Gizmo stays in contact

Sydney-based Gizmo, a provider of technical support for a wide range of computer-related technologies, has successfully migrated to a fully fault-tolerant Mitel unified communications solution to support the company’s rapid growth and improve the efficiency of its 10 Australian offices and large field services workforce.

Troy Cox, Chief Technology Officer for Gizmo, said, “Gizmo’s goal is to help ordinary Australians, by sorting out the computer problems they run into. We are a young company that is growing fast and need a flexible solution that helps our business grow.”

The core of Gizmo’s business is a contact centre located in its Sydney office. Operating seven days a week with 30 full-time employees, the contact centre handles all incoming customer requests and provides comprehensive telephone-based support services to Gizmo’s clients.

Cox continued, “Every piece of work we carry out starts with a support call to our contact centre, so downtime is incredibly damaging for our business. Mitel’s IP contact centre solution has made it easy for us to grow fast and has helped improve team work between our contact centre specialists and field service technicians. Most importantly, our Mitel solution integrated easily with our Microsoft applications and has never missed a beat.”

The complete contact centre and co-located data centre solution was designed and implemented by Essential Data and Voice, a Mitel solution provider and Microsoft Gold Partner. In addition, Essential Data and Voice provide Gizmo with complete ongoing support for the entire solution. The initial stages of the implementation occurred in August 2006. A major expansion of the solution was completed in September 2008, and included a migration to a fault-tolerant design and enhancements to the contact centre.

Gizmo’s entire business is supported by two Mitel 3300 IP Communications Platform (ICP) platforms in a fault-tolerant configuration. One of the 3300 ICPs is located at Gizmo’s Sydney head office, with a second unit located in an off-site co-location data centre. HP ProCurve 5400 and 2626 series switches were deployed to deliver power over ethernet to every part of the network. The Mitel Teleworker Solution is used to support both employees working from home and desktop phones at branch office locations.

Customer calls are handled with a two-step process. An initial prequalification stage is handled by a dedicated telephone team and is used to broadly diagnose the type of problem faced by the caller before the call is handed across to a technical specialist. In the event the problem cannot be resolved via phone-based support, Gizmo is quickly able to schedule a visit by one of its field service technicians.

Handling surges in incoming customer calls is a key challenge for Gizmo. Despite extended operating hours and operating seven days a week, demand typically surges by 200% on Monday mornings and by 150% on Friday afternoons.

To handle peak levels of demand, advanced queue handling has been implemented using Mitel Interactive Visual Queue Enterprise Edition. The contact centre manager is now able to dynamically adjust queue settings and route calls to reduce customer delays. In addition, when Gizmo’s field services technicians are not scheduled for client appointments, they are seamlessly linked into the contact centre solution using Mitel’s teleworking technology. This allows Gizmo to better distribute incoming support requests in periods of peak demand, as well as improve customer service delivery and staff productivity for field service employees.