Contact Centre on Demand becomes a reality in SA

Intelleca, South Africa's leading provider of speech and contact centre solutions, has designed and delivered South Africa's first fully hosted, virtual contact centre on demand (CCOD) turnkey solution at Telemed, one of the country's leading medical aid administrators.

The contact centre is being run out of both Telemed Pretoria and Telemed Germiston, and is the first of its kind contact centre solution in the country. Based on technology from CosmoCom (which Intelleca represents as the Master value-added reseller (VAR) and integrator in South Africa), the contact centre is unique in that there is no hardware at either of the customer's sites. Rather, all the software and hardware required to power the contact centre is provisioned from Intelleca’s hosting facility in Centurion.

"This model holds multiple benefits for Telemed," says Intelleca’s Contact Centre on Demand business manager Grant Allan. "It’s important to note that there is no capital cost up-front for any of our contact centre on demand customers. This differentiates our solution from the vast majority of other service providers in the country in that our customer pays for a full feature, full function contact centre solution on a ‘pay-per-use, month-by-month’ basis as an operational cost, taken off balance sheet. The technology is provisioned as a utility and our customers are billed accordingly.

"Secondly, it can quickly and easily scale up the contact centre as it needs to, and then scale down if needs be, in line with the business's requirements. Thirdly, it can take advantage of the very latest technology available, without considering the ‘traditional solution’ capital outlay required. Fourthly, it can locate its contact centre agents wherever it chooses - they can even work from home, on the proviso that there is sufficient connectivity linking the agent to their corporate network."

Telemed, whose clients include Eskom, ICASA, Impala Platinum and Telkom, had run its contact centre with a dedicated Alcatel PABX and standard telephone headsets. These have been replaced with PCs powered by an Intelleca CCoD software agent, and USB headsets. The two contact centre sites are connected via leased line to Intelleca’s hosting site in Centurion.

"As a business, we are adopting the theory of chase demand," says Telemed operations executive Andre de Lange. "This implies adjusting capacity to meet demand at any given time. As a business, we can reflect on statistical experience and predict future demand, and deploy resources rapidly. Accordingly, we needed contact centre technology that could be deployed very fast, and the CCOD model fitted very well with what we had in mind.

"We were referred to Intelleca, and their track record spoke for itself. Deployment was as easy as expected, taking just two months. We now have an instant failover facility, allowing us to switch over to agents anywhere in the event of failure at either of the sites. We continuously balance our staff load and we are now so agile, we can even accommodate contact centre agents at home. In addition, we expect to save significant money, relative to any other contact centre offering."

No compromise

Telemed has not had to compromise in any way for its cost savings and agility: it has all the functionality it needs, including full interaction recording, multimedia recording, skills-based and priority-based routing, administrator reporting, agent management, service level agreement management and monitoring, and business management for CCOD.

In addition, the Intelleca solution has a comprehensive unified queuing capability: voice calls, video calls, e-mails, faxes and SMSes are lined up as they arrive, and then submitted to the next available agent for resolution in accordance with pre-defined per queue SLAs and priority-based rules.

"In effect, Telemed has leapt into the world of leading-edge technology without a major investment," notes Allan. "As the site grows, we expect to add more capacity, channels and functionality in the near future, and to add another 30 channels of telephony. Further to this we’ll be routing email through the contact centre in the same way as we route voice calls."

Intelleca has invested significantly in creating the capacity to offer contact centre on demand solutions. It has deployed Intel-based servers at its hosting centre, including high-availability architecture to ensure high uptime, and is able to provision multiple, secure, scalable instances of technology to an infinite number of customers off a single technology platform.

Telemed's leased line connects the two sites. When a member calls Telemed, the call is first processed through an on-demand IVR (interactive voice response); ACD technology (automatic call distributor) then routes the call to the most appropriate agent, and the member transacts business with the agent.

“We believe contact centre on demand has changed the nature of service provisioning in South Africa, and has taken delivery of technology to a new level,” adds Allan. “Customers for the first time are able to subscribe to a fully managed, fully hosted service offering feature-rich contact centre technology in a scalable and affordable way. Intelleca’s ongoing innovation in the development of appropriate solutions for the South African economy and market creates a clearly differentiated opportunity for our organisation, and more importantly our customers.”