site implementation within the two-week deadline. The actual roll-out of the Spyline project - which included testing in a laboratory environment, the trial and on-site implementation - took place during the course of the week prior to 23 July when Big Brother II went live.

"We met our commitments timeously and the implementation and project management thus far have proved to be very successful. We are very pleased with our record achievement," says Keshwar.

Siemens Enterprise Solutions' Aspect Office edition was used because of its ability to handle the high traffic volumes and its robust and flexible features, such as customer self service through the IVR functionality used at the front-end, which also has speech recognition functionality.

Spyline will run for the full duration (90 days) of Big Brother II, during which Siemens is contracted to provide a 24-hour support service.

The fully automated Aspect solution has built-in intelligence. When a housemate is evicted, the system adjusts to the changed situation with seamless flexibility. The smart automation features provide enhanced productivity as well as reduced cost of ownership, while the sophisticated technology handles high traffic in a robust and reliable manner - as the lack of fault reporting shows.

Siemens Telecommunications' Aspect solutions include front-end Contact Servers to handle the intelligent routing as well as a central Enterprise Contact Server to handle multimedia and unified messaging needs. Various adapters are available to provide seamless integration with all major vendors' software platforms.

The solution provides a complete interface for the caller, with full IVR, speech recognition and text-to-speech abilities.

Most significantly, the solution provides all the information needed for a full CRM system, enabling better access to the information essential for business intelligence and accurate analysis of trends.