While everyone's call center is important to their operations, some are more so than others. If you're an apparel company and one of your contact centers goes down, perhaps your customers will be a little delayed in ordering their polo shorts or annoyed by an inability to find out when their orders shipped. Utility companies, however, are a special case. In the case of emergencies or outages, utility call centers become a literal lifeline for many people.
For that reason, utility providers tend to choose their contact center solutions very carefully.
NEC Corporation of America today announced that Hartford, Alabama-based Wiregrass Electric Cooperative (WAC) has chosen its communications technology to streamline operations and improve customer service within its contact center. WEC chose to integrate the NEC UNIVERGE SV8300 Communications Server with Service Interruption Management System (SIMS) and an interactive voice response (IVR) system from Oldsmar, Florida-based Centurion.
To help its agents resolve calls faster and to customers' greater satisfaction, WEC also chose to deploy NEC's UNIVERGE UC for Business (UCB) Contact Center. The new, fully integrated solution is expected to help WEC provide better customer service by optimizing its existing resources without additional headcount, while improving its first-call resolution and call handle time metrics.
Prior to the new solution, WEC wanted to use Centurion's turnkey IVR to provide customers with round-the-clock access to billing information, payment by credit card and outage reporting through an automated telephony communications channel. The company chose the UNIVERGE SV8300 with UCB voice solution because it supports session initiation protocol (SIP) VoIP, which simplifies integration with the Centurion IVR system.
“It was the people that made this solution work,” said Les Moreland, CFO of Wiregrass Electric Cooperative. “NEC and Centurion provided the right technology to meet our business needs. Knology [a systems integrator and reseller in the southeast U.S.] was instrumental in bringing it all together – we had a good team.”
To tie WEC's four call center locations together into a coherent whole, UNIVERGE SV8300 with UCB will provide the electric cooperative with a common voice platform across all sites. Previously, each center used a different voice solution. Callers needing help from another center were required to hang up and dial another number. By choosing the UNIVERGE SV8300 with UCB, WEC streamlined its contact center operations. Callers can also be seamlessly transferred across each center, quickening access to the appropriate service.
“The UNIVERGE SV8300's ability to support SIP expands a company's ability to easily integrate a number of systems in order to create customized solutions to help better meet customer demand and remain competitive in the market,” said Larry Levenberg, VP of Channel Sales and Marketing, Communications Technologies, for NEC Corporation of America. “SIP also offers small- and medium-sized businesses the added advantage of simplified management and cost savings from a telecom perspective.”
For more information about the NEC solution, click here.