UCS Solutions, the leading provider of business and IT solutions to the retail and manufacturing industries, has implemented FrontRange Contact Centre, a solution that enables significant advances in the productivity and effectiveness of contact centre staff.
As a provider of end-to-end services across the full range of IT operations, UCS Solutions looks to its 40-consultant contact centre to provide expert support to about 15 000 users at more than 20 major customers.
Debby Webster, Customer Contact Centre Manager at UCS Solutions, says the company signed up as pilot implementers of FrontRange Contact Centre in May 2004 and were fully aware of the challenges and risks associated with being the first HEAT customer globally to implement a new, mission-critical application.
"We`re also in the IT business. We knew that being the first with a new application would have its challenges. However, we drew on the strength of our five-year partnership, experience of their HEAT application and their knowledge of contact centre business to deliver a great solution!
"One of the great benefits of being first with a new application is that a lot of functionality is developed for you, and this was certainly the case with FrontRange Contact Centre."
Webster says UCS Solutions needed a comprehensive management console which would provide critical contact centre statistics to enable effective staff management.
After several months of testing and implementation, Webster reports that the system is stable and its full potential is being explored. "We`re now ready to respond to requests to visit the facility from people who are interested in seeing at firsthand how it works," she says.
Among the immediate benefits UCS Solutions has seen are clear visibility of the status of call queues and the implementation of skills-based call routing.
"Quality monitoring and training is most important in any contact centre," observes Webster. "FrontRange Contact Centre gives us the ability to ensure consultants take calls on specific clients only when they are properly trained to do so. This ensures a quality to service to our clients."
UCS Solutions is currently using FrontRange Contact Centre`s voice recording on demand functionality, but plans to expand this to recording all calls soon. "The ability to record calls and attach each to a case number is a significant step in maintaining and improving our service," adds Webster.
While FrontRange Contact Centre integrates with any other service and support application, Webster found that fast integration with UCS`s existing HEAT implementation a further benefit.
Future development for UCS Solutions could be to expand the use of FrontRange Contact Centre to its Cape Town and Durban facilities, enabling the functionality of FrontRange Contact Centre to be applied to the same queue of calls from any location.
"Ultimately, we`ll be able to exploit the potential of the idea of the virtual contact centre, where individual consultants are able to take calls from home, for example. We plan to be ready for the growth and possibilities of VOIP by having the technology and the systems in place to make VOIP work effectively," says Webster. Says Tracey Newman, managing director of FrontRange Solutions South Africa: "It`s not often that a totally new development such as FrontRange Contact Centre is implemented first in SA, and we`re especially pleased to have been able to extend and deepen our strong existing partnership with UCS Solutions during this implementation. Since this deal, FrontRange Solutions has closed a further 15 sites to date, thus vindicating the enormous potential we all see with this product."
FrontRange Contact Centre is part of an entire series of new software developments the company began rolling out worldwide from last year. "As a long-standing supplier of service and customer relationship management solutions for the mid-market, FrontRange Contact Centre is a natural progression for us," says Newman. Newman says the new suite of integrated contact centre applications from FrontRange Solutions matches very closely the increasing telephony and contact centre needs of the majority of South African businesses that cannot justify full enterprise-strength contact solutions. "The FrontRange Contact Centre provides comprehensive telephony functionality in a single modular package that allows organisations to simply plug directly from Telkom into a SIP (session initiated protocol) compliant voice gateway and from there to a single server. "It eliminates points of failure and extensive maintenance, makes upgrades easy and slashes implementation time and cost."
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