Spescom is set to provide Eskom with a contact centre solution that meets all of the stringent requirements of the power company's world-class customer relationship management (CRM) strategy.
As SA's largest distributor and generator of power, 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.
Hugh McGibbon, group customer service manager for Eskom, explains where contact centres fit in.
"A necessary consequence of this key role is that the seven regional Eskom customer contact centres handle 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."
Eskom is in the process of upgrading its contact centre systems to meet the high standards of its CRM philosophy. This made it essential to achieve a best-of-breed telephony interface that would interface flawlessly to existing systems, as well as proposed future CRM implementations.
The winning Spescom solution proposed and due to be implemented over the next few months met Eskom's requirements: providing a system with potential for growth; smart interconnection of the contact centres to enable call overflow; and a system with proven reliability to provide a solid telephony foundation for Eskom's CRM strategy.
Paul Fick, head of the customer contact solutions division at Spescom, 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 enables '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, thus minimising the customer's waiting time."
In terms of hardware, each centre is equipped with a Definity PBX and CTI servers which are 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 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.
The platform offers Eskom a significant upgrade path to enhance its customer service capabilities in future, since it is a Web-enabled system with multimedia input functionality and has full potential for voice over Internet Protocol.
"The Spescom solution offers Eskom the flexibility and scalability to cope with changes expected in the electricity distribution industry," says McGibbon. "We now have the ability to configure a single national virtual call centre to handle the peak volumes of calls that occur during power failures, without moving people to a central location - or to run the call centres autonomously at other times."
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Spescom Limited is an information and communications technology company listed on the JSE Securities Exchange SA, with operations in US, UK and SA.
The group is active in two main areas of the world IT market, namely offering product and solutions to connect to the networked economy, and the provision of software solutions to manage information and knowledge.
The strategic focus is on the convergence of knowledge, document, configuration and voice transaction management technologies.
Spescom holds the controlling interest in US-based Spescom Software Inc (formerly Altris Software Inc), a Nasdaq-, OTCBB-listed company, and developer of the award-winning eB software.
In SA, Spescom, in alliance with world leading companies such as Cisco and Avaya, provides a range of customer contact and intelligent network solutions to its blue-chip customer base.
The company is a leading supplier of communications solutions and products to network operators and service providers on the African continent.
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