Cellarmasters deploys new contact centre with IP telephony

Cellarmasters, Australia’s largest direct wine retailer, will deploy the Interactive Intelligence all-in-one IP communications software suite Customer Interaction Center (CIC) at its new contact centre in Surry Hills in inner Sydney.

Interactive Intelligence Elite partner CallTime Solutions is deploying the CIC next-generation telephony platform, which will support growing sales and enhance service to more than 360,000 Cellarmasters customers.

The SIP-based CIC solution will provide Cellarmasters’ new Surry Hills 200-seat contact centre and the organisation’s 100 business users with functionality for IP PBX, automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, unified messaging, desktop faxing, softphone, presence management, multi-channel recording and blended dialling. It replaces the organisation’s legacy PBX, ACD, call recording and dialler systems.

“We selected Interactive Intelligence on account of CIC’s excellent Windows user interface, its high level of compliance with our documented requirements and the fact that it only uses a small number of servers. We looked at six solutions in total but Interactive Intelligence was very attractive in terms of its simplicity, ease of use and its small IT footprint,” says Cameron Brawn, Head of IT at Cellarmasters Group.

Initially, CIC will provide support for email customer response, inbound calls and outbound sales to existing customers. The organisation will be able to monitor call time queues, effectively manage emails from point of contact into an in-house developed CRM platform and provide priority routing for loyalty program customers. Efficient call routing will also enable customers to speak to their personal wine advisor.

“The fact that with CIC our PABX can be hosted off site means that we don’t need to have a dedicated computer room in our new contact centre. All features that we require are integrated within the Interactive Intelligence software and it also provides for disaster recovery. As CIC’s technology footprint is so small the system is easy to duplicate,” says Brawn.

Interactive Intelligence’s ‘thin’ client strategy will enable the organisation to more quickly and easily deploy its software for new distributed users by reducing bandwidth requirements and eliminating the need to install software at each desktop.

CIC includes functionality designed for more flexible and efficient communications, such as the ability to configure information views for faster look-ups; enhanced alerts to more easily identify incoming calls; the ability to configure personal rules for specialist call-handling; and a personal rules wizard that simplifies customisation.

“The Interactive Intelligence system will ultimately enable us to effectively communicate with our 360,000 customers via whichever touch-point they choose - telephone, email, web chat and SMS. We will also be able to seamlessly include emerging methods such as social networking,” says Brawn.