New £3.2M Contact Centre and IP Telephony solution for Billing and Operational departments

Lichfield – 7th December, 2009. Europe’s leading expert in communications services, NextiraOne, has won a contract with Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water (Welsh Water) to supply an advanced communications solution that will deliver enhanced customer service for Welsh Water’s Billing and Operations divisions which handle over 1.2 million calls each year. The new solution provides an IP Telephony platform and supports Welsh Water’s customer interaction with state-of-the art Contact Centre and voice recording technology.

Under the contract, worth a total of over £3.2million, NextiraOne will supply a Contact Centre and interaction recording solution for two of Welsh Water’s key customer-facing departments - Billing & Income and its Operational Activity Centre (OAC). These two departments handle a volume of over 1.2 million calls per annum on behalf of Welsh Water, and the choice of a robust, resilient system that can manage this volume of traffic is critical to the company’s success. To be delivered under a five-year Managed Services agreement, NextiraOne experts designed an infrastructure based on the Alcatel-Lucent IP Telephony OmniPCX Enterprise platform with a 500+-seat OmniGenesys Contact Centre and Nice™ Perform voice recording solution and analytics package.

Welsh Water supplies water and sewerage services to household and non-household customers in Wales and some adjoining parts of England. The sixth largest of the ten regulated water and sewerage companies in England and Wales, Welsh Water is responsible for providing over three million people with a continuous, high quality supply of drinking water and for taking away, treating and properly disposing of waste water.

The project is expected to run until October 2010 and represents the ideal platform to meet Welsh Water’s requirements – the Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise platform integrates key technologies within a single easy-to-manage platform, which can be distributed across multiple sites and joined together with existing Alcatel-Lucent systems or legacy PABX systems to create a single entity.  The Genesys Customer Interaction Management Platform processes customer calls intelligently so that they are immediately routed to the right resource.

“NextiraOne set the bar very high and were always the front runners for this contract,” commented Tim Masters, Head of Performance and Customer Service at Welsh Water. “They were successful against a very strong competitive field including the incumbent suppliers because of the strength of their proposal and the level of expertise they were able to demonstrate during the tender process.”   NextiraOne is Europe’s leading expert in communications services and has a direct sales and service presence in 17 countries, serving more than 60,000 customers.  The company  designs, installs, maintains and supports sustainable solutions to meet the communications needs of its customers - from voice, data and video to mobility, security and applications. Working with the world’s leading technology companies, NextiraOne provides end-to-end sustainable communications solutions to deliver measurable business benefits to its customers.

Steven Skakel, General Manager, NextiraOne UK, said: “With such a high volume of incoming calls from the general public, Welsh Water needed a robust and highly resilient Contact Centre solution to provide the very best in customer interaction. We are delighted that the organisation has chosen to partner with NextiraOne for the design and implementation of the system and also for the ongoing support and maintenance of the infrastructure.”