Optimising your operations

As IP-based applications and solutions gradually supersede traditional Telephony technologies, organisations are realising the significant benefits – technically, financially and operationally – that IP can deliver. This is particularly evident in your contact centre.

Migration to IP and hosted reduces the cost of ownership, while enabling the rapid deployment of new applications across an increasingly distributed operation, much of which is facing directly onto the end customer – call centre, branch, and agents at home or on the move.

At the same time, many organisations are questioning the need to own and manage their own infrastructure and are considering hosted contact centre options.

25 years’ experience delivering contact centres

BT can help customers transform their contact centre infrastructure and operations, drive efficiencies and optimise customer service levels. Our solution is adaptable for you in the following ways:

Flexible pace of change: We support organisations in a way that enables them to move at their own pace as they transform their contact centre operations. We provide a modular up-grade path and technical roadmaps for the migration from traditional telephony to IP infrastructure.
Size of base: We manage one of the largest multimedia contact centre operations in Europe, servicing 20 million customers, and have deployed contact centre solutions for over 800 customers across 4,000 global sites, from small single site organisations to large multinational, multi-site organisations.
Skills and accreditation: We have 25 years’ experience delivering contact centre solutions to some of the biggest organisations across Europe, APac and America as well as 300 developers of CRM and Contact Centre solutions, and access to 5,000 business transformation experts.
Flexible deployment options: BT can offer a range of deployment options from Premise, managed, hosted (single and shared) or fully outsourced.
Support: BT can provide the level of support you require, from helping you with your transformational roadmap through deploying the technology, consulting on process and cultural change to on-going maintenance and management of you contact centre solution.

Delivering world-leading expertise

BT’s Hosted and IP contact centre solutions offer the technology of our world-leading partners: Nortel, Avaya, Cisco, Genesys and Cosmocom. The best choice of solution will depend on your requirements.

A typical IP Contact Centre solution includes:

Multimedia ACD: The intelligence behind any IP contact centre, the ACD routes multimedia calls (via phone, SMS, web or email) to appropriate agents.
Detailed analysis software: For a comprehensive view of all contact types and agents. Facilitates management of a virtual call centre across distributed locations, and includes applications such as call recording, CRM and supervisor consoles.
Smart Desktop: Enables agents to access resources they from a single location.
Flexible infrastructure: Modular approach for dynamic scaling of agents and capabilities as well as locations. Includes servers and IP networks.
Smart applications: Including recording, workforce optimisation and switch upgrades.
Flexible deployment choices: May be deployed on your sites; managed by us; hosted exclusively on your behalf; or pay-as-you-go, OnDemand service.

Our hosted solutions are housed within BT's secure data centres, or even your site, on either dedicated (OnNet) or shared (OnDemand) platforms. We provide a fully managed service:

IP telephony and advanced call routing: Includes the ability to add optional components such as voice mail, voice recording, computer telephony integration, and interactive voice response.
Components selected to match infrastructure needs: May include PSTN, managed IP transport, and integration to third-party systems.

Powering a financial services transformation

Adopt an innovative and cost-effective approach to investment in your contact centre and branch network.

Newcastle Building Society rolled out BT IP Contact Centres to 49 branches.

The solution included a Nortel Business Communication Manager 200 with Survivable Remote Gateway software. This linked branches to the main Nortel-equipped customer service centre over a BT Ethernet-based wide area platform – forming a virtual contact centre. A Nortel Communication Server 1000 was installed in a new administration centre.

The new end-to-end BT and Nortel IP-based systems environment has enabled this organisation to scale its customer service, improve staff productivity, reduce network costs and enhance the customer experience.

The virtual contact centre model is being progressively extended as BT installs SRG software on existing BCM 200 switches.

Lowering your IT cost of ownership

The cost benefits of migration to IP include:

Reduce cost: Flatten and consolidate your contact centre infrastructure and replace expensive network charges. Deliver from one centralised set of applications, reducing costs.
Maximize resource: Easily add agents and sites as extensions to the same contact centre, maintaining centralised management and decision-making.
Migrate at own pace: Get started at your own pace and, with BT support, plan your own migration path.

Our OnNet solutions significantly reduce the total cost of ownership, by outsourcing IT management. This helps to minimize hidden overheads, such as upgrades, training, maintenance, infrastructure, recruitment and integration.

Ongoing costs are predictable and usage-based, which is important when significant seasonal variations in call centre traffic are experienced.