Water Corporation integrates IP telephony with omni-channels platforms to support frontline contact centres in Perth.

Perth-based Water Corporation has moved to integrate its IP telephony and omni-channel services under plans to deliver more seamless services for customers. The corporation has gone live with an omnichannel customer engagement software suite that integrates with its IP telephony platform.

This latest integration taps into Customer Interaction Cente (CIC) software that is being sourced from the Interactive Intelligence Group.

The Water Corporation is one of Western Australia’s principal suppliers of water, wastewater and drainage services. This corporation manages $34 billion in assets, and delivers services to hundreds of thousands of homes, businesses and farms acros metropolitan and regional areas.

In 2015, the corporation’s annual budget for information technology was $37 million. The corporation services around 2 million customers in Western Australia.

Among the new features, the CIC service helps automatically route and manage inbound and outbound calls. This is designed to speed up services and ensure that contact centre agents offer a more personalised and timely customer experience.

The CIC service builds the corporation’s multichannel capabilities. This incorporates online and mobile apps, directly from the desktop or mobile devices. Chat features, email integration and social media join the mix of customer engagement. These apps run on the same platform, while offering a more consistent look-and-feel. The goal is to seek faster turnaround and intuitive services for customers on the road, at work or at home.

All-in-one solution

Designated agents currently field more than 800,000 calls each year. The CIC service supports 160 staff at two contact centres that are located in Perth.  

Catherine Ferrari, the general manager for customer and community services, said the corporation wanted a “single, all-in-one IP communications solution” that offered traditional telephony, together with the more interactive multichannel functionality. “We previously had telephony provided by one vendor, and call recording and workforce management supplied by another,” she said.

She added this was a technology refresh and replaced a 17-year-old system. An all-in-one platform reduces the number of support vendors and simplifies the maintenance.This system gives us the ability to multi-channel through a single platform, offering customers an improved service experience.”

The enhanced software suite supports the corporation’s quality assurance program. Among the features, agent and customer conversations are recorded. “Screen scrapes” are taken from legacy systems, enabling team leaders to track services, and identify the contact centre staff’s coaching needs. 

Other features incorporate customer feedback and automatic call distribution capabilities. Workforce management features will simplify the scheduling of staff across contact centres, as well as the allocation of resources. Full redundancy is being built between the two contact centres to support the corporation’s business continuity plans.

The Water Corporation 2015 Annual Report offers additional details.