Author: Serge Hyppolite

First, I’d like to thank Gary, Jim and Roger for letting me post my first blog! As director of product management, I’ve spoken with a lot of companies that are evaluating the possibility of moving to an IP-infrastructure in their contact centers. Many of these organizations ask about the return on investment and are looking for examples of companies that have successfully transitioned to IP. One such example that comes to mind is Garlands Call Centres.

Garlands has been an Aspect customer for years, providing a range of outsourced services for various business processes. This UK-based company made a commitment to creating a 21st century IT infrastructure to gain a competitive differentiator through technology leadership. A key piece of this strategy was building a technologically advanced contact center, using leading-edge IP and Aspect Software standards-compliant solutions interoperating with other third-party vendor products.

The results have been tremendous. Garlands was able to reduce its technology footprint and administrative costs, cut IT operating costs by 25 percent, improved overall architecture uptime to 99.9 percent, and gained a competitive advantage with its IP contact center—which played a significant role in four business wins worth more than £12 million.

Not only did Garlands successfully transition to IP, but the company also recently announced the development of a Centre of Excellence for Collections and Debt Recovery. I think this new collections center will be a very promising business offering from Garlands, given the current market volatility and increasing debt collection requirements. The company picked a good time to transition to IP – now Garlands has a competitive advantage and the flexibility to quickly and easily respond to the changing market demands of the collections industry, allowing them to scale up or down as needed.

And most importantly, Garlands is being recognized for their ability to capitalize on advanced technology. In fact, Garlands’ new IP contact centre won the North East region ‘Orange Best Use of Technology in Business’ award at the 2007 National Business Awards in the UK.

Is your company encountering success or challenges in your transition to IP? I’d like to hear how IP is playing a role in your company’s business strategies.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 9:56 am and is filed under Collections, Contact Center Technology, Customer Service/Consumer Demands, Unified Solutions, VoIP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.