The SAAQ Deploys a New Contact Center Solution

MONTREAL, Québec - The SAAQ (Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec) announced the deployment of a new contact center solution from BCE Elix. With 10 self-service applications, intelligent routing, a quality monitoring system, and a new IVR (Interactive Voice Response), the SAAQ has improved its service and has reduced the number of unanswered calls from 30 percent in November 2002 to three percent by the end of the project in December 2004.
 
"The SAAQ handles more than 3 million calls annually," stated Louise Guimond, vice president, customer service at SAAQ. "Modernizing our telephone services enabled us to better respond to customers' needs, while considerably improving the quality and timing of our services."
 
The project began in November 2002. The SAAQ was seeking to deploy a contact center solution that would help it respond to an ever-increasing call volume while improving the efficiency and effectiveness of its call centers, regardless of the location of the 220 agents based in Montreal and Quebec. At the beginning of 2003, SAAQ also wanted to add a new call center site, located in Murdochville. These projects aimed to help the SAAQ achieve its service objectives, in particular, to answer all calls within three minutes and to answer e-mails within two working days. BCE Elix implemented the contact center solutions and unified the three sites into one "virtual" center.
 
"The project includes a new IVR platform that provides 10 self-service applications in French and English," said Pierre Gagnon, director of customer information at the SAAQ. "With this new platform, it is now possible to handle 650,000 calls per year, which represents an increase of 50,000 calls. The intelligent routing from Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories sends calls to the agents with the required skills according to the information or administrative service requested by the caller. An information screen pop opens at the agent workstation with the customer history, using information gathered from the IVR and our databases. This application was custom-designed for the SAAQ and enables appropriate information to be read directly on the screen without the agent having to retype it. This application alone saves 10 seconds per call; an amount of time that becomes important when you consider the total call volume."