In 1994, just before the first democratic elections, one of the most dynamic companies in SA did not exist. Today, Vodacom is valued at between R60 billion and R80 billion, making it one of SA`s top 10 companies. Vodacom now delivers a service to some 5.5 million South Africans, forming an integral part of their lives. Vodacom is a true-blue corporate citizen of the new SA - it was born during the transition to democracy and it truly embodies the spirit of the Rainbow Nation.
Vodacom installed AtioCALL five years ago when it started its first call centre. ATIO Corporation, which at the time focused on telecom solutions, was tasked to develop a CTI call centre solution to meet Vodacom`s business specifications and requirements. The original release of the software was developed in just three months and the development process continued into a full multimedia call centre solution. Today this multimedia solution is still in operation with new releases being added and customised developments being made to suit Vodacom`s specific requirements.
The AtioCALL installation at Pier Place, Cape Town, handles staggering amounts of traffic. This call centre has an average of 2 million incoming calls per month - with peaks as high as 2.6 million calls over Christmas holidays. A quick mathematical calculation shows us that a 31-day month has 2.6 million seconds, this means there is a call into the call centre every second.
In spite of this high traffic, this call centre has one of the highest uptimes in Vodacom and is still extremely flexible when it comes to being able to make on-the-fly configuration changes.
The AtioCALL software was later re-branded to CyberCall and the fact that this is a rand-based product means that upgrades and maintenance costs are not subject to the fluctuation in the dollar to rand exchange rate, resulting in an extremely cost-effective solution.
The ATIO team of CTI experts has just completed the integration of CyberCall to Siebel 6 and integration to Siebel 7 will start soon which will give Vodacom the added advantage of being able to move its agents between various call centres while maintaining a consistent user interface, thereby eliminating the need to retrain agents.
With an uptime of 99.99% and a dedicated ATIO team to provide the support, Vodacom have come to rely on this installation as both a high-availability operational call centre and as a hot-standby disaster recovery site.
When cellular was launched in SA in 1994, nobody would have thought that cellphones would eventually be owned by such a wide variety of people. Prepaid vouchers have meant that everybody - from a businessman to a street hawker - can own a cellphone, and more than 90% of all new connections to the Vodacom network are now prepaid.
Recently Vodacom has started allocating cellphone numbers beginning with 072 to new customers. The 082 prefix was previously the only number range to represent Vodacom cellphone numbers. After originally forecasting 250 000 subscribers for the first 10 years of operations, Vodacom now have some 5.5 million customers - after just seven years of operations - so the original number ranges allocated are almost fully utilised.
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