Glasgow Housing Association opened a new 60-seat customer service centre in October, initially handling general enquiries and telephone payments. GHA soon expects to launch a range of additional services including repairs and gas maintenance and also hopes to support interactions with third parties such as Glasgow City Council.
The new centre will be powered by a contact centre system from MacFarlane, which includes automatic call distribution, call recording, interactive voice response and management reporting. It will also integrate with GHA’s Lagan enterprise case management system to synchronise data to agents’ desktops as calls are delivered to their phones.
The Macfarlane solution features host media processing (HMP) which removes the need for specialist telephony cards in the contact centre’s servers. HMP lowers the cost of deploying and operating telephony servers and makes it easier for GHA to integrate its contact centre with its Cisco Call Manager switch. The contact centre will provide failover redundancy with mirrored CallPlus applications running in a separate location for complete disaster recovery.