Centrix nominated for Award at Prestigious Industry Event

This years Channel Network Awards are being held on 16th October 2003 at The Grove Hotel in Hertfordshire and threatens to be the biggest and best yet with the main sponsor being none other than Avaya.

Centrix are pleased to have been nominated for one of the top awards, “Best Government Solution” through our recent installation at Islington Borough Council in London.

The award will be “to recognise the channel partner supplying the best solution to a national or local Government or Government-related body, including local authorities and statutory bodies. Emphasis will be placed on tendering approach, security and reliability issues and meeting tight budgetary strictures”.

Background
Centrix has played a key role in the creation of Contact Islington, an ambitious and complex project designed to make the process of contacting the council for information quicker, easier and more convenient, as well as ensuring consistency of information across channels. This has involved upgrading the telephony system to enable VoIP over a WAN and evolving the call centre into a full contact centre using infrastructure independent software and special voice recording systems designed to work with VoIP. This has also been integrated with a full, browser-based CRM system which means in future agents will not be location dependent.

Proposed Solution
Recognising that Islington needed a converged solution with considerable flexibility and the potential for future development (all within the usual budgetary constraints of local government), Centrix proposed a solution comprising an Avaya S8300 media server with IP softphones integrated with Altitude contact centre software with Magnetic North voice recording. This, in turn, was integrated with a Deloitte & Touche eShop CRM system.

Unlike most CRM systems, eShop is browser-based, presented like a web page, and so eventually contact centre agents will have the option of logging on anywhere, allowing Islington to maximise the cost benefits of VoIP and bringing together Islington’s 70 or so buildings over a WAN.

Centrix worked closely with distributor Crane to supply the Altitude software. Described as a “contact centre in a box”, this offers voice and email management, IVR with intelligent routing, monitoring and reporting and supervisor tools.

One of the challenges was finding a voice recording system that dealt effectively with VoIP encryption. Working with Crane, Centrix was able to recommend Magnetic North.

Implementation
Centrix recognised that a step by step implementation in a highly controlled manner was key to building a highly reliable system that had the full support and confidence of all Islington staff.

The team began with a small pilot call centre in Islington’s environmental department. By starting small, Centrix could monitor and solve any problems before the whole system became totally mission critical.

This small project was set to evolve into Contact Islington, but in rolling out to the entire authority, the approach remained a careful one. To further test the technology, Centrix put in place a pilot running the Altitude software with no live users. Reliability and resilience was a priority here, with Centrix making extensive tests to ensure that there was no single point of failure.

The team also arranged a test run with sample calls to train agents to use the new system.

Results
The most far-reaching benefit is that Islington now has in place a centralised contact centre so that residents no longer have to know the department they need or are kept waiting while an agent finds the appropriate council contact. Soon residents will be able to contact the council in whatever way is most convenient including email and SMS and through collaboration, agents will be able to help them find answers on the web too.

This ensures the council better serves the public and also offers significant savings in overheads as it cuts expensive call handling time. This all comes together to help Islington meet government directives on making services accessible online by 2005.

The flexibility and cost benefits of using VoIP over a WAN will also make a considerable impact. Telephony costs will be lower because calls between sites will be free of charge and the browser-based structure of eShop ensures that eventually agents will have complete mobility, if needed.

> More information from Centrix

Back to top