Value-added, multi-technology support contracts essential to under pressure contact centres
Leading contact centre systems integrator highlights need for multi-vendor skill support contracts with full accountability
LONDON 4th January, 2010 - According to Sabio, a leading Avaya Platinum BusinessPartner focused on contact centre and unified communications technologies, customer service organisations need to have a robust and responsive contact centre service infrastructure in place to support their operations during periods of intense activity - such as the UK’s current extreme weather conditions and run up to Christmas.
Snowy and icy weather inevitably results in emergency services, energy companies, breakdown recovery firms, councils and busy helplines such as NHS Direct all receiving major spikes in call volumes, with some customer service centres reporting twice the normal level of incoming calls. Couple this with the challenges all contact centres face with agents finding it difficult to get to work due to snowy weather, and the pressures on contact centre infrastructure become even more intense.
According to Sabio’s Commercial Director, Andy Roberts: “now is not the time for contact centre management to find that their basic break-fix support contracts simply don’t give them the response, skills and service levels they were expecting. We would urge IT Directors to look closely at their existing support arrangements and ask themselves three important questions:
- Does my support partner have the in-house skills needed to maintain my solutions?
- Are they responsive enough to support my business-critical requirements?
- Can I hold them accountable for the performance of my contact centre across multiple technologies?”
“Effective support is an essential element in any successful contact centre technology strategy, and – with over ten years’ of proven experience in supporting complex Avaya solutions – Sabio is clearly ideally placed to add value to our customers’ Avaya contact centre and unified communications infrastructure,” added Jeremy Butt, Avaya’s Vice President of Worldwide Channels. “In addition to supporting our core Avaya Aura™ communications platform, Sabio also brings real expertise in key added value areas such as voice/self-service and workforce optimisation, and this can prove a real differentiator for the growing number of organisations looking for an integrated support approach across their multiple contact centre technologies.”
“It’s in situations like this month’s extreme cold weather that you should expect your support provider to pull out all the stops. At Sabio we don’t believe organisations should have to spend their time ringing round their different technology support partners just to find someone who’ll take responsibility for a fault,” said Andy Roberts. “At Sabio not only do we have an impressive support ratio of less that three customers to each support professional, but we’re also happy to support today’s increasingly complex contact centre technology infrastructures, ensure that all our frontline support staff are fully trained to ACA and CCNA equivalents, and that we support all our Avaya, Verint and Nuance customers with fully-accredited UK-based support professionals. That’s why major organisations such as Budget Insurance, Which? and Eurostar are increasingly turning to Sabio for their contact centre support requirements.”
Sabio’s Intelligent Connect (ICe) always-on, live monitoring system constantly checks customers’ ACD, dialler, IVR, speech, CTI, WFO technologies and desktop systems, identifying potential faults before they can start to impact customer service levels. In addition, the company’s Service Centre ensures that Sabio is able to handle over 93 percent of customer calls in-house, ensuring that Sabio deals with customers’ issues rather than simply acting as a call handler between your IT department and the manufacturer.
Sabio who recently achieved Avaya Platinum Business Partner status for the seventh consecutive year, has been a Verint Premier Partner since 2000 (Premier Partner since 2007),and has worked closely supporting Nuance solutions since 2004. The company offers this breadth of technology skills across 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support activities, and delivers full 24x7x365 support across these multiple disciplines.