Bayside Council claims unique call centre

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 26 October 2005 17:53

Your IT - Home IT

Bayside City Council in Victoria is developing a contact centre to serve to more than 84,000 residents using Nortel's Symposium contact centre technology and the Barracouta monitoring system.

Barracouta integrates with Symposium to give operators a view of how many calls are queued for their department, and how quickly their department is responding to incoming calls. In this way, according to Nortel, contact centre staff can self-manage their own performance, with each department responsible for maintaining its service delivery levels.

Mike Whittaker, the council's project manager, communications strategy, said: "We're creating what we believe to be a unique solution for local government authorities in Australia to distribute the management of service calls and empower staff to self-manage their service delivery to customers...Barracouta places a bar across the top of a call agent's screen that scrolls information such as the number of calls coming through to that group, and the number of group members logged in to the system.

"Using predefined rules, it can then alert group members when call rates are high, or when not enough agents are logged in to take incoming calls. A 'pop-up' appears on agents' screens when action is needed, encouraging them to attend to a problem without having to rely on outside instruction.

"To my knowledge this is the first time this type of system has been tried at local government level and it owes much to the ease of use, integration and deployment of Nortel's contact centre solution and its third-party integration."

The system was designed by Nortel nPower system integrator 3D Networks.