Affinity Water Enhances Its Cloud-Based Contact Centre Solution From Intelecom

Intelecom has announced that Affinity Water has built on the success of its original Intelecom implementation to support the organisation’s business, workforce and customer base. The UK’s largest water-only supplier operates a 300-strong contact centre that serves a population of 3.5 million people and manages on average 90,000 calls every month. Affinity Water’s latest investment in Intelecom has maximised the flexibility and scalability of the platform to benchmark the contact centre’s performance against specific targets. In addition, new services such as webchat and a fully automated secure payments facility have been introduced.

David Gray, Resource and Planning Analyst at Affinity Water, commented, “We first turned to Intelecom in 2005 to create a completely new cloud-based contact centre that could help automate call handling and improve customer response times. Since that time, it has evolved to become a sophisticated infrastructure that supports the focus of our company in terms of high-quality customer service, transparency and good governance. We have also established a close partnership with Intelecom. The company’s openness and willingness to share learning and best practice are critical to our success, enabling us to explore new ways of delivering a better customer experience with utmost confidence.”

The highlights of Affinity Water’s recently expanded Intelecom deployment include:

• Integration with the company’s Verint Workforce Management (WFM) system to drive call predictions accurately and manage hundreds of shifts and work schedules for 240 out of a total of 300 agents. When complete, Affinity Water expects skills-based routing to manage multiple staff talents and meet different Service Level Agreements (SLAs) across the complex organisation.
• Geographic routing to detect, identify and direct calls from certain parts of the country that might be suffering a crisis, such as flooding, to a specially tailored recorded message. This allows agents to maintain business as usual and deliver a personalised service to other customers with generic enquiries.
• Seamless connectivity with third-party applications has enabled Affinity Water to offer a wealth of new services, such as a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)-compliant automated and secure payments facility, under one roof with one single contact point for the customer.
• The introduction of speech analytics from Intelecom means that every call is transcribed and recorded for compliance and benchmarking purposes, making it an effective tool for spotting trends and making meaningful changes and improvements to processes and services.
• New initiatives such as post-call surveys and agent scorecards enable Affinity Water to measure customer satisfaction levels and track agent and contact centre performance against specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) accurately.
• Early experiences of customers using webchat to interact with the contact centre are very positive and indicate a definite focus going forward. Currently, 3% of all calls, around 2,700 per month, come in via webchat, a number that is expected to increase exponentially. The rising use of the internet makes it easy for agents to direct chatters to other parts of the website to find the information they need to confidently resolve their queries and encourage further self-service in the future.

Børge Astrup, Managing Director, Customer Contact Division of Intelecom Group AS, concluded, “Organisations like Affinity Water who have undergone periods of significant transformation rely on the flexibility and scalability of our solution to add agility to their operations. With our focus on continual product innovation, they can also depend on us to introduce new features that increase customer engagement and meet the needs of today’s internet-savvy consumers such as webchat. Intelecom is so much more than technology. It is a valuable strategic tool and partner that empowers staff, boosts customer loyalty and enables next-generation customer service.”

For more information on Intelecom, visit their website.