CPS wins IP telephony project

Peter Dinham
Friday, 04 November 2011 01:30

IT Industry - Deals

The IT services company, CPS Technology Group has been selected by New South Wales energy services provider, Essential Energy to deliver a new IP telephony platform, contact centre and managed services solution to drive customer service, operational savings and scalability for ongoing growth and business continuity.
CPS, an Australian-owned ISO-certified provider of integrated contact centre, unified messaging and cloud solutions, won the government-owned Essential Energy tender following an extensive market review by the company. The new telephony platform is aimed at enhancing voice services for Essential Energy's 4,600 employees based in various sites across NSW, by replacing the organisation's end-of-life, decentralised and non-standardised telephony environment.

CPS managing director, Seamus Nash said Essential Energy would deploy Interactive Intelligence's SIP-based customer interaction centre (CIC), an all-in-one telephony solution recommended by CPS.  The solution is built on open standards and features call centre agent applications, including automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, unified messaging, desktop faxing, softphone, presence management and multi-channel call recording.

'These features will deliver significant business capabilities and voice service improvements to the organisation, including a guaranteed level of availability, reliability and scalability to meet current and future required levels of service to internal employees and external customers,' Nash said.

Physically, Essential Energy will locate one CIC server at its primary data centre, with a switchover redundancy server housed in a second data centre, providing support for business continuity and compliance to the organisation's disaster recovery guidelines. 

A Wide Area Network (WAN) will feature multiple distributed 100 MB fibre links delivered by three different carriers to all main company sites for maximum availability.  Other key features include 45 Audiocodes Mediant ISDN gateways with 1000 ports of ISDN, 43 media servers for audio control and Polycom IP DECT handsets in their high voltage substations.

According to Nash, the combination of CIC technology and CPS's deployment skills is designed to meet Essential Energy's strategic business demands, improve the customer experience, and centralise the management of a dispersed telephony environment, reducing the complexity and cost of overall management and support.   'In particular, the solution will boost the network services provider's customer service response due its ability to 'load balance' incoming calls between its contact centres, while at the same time reducing call and operational costs,' Nash said.

'Our goal as a strategic partner is to ensure that our experience across many industries brings opportunities to Essential Energy to conduct business faster, smarter, safer, and at the right cost. Once the new IP telephony platform is deployed, Essential Energy will also enjoy reduced call costs as many calls will be made over the company's data network rather than a separate voice network.  At the same time, the organisation will be able to better manage incoming calls between contact centre sites resulting in improved customer service and greater flexibility.'