Enghouse Interactive and Voyager Networks have completed the installation of a new call-centre platform for Nottingham City Homes.
Nottingham City Homes handles over 400,000 calls through its contact centre each year relating to the 27,000 it manages on behalf of Nottingham City Council. Most calls are repair related, but they also cover rent accounts and other tenancy and estate management issues such as anti-social behaviour and domestic abuse.
Catherine Elliott, head of customer experience, Nottingham City Homes, said, “At the moment, 90 per cent of our interactions are phone based but we want to drive uptake of other interaction methods over time, so we needed to ensure that the chosen platform offered a future migration path.
“We had no pre-conceptions about any particular solutions, and the tendering and selection process gave us the opportunity to benchmark products and suppliers. It soon became clear that the combination of Voyager Networks as the solution provider and the Enghouse Interactive Communications Center (EICC) as the contact centre solution was the right choice.”
One of the key priorities for NCH when it came to installation was that it had to be completed with minimal downtime. Thanks to the expertise of the Voyager team and the intuitive nature of EICC, the system was only down for 17 minutes in total and was being actively used within a day of installation.
NCH now uses EICC to quickly and efficiently handle calls coming into the contact centre from tenants as well as for reporting purposes. Elliott said, “We have already got more data out of the system than ever before – now we need to start drilling into that data to achieve enhanced insights.”
Contact centre staff have needed little external support to use the system and have already used its functionality to find faster, more intuitive ways to carry out their day-to-day tasks. Elliott said, “For example, our agents can monitor and manage their own breaks better, and we have seen a real increase in schedule adherence as a result.”
Since EICC’s introduction, call coding has improved, both in terms of the detail agents provide and also the ability of NCH’s management to drill down and gain a better understanding of the status, preferences and needs of tenants.
The new implementation has fostered a more flexible approach to scaling the workforce up and down. With the Cisco unified communications platform as the foundation, the combination of EICC and Enghouse Interactive’s TouchPoint application allows users working in one NCH office to pick up calls from another quickly and easily. The Cisco platform also helps agents to route calls faster to experts in NCH’s middle- and back-offices.
Elliott said, “The continuity of service we received during this project has been very important. The Voyager team we were introduced to at the outset has remained the same throughout, and that continuity has been increasingly important as the project has rolled out.”
