Thames Water Selects Unify for Contact Center Voice Techs
The United Kingdom's largest water and wastewater services provider, Thames Water, has selected Unify to support its corporate focus on improving customer satisfaction, meeting regulatory compliance, and increasing operational efficiency to all 15 million customers.
Thames Water's corporate objectives will be delivered through OpenScape Contact Center, OpenScape Voice, and Unify's Managed Service as Thames Water strives to meet its regulatory performance targets.
Unify's OpenScape Contact Center and the underlying OpenScape Voice technology enables Thames Water to take greater control of the day-to-day operation, administration, and configuration of its contact center. This is achieved through improved visibility of operations with a real-time dashboard and a comprehensive reporting suite. The platform allows Thames Water to have greater reliability and flexibility to configure and deploy new business units to meet consumer expectations and to modify call routing and allocate resources to demands as and when needed.
In addition, Thames Water will be supported by Unify's Managed Services, including both hardware and software support, comprehensive training, and remote monitoring. A software assurance package is also included which guarantees that Thames Water is constantly up to date with the latest software enhancements.
Thames Water can now widen its service delivery and both "in" and "out of hours" contact. Both agents and customers will benefit from enhanced features in the interactive voice response (IVR) platform that enables sophisticated call routing and self-service options.
Additional functionality includes automatic speech recognition (ASR), postcode recognition, and text-to-speech, to identify callers and play incident messages where appropriate. For instance, Thames Water can pre-empt an influx of calls due to a specific burst water pipe through In-Queue messaging, where customers can receive status updates without needing to speak to an agent, while also offering call-backs as an alternative to queuing.
"Our customers and the experience they have with us is one of our top priorities," said Andy Clark, head of IS Services at Thames Water, in a statement. "To achieve the highest standards and to meet the changing demands of increasingly tech-savvy consumers, we need guaranteed performance and scalability from our supporting infrastructure. Having access to real-time monitoring and historical reporting ensures that agents are working effectively and efficiently to meet customer expectations."
"We are proud to support Thames Water as it strives to provide the best service possible to both customers and employees," said Trevor Connell, general manager of the West/East Region at Unify, in a statement. "Consumers are now more than ever about choice, and by investing in a technology and service roadmap, Thames Water will be able to offer a point of differentiation in the highly competitive utility market. With OpenScape Contact Center, based on IPT softswitch technology, agents are better equipped to react and respond to customer demands. Our technology is modular and scalable in design, giving Thames Water the opportunity to expand and develop the platform as and when needed. It incorporates the potential for greater integration with social media and the desktop, giving the organization's employees new flexible ways of working."