The Pathway to Profitability for your Contact Center

Spescom supports Blake Holdings´ rapid expansion with Presence Technology

Monday, 07 July 2008 00:00

Presence Technology, A global company specialized in optimizing contact center performance, has announced that Blake Holdings, one of the largest call centre operations in South Africa, is using the Presence Technology solutions for their contact centers for various UK-based customers

Blake Holdings is an outsource call centre operator, providing services to both local and international clients. This privately held, South African company has had remarkable success with inbound and outbound services for its growing list of customers.

"A couple of years ago, Spescom supplied Blake Holdings with the latest Avaya equipment as the foundation for future expansion of the call centre," says Paul Fick, MD of Spescom DataFusion. "At the same time, Spescom provided our DataVoice voice recording equipment to support the call centre.”

"As they anticipated, their operation has since grown significantly, increasing the number of agents to almost 1 500, handling very large call volumes for both local and overseas clients.

Following a visit last year to the Spanish headquarters of Presence Technology, Blake Holdings were very interested in acquiring the Presence solution. Early this year, Spescom installed a pilot version of the Presence

call center dialler systems

, which was tested successfully, serving one of their UK-based customers. A dialer is a computerized system that automatically dials batches of telephone numbers for connection to agents assigned to sales or other campaigns. The pilot used the advanced predictive dialing algorithms that are part of the Presence Technology solution.

The Presence Technology offers a powerful dialler, which competes with any of the world’s best products and is very cost-effective to deploy. Blake Holdings' success with implementing this solution bears witness to its ability to deliver excellent service on local and international connections.

"The full Presence product is the CRM Optimizer, which has a wide range of modules, the dialler being only one component," says Paul Fick, MD of Spescom DataFusion. "With the success of the first pilot, Blake Holdings moved on to test blended dialling for another one of their clients. This allows agents to handle inbound calls and when they are not otherwise occupied, the system automatically routes outbound calls to them.”

"Essentially, we have two new implementations running at the call centre and since both of the customers are very pleased with the results, we expect to be deploying further Presence technology, as Blake Holdings offers this solution to its many other customers. On the management side, the company also adopted the Presence Custom Reports module, which allows very detailed reporting of the status of the dialler process and call centre activity.

"Simultaneously, the Avaya call centre infrastructure is also being extended to handle additional agents, as is the Spescom DataVoice recording solution.

"Blake Holdings' rapid growth of their call centre facilities - and the very positive results from the technology we have supplied - means that Spescom looks forward to providing more Presence technology to support this leading company's success," concludes Fick.