Telecom’s customer service division operates the largest contact centre in the country, handling 12 million calls each month for a broad range of services, from managing customer moves, sales of new products and logging of faults, through to mobile phone text top-ups and balance queries.
With constant variations in call flows due to abnormal events, such as marketing promotions, major communications faults or even technical outages, making accurate predictions of caller volumes is nearly impossible. Telecom, which operates the largest contact centre in New Zealand, needed to set a new standard for customer service.
Telecom had relied on a labour intensive manual approach to manage and optimise the call traffic for its 540 access numbers. “Whenever we experienced massive increases in call centre traffic, unplanned outages or call volume issues, we needed to manually redirect and rebalance the call traffic across the IVR infrastructure,” explains Greg Fayerman, IVR Implementation & Solutions, Contact Centre Technology for Telecom. “Each 0800 number would have to be manually adjusted in turn, taking us a long time to complete.”
Gen-i used its extensive experience in providing contact centre management solutions for customers across New Zealand to recommend an automated solution based on Cisco’s Toll Free Self Manage product. The solution was piloted with Telecom’s Xtra Broadband service in May 2005. The success of this pilot convinced the contact centre’s management to complete the full migration across all 540 access numbers, which took place during September to December 2005.
By implementing the Toll Free Self Manage solution Telecom can track the performance of its call routing function in real time and manage call traffic across its seven contact centre locations.
Toll Free Self Manage has transformed the way the contact centre team works, by allowing them to track the overall performance of the IVR infrastructure and to use this knowledge to make effective management and call routing decisions. Toll Free Self Manage provides the team with the ability to create pre-defined automated business rules that enable them to tailor the call routing to respond to known peaks and troughs throughout the day, week or month. It also enables them to deal with unexpected call loads or technical outages and provide a seamless service for callers.
As a result, Telecom has significantly reduced its administration requirement, from two days each week to just a half day. Customers and callers have also benefited dramatically. With no need to switch off access numbers during routine administration and maintenance tasks, Telecom now offers 100 per cent caller coverage.