Affinity Water enhances its cloud-based contact centre solution from Intelecom to further support its business and introduce new services for customers

Intelecom, a provider of cloud-based contact centre solutions, today announced that Affinity Water has built on the success of its original Intelecom implementation to support the organisation’s business, workforce and customer base. The UK’s largest water-only supplier operates a 300-strong contact centre that serves a population of 3.5 million people and manages on average 90,000 calls every month. Affinity Water’s latest investment in Intelecom has maximised the flexibility and scalability of the platform to benchmark the contact centre’s performance against specific targets. In addition new services such as Web Chat and a fully automated, secure payments facility have been introduced.

David Gray, Resource and Planning Analyst at Affinity Water commented, “We first turned to Intelecom in 2005 to create a completely new cloud-based contact centre that could help automate call handling and improve customer response times. Since that time, it has evolved to become a sophisticated infrastructure that supports the focus of our company in terms of high quality customer service, transparency and good governance. We have also established a close parternship with Intelecom. The company’s openness and willingness to share learning and best practice are critical to our success, enabling us to explore new ways of delivering a better customer experience with utmost confidence.”

The highlights of Affinity Water’s recently expanded Intelecom deployment include:

• Integration with the company’s Verint Workforce Management (WFM) system to drive call predictions accurately and manage hundreds of shifts and work schedules for 240 out of a total of 300 agents. When complete, Affinity Water expects skills-based routing to manage multiple staff talents and meet different Service Level Agreements (SLAs) across the complex organisation.
• Geographic routing to detect, identify and direct calls from certain parts of the country that might be suffering a crisis, such as flooding, to a specially tailored recorded message. This allows agents to maintain business as usual and deliver a personalised service to other customers with generic enquiries.
• Seamless connectivity with third party applications has enabled Affinity Water to offer a wealth of new services, such as a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)-compliant automated and secure payments facility, under one roof with one single contact point for the customer.
• The introduction of speech analytics from Intelecom means that every call is transcribed and recorded for compliance and benchmarking purposes making it an effective tool for spotting trends and making meaningful changes and improvements to processes and services.
• New initiatives such as post-call surveys and agent scorecards enable Affinity Water to measure customer satisfaction levels and track agent and contact centre performance against specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) accurately.
• Early experiences of customers using Web Chat to interact with the contact centre are very positive and indicate a definite focus going forward. Currently, 3% of all calls, around 2,700 per month, come in via Web Chat, a number that is expected to increase exponentially. The rising use of the Internet makes it easy for agents to direct Chatters to other parts of the website to find the information they need to confidently resolve their queries and encourage further self-service in the future.

Borge Astrup, Managing Director, Customer Contact Division of Intelecom Group AS concluded, “Organisations like Affinity Water who have undergone periods of significant transformation rely on the flexibility and scalability of our solution to add agility to their operations. With our focus on continual product innovation, they can also depend on us to introduce new features that increase customer engagement and meet the needs of today’s Internet-savvy consumers such as Web Chat. Intelecom is so much more than technology. It is a valuable strategic tool and partner that empowers staff, boosts customer loyalty and enables next generation customer service.”

-ends-

About Affinity Water
Affinity Water is the largest water-only supplier in the UK and it is committed to delivering a high quality water service to all its customers.

The organisation provides on average 900 million litres of water each day to a population of more than 3.5 million people in parts of Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Surrey, the London Boroughs of Harrow and Hillingdon and parts of the London Boroughs of Barnet, Brent, Ealing and Enfield. It also supplies water to the Tendring peninsula in Essex and the Folkestone and Dover areas of Kent.

For further information, please visit Affinity Water

About Intelecom

Intelecom is a leading provider of contact management solutions. With over 15 years’ experience, Intelecom was on one of the first to develop a cloud-based contact centre. Highly flexible and scalable, from Intelecom can be adapted to accommodate one to several thousand concurrent agents using any device, in any location and integrates with multiple applications seamlessly.

Intelecom is one of the few contact centre solutions that is completely multichannel. Intelecom agents can respond to Phone, Email, Chat, Social Media and SMS enquiries all within the one application.

For more information please visit Intelecom

Press contact: Mary Phillips
PR Artistry Limited
T: +44 (0)1491 639500
E: mary@pra-ltd.co.uk