Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

February 26, 2008

South African Energy Giant Eskom Wins Gold Award

By David Sims


Glasgow-based Graham Technology, a vendor of customer-oriented business software and services, has announced that its customer, South African energy giant Eskom, has won the Gold Award for the Middle East and Africa region at the International BPM Awards and Technology Showcase in Nashville.
 
Eskom, South Africa's state-owned electricity company is the seventh largest utility in the world in terms of generation capacity, and ninth in terms of sales.
 
The winning project, codenamed UBUSO, which, as you of course know, is the Zulu word for "face," created a Customer Service and Relationship Management product underpinned by Graham Technology's business process platform, which provided the means to control routing and monitoring of work over Eskom's vast operational arena and sharing workloads across their seven regional call centers.
 
Gabriel Kgabo, Divisional Customer Service Manager, Eskom, said the firm has "focused entirely on our people and processes over the last few years," and with Graham Technology's software platform "have been able to strip out waste and dramatically improve the customer experience."
 
Eskom, with revenues of over $5 billion, serves more than 3.7million customers throughout South Africa. The vertically integrated utility generates 95 percent of the electricity used in South Africa and generates over 50 percent of the total electricity produced in Africa, making Eskom by far the continent's largest utility company.
 
Last week Graham announced that it had rolled out a company-wide CRM platform for Australian mobile phone retailer, Crazy John's. The platform is based on ciboodle, Graham Technology's customer interaction platform, and represents the first deployment of the software in Australia.
 
Crazy John's is Australia's largest independent mobile phone retailer with over 100 retail outlets across six states, two mainland territories and three time zones, employing over 700 staff. The company recently launched its own mobile virtual network, and ciboodle provides the underlying CRM and sales platform.
 
"The evolution of Crazy John's has to be supported by the right kind of technology platform," said Stephen Tuffley, Head of Operations at Crazy John's. Ciboodle is Graham Technology's flagship customer interaction software for contact centers, what the Grahamites call "a refreshing alternative to the rigid CRM and telephony software packages prevalent in today's call centers."
 
While Graham Technology has had an established presence in Australasia for some years, with customers including Energex, MBF Group and Telecom New Zealand (News - Alert), the Crazy John's deployment is the first implementation of ciboodle in the region.
 
In late January Graham Technology, which sells business software and services, announced it had delivered the underlying technology platform that drives MoveMachine, the online portal from property firm ESPC, designed to be a one-stop-shop for buying and selling homes.
 
Don’t forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers whitepapers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users. Today’s featured white paper isSignificantly Improve Your Business Communications, brought to you by Avaya (News - Alert).
 
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.


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